WHISTLER’S GHOST TOWN
“TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON, AND A TIME TO EVERY PURPOSE UNDER HEAVEN.” ECCLESIASTES 3: 1
In 1926, while Myrtle and Alex Philips of Rainbow Lodge were setting Whistler on the course to becoming the resort we know today, Alison and Ross Barr of Mission purchased an 11- acre parcel at the northeast tip of Green Lake and built the pioneer sawmill settlement of Parkhurst. For nearly three decades, the mill’s crews processed the timber resources opened by the Pemberton Trail, in peak years shipping as much as 35,000 board- feet of finished lumber and huge squared timbers a day to markets as far away as Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia. The time came, however, when enterprise found brighter opportunities elsewhere, and Parkhurst slowly succumbed to a natural death. Abandoned for more than half a century, reduced by plunder, it has collapsed beneath smothering snows and returned inexorably to the silence of the forest from which it had sprung.
One sunny day last September, as raindrops intermittently pocked the water, photographer Joern Rohde and I, accompanied by Whistler friends, Karen and Chuck Blaylock, set out to explore the afterlife of long- deserted Parkhurst: Joern and I paddling our canoe across from the landing at Green Lake Park - the Blaylocks theirs from their home just down the lake.
Beaching on the lakeshore beneath the rusted hunk of an ancient loader that topped the bank above us like the revealed skeleton of a dinosaur, we probed the underbrush, quickly discovering the degraded remains of the concrete foundations of the mill’s steam boilers. In the 1930s the original mill had burned to the ground and been rebuilt. Beyond a few random scatterings of obscure machinery, little now remained. Crossing the railway tracks, we followed the worn path up the hillside to where Parkhurst’s workers and a few families had once lived.
My only previous experience of a ghost town had been an unsatisfying visit to the mining town of Cumberland on Vancouver Island in the 1970s. Fifty years earlier, the metropolis of log shacks erected by the Japanese and Chinese miners who worked the coal seams, comprised the largest Asiatown in North America, outside of San Francisco. By the time of my visit, there was not a vertical stick standing. Every building had been razed to the ground, literally interred, spadeful by spadeful, by an army of bottle collectors and treasure hunters. However, as we approached the former Parkhurst, I couldn’t help thinking of how the explorers must have felt who first laid eyes on forgotten Machu Picchu, or who pierced the impenetrable jungles to rediscover long- hidden Angkor Wat. I refused to allow my romantic expectations for lost Parkhurst to race out of hand.
A sepia- toned photo in the book Whistler Reflections shows what once flourishing Parkhurst had been like. Upwards of 60 men had lived here during the spring, summer and fall seasons when snow and ice did not impede their work, but only a few families had remained over the long,
bitter winters. It took many years before the community finally had enough children to warrant its own school. Back then, bunkhouses had dominated the hillside we were now climbing. The few trees that once dotted the overlook had since given way to a well- spaced, fir forest, the tended absence of underbrush between its trunks now a sign of the grooming of former habitation. Bird song danced in the sunlight filtering through the canopy above.
Just off the main trail, my fellow explorers and I came upon a hoodless, 1940s logging truck, with its rear tires still intact, front rims buried to the axle, and its partitioned and glassless windshield flipped up like a pair of spectacles. Even though its state of decay should have been a deterrent, I could not resist climbing behind the old steering wheel. A little further on we spotted the remains of a basementless house, collapsed and reduced now to a heap of weathered grey boards, its upper floor pancaked to the ground. Chuck ventured that we probably didn’t see more buildings, even ones in this advanced state of disintegration, because over the years the most dangerously decrepit had been hauled away for safety’s sake.
As we continued along the trail, an eerie, blue human face suddenly seemed to loom at us through the lacework veil of intervening branches ahead. My overheated imagination could not resist conjuring up the vision of a wendigo or some other supernatural forest being. Closer inspection revealed a beautifully executed painting evocatively rendered across the windowless front wall of Parkhurst’s only intact structure. It was most likely the work of unknown hippie squatters who had periodically made the community their home over the years since the 1960s. A circle of benches surrounding a fire pit out back stood as testament to frequent and recent use. The V- trough of the old wooden flume that had once carried fresh water from the mountaintop lay rotted away, replaced by a more practical, but less poetic PVC pipe snaking through the moss- covered granite rubble.
When archeologists explore sites of ancient habitation, they hope for tombs like Tut’s, but often find their most productive excavations to be where people have disposed of their garbage. In place of pot shards and fragments of lost bottles, Parkhurst’s garbage dump comprised a huge clearing filled with decades of rusted food and soda cans. Poking among the remnants, the treasure- hunter in me found drano- shaped cans of long- defunct B. C. brands with names like White Rock Lemon Lime and Lucky Strike Orange Soda … Maybe not a bottle collector’s bonanza, but treasures nevertheless.
Fanning out into the pines, we called to each other whenever we made a find worth sharing. I searched for echoes of what once was, whispers of a time past. I found the most elegant expression in a simple rectangle barely visible beneath a flannel blanket of fairy moss on the forest floor, the ghostly tracing of a log home now returned to dust. Straight lines are the sure marks of human hands, and this fragile outline spoke to me of the aspirations and dreams of people long gone.
During my research for this article, I came upon a poem about an abandoned homestead, titled The Reclaimed, collected in the book, Bush Poems by B. C. writer,
Peter Trower. The final stanza says more than I could about the fate of Parkhurst.
“Wordless the epitaph decades have wrought vanishing paths weedthrottled forgotten impotent schemes abandoned endeavours quick in her seasons the earth will reclaim them.”
In their life after people, places like Parkhurst remind us of our tenuous and temporary bond with our planet. I am reminded of the final words of Alan Weisman’s wonderful book, The World Without Us: “Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.”
For more information about Parkhurst, check out The Whistler Story by Anne McMahon, Whistler Reflections by Florence Petersen, Sally Mitchell and Janet Love Morrison, and visit the Whistler Museum. 604- 932- 2019; whistlermuseum. org.