As he reflected on receiving the highest honour Whistler can grant, ski-industry visionary Hugh Smythe couldn’t help but thank the people around him who made it all possible.
“I am really honoured to get this award, but the award is especially about the people I worked with on the mountain and in the community,” Smythe told Pique ahead of the Oct. 22 council meeting where he received the Freedom of the Municipality alongside longtime mayor and councillor Nancy Wilhelm-Morden.
The Freedom of the Municipality honours citizens for their outstanding contributions to the community, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who played a bigger role than Smythe in what Whistler has become.
“There is no doubt that without Hugh Smythe, Blackcomb Mountain, and therefore Whistler, would not have developed into the resort we know today,” Whistler Museum executive director Brad Nichols said at the Oct. 22 ceremony.
Smythe was there for Whistler Mountain’s opening day on Jan. 15, 1966, as a bright-eyed, 18-year-old volunteer ski patroller, and he was there for virtually every key moment of the resort’s stratospheric rise over the next four decades.
After that shortened ’66 ski season, Smythe returned the next winter as a full-time patroller. The winter after that, he served as the director of ski patrol, an improbable rise for a 20-year-old even in those heady early days of the resort.
A passion for skiing—and the business of skiing
It wouldn’t be the first time Smythe was given an opportunity without the resumé to match, a sign of the faith his mentors had in him from a young age.
“I came to Whistler because I was passionate about skiing, but I would say in that first year being the director of the ski patrol, that passion for skiing turned into a passion for the business of skiing,” Smythe said. “I became passionate about which aspects make the business successful, the industry successful. I was inquisitive, and in those early days at Whistler, I was just given a ton of opportunity to be able to do some pretty cool things.”
Quickly moving up to safety supervisor, hill superintendent, then mountain manager, Smythe had his hand in nearly every element of operating a ski resort. He helped design Whistler’s first grooming equipment. He developed the mountain’s avalanche and heli-bombing procedures. He designed ski trails, including Upper and Lower Olympic.
It was a trend Smythe would continue throughout his career as a leader in the industry, empowering the people behind him to succeed in their own ways.
“There was a knock-on effect with those things, letting people come up with ideas,” he said.
Eight years after that first fateful opening day, the precocious Smythe—still only 26 years old—was tapped to resurrect Fortress Mountain, a defunct ski area outside Calgary. It was during that four-year stint as general manager, the only significant time he spent away from Whistler, that Smythe truly delved into the guest experience side of operating a ski resort, something he would become legendary for later in his career.
“I wanted to learn more about and be responsible for the other aspects of the total guest experience,” he recalled. “We were able to turn Fortress around by having good food, good customer service, good grooming—all the aspects that touched the customer.”
An upstart underdog
By 1977, Smythe had convinced the Aspen Skiing Company and the Federal Business Development Bank to pursue a proposal to develop Blackcomb Mountain, and the following year, he returned to Whistler as president of the upstart ski area.
In what was a whirlwind timeline, Smythe oversaw the ambitious project from inception, planning and construction to its eventual opening in December 1980.
“From the initial idea of developing Blackcomb to the day that it opened was 36 months, and it was done for approximately $13 million (just under $50 million today),” he said. “You’d think of that today, from the idea through to putting in the proposal to the B.C. government to being awarded the rights to develop the mountain and then two construction summers, to build absolutely everything right down to electric, water, sewage all the infrastructure stuff that had to be done, it is basically unheard of.”
An auspicious start for a mountain resort that played the underdog from Day 1, Smythe was tasked with figuring out how to get a leg up on his cross-valley rival and former employer.
“Whistler had been operating for 14 years at that point. They had many more lifts, way more terrain, and all these loyal customers,” Smythe said.
Although the village had opened around the same time as Blackcomb, there still wasn’t much tourist accommodation available. So, where would the nascent resort find the skiers?
“We’ve gotta grow the market,” added Smythe, “but we’re also going to have to steal some from Whistler. How are we gonna do that? By that point, it was ingrained in my philosophy that we had to make the customer experience better, because I had seen the success at Fortress and, quite frankly, I’d seen the success a little bit at Whistler.”
That success would eventually come, but there were some significant bumps in the road along the way. Not long after Blackcomb opened for its inaugural season, Whistler was hit with weeks of rain that led to both ski areas closing and mass layoffs. In 1981, interest rates skyrocketed, and all of a sudden it began to look like the little-resort-that-could might not be long for the world.
Smythe, however, kept the faith.
“For me, I don’t know whether I was naïve or not, but I never felt we weren’t going to be successful one way or the other,” he said.
You get the sense Blackcomb would have become a world-class mountain by Smythe’s sheer force of will alone. He wasn’t insulated in some ivory tower; he cared about the nitty-gritty details. The hot chocolate for guests while they waited to download. Staff clearing customers’ windshields on a snowy day. The famous “sniffle stations” on cold days.
He of course concerned himself with the big details, too. Smythe was instrumental in the 1985 T-bar installation in the area now known as 7th Heaven, the valley’s first lift access to the alpine, representing what was then the largest alpine expansion in Canadian history.
Unable to find investors for the project, the bank told him to finance it himself. And that he did, making use of an underutilized T-bar from Fortress that Smythe surreptitiously had removed from Albertan Crown land in short order.
“In a day and a half, it just disappeared, sort of like one of those undercover stories,” Smythe said in the 2015 anniversary book, Whistler Blackcomb: 50 Years of Going Beyond.
But as Smythe is quick to tell you, it was a consummate team effort. And with carte blanche to hire from the ground up, Smythe took a page from his predecessors by picking his personnel for personality over experience.
“Most importantly, we hired friendly, gregarious, outgoing employees. Our philosophy was to hire for personality and whatever training you would need to do your job, we would do the training,” he explained.
“When you start with a total blank sheet of paper as it relates to employees, you get the opportunity to hire the management team, the supervisory team, and down the line to the first season of employees, you get to build a culture for the organization that would continue on over the years.”
Rivals turned allies
Within half a decade, Blackcomb’s success had drawn the eye of Intrawest, and in 1986 the company acquired the ski area. By the winter of 1987-88, Blackcomb had overtaken Whistler, claiming 54 per cent of local skier visits.
The resort continued to grow, adding lifts, staff housing, summer offerings, and building the Upper Village, until 1996, when the impossible became real: Whistler and Blackcomb merged, turning 16-year rivals into allies, and making Smythe the president of North America’s largest ski resort.
“When you take two archrivals and different cultures and put them together successfully, that was a big deal,” Smythe said. “Doing something that was not the norm, I had two people reporting to me: Doug Forseth from Whistler and Dave Brownlie from Blackcomb, and they just did an awesome job. It was an awesome partnership between the two of them.”
Heading the merged resort, Smythe and Whistler Blackcomb’s (WB) achievements continued to pile up. Thanks in no small part to his vision, in 2003, Vancouver and Whistler were awarded the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, a watershed moment for the resort and a direct link to its current status as a global destination. In 1999, the bike park opened, the spark that lit WB’s summer expansion efforts. Just in case that wasn’t enough, before his retirement, in 2008 Smythe oversaw another monumental moment for WB that also served as a physical symbol of the two mountains’ earlier merger: The opening of the Peak 2 Peak, an idea first hashed out in Zermatt, Switzerland with resort planner and Whistler visionary himself, Paul Mathews.
“The success of that has been is phenomenal,” Smythe said. “A lot of people said that was a real harebrained idea and way too expensive and why don’t you spend money on more chairlifts? From the community’s standpoint and a financial standpoint, it took a lot of convincing.”
Leaving a legacy
Asked what he wants his legacy to be, the 77-year-old Smythe of course returned to the people: the ones on whose shoulders Whistler rests, and the ones who Smythe passed the torch to who have gone on to create memorable legacies of their own.
“I think it all comes down to people,” he said, before mentioning a long list of Whistler luminaries, from Franz Wilhelmsen, Terry Minger and Eldon Beck to Al Raine, Garry Watson and Nancy Wilhelm-Morden. “And then the great number of people that I had the opportunity to hire, develop and mentor, who have gone on to a variety of very senior leadership roles in a broad range of industries.”
Check back with Pique next week for a profile on fellow 2024 Freedom of the Municipality recipient, Wilhelm-Morden.
