The Whistler Adventure School (WAS) has helped train the next generation of Whistler’s mountain industry professionals since opening for business in 2014. Now, it’s taking that training on the road.
Shelley Quinn, the school’s general manager and sales director, will join sustainable trail-building instructor Dakota Goulder in Mexico later this month for a three-week tour through the country in partnership with local bike shops, offering trail-building clinics, WAS information sessions and help repairing some well-loved trails.
“Recently, as biking has been getting more and more popular worldwide, we’ve realized that trail building and bike mechanics and skills like that are becoming more essential not only in Whistler, but in lots of other emerging places,” said Quinn. “One of our ex-students who owns a bike shop in Puebla, Mexico, had suggested to me a couple years ago, ‘Wouldn’t it be great, you know, to bring a trail-builder down here and help us to develop some of our trails?’ and then COVID came along. Two years later, we’re now finally able to go down there and kind of fulfil this idea.”
Though the WAS reps will be simultaneously spreading the word about opportunities to study at the school—the private, post-secondary institution offers career-specific training in the marketing and media, mountain sport technician, design and innovation, adventure tourism and adventure-guiding disciplines from its Function Junction headquarters, with courses offered on a rolling basis throughout the year—“We also wanted to be able to give something back to where we went and leave people with some skills, and also learn about how important volunteerism is,” Quinn added.
“The trails don’t just get built and maintained; it’s a lot of volunteer work.”
From Oct. 24 to Nov. 13, the WAS team will drop by numerous locations like Oaxaca, Pachuca, Puebla, Avandaro, Mexico City and San Jose del Cabo.
Goulder—one of the names responsible for bringing Whistler’s iconic Lord of the Squirrels trail to life—will be on hand, armed with all the necessary tools to impart some of the wisdom he’s garnered as a B.C.-based trail builder with the Whistler Off Road Cycling Association, Squamish Off Road Cycling Association, private groups and ski resorts. The clinics will cover topics such as water management, basic principles of rockwork, trail maintenance, building corners and, as Quinn mentioned, volunteerism.
“This is kind of groundbreaking for us in that we’re actually going to be taking an instructor and giving some courses over there to give people a little bit of information that they can use, even if they can’t come all the way to Whistler to study—because it is an expensive undertaking to come and live in Whistler,” said Quinn. “This way, we get to spread some of that knowledge in some of the areas that they can use for their own development.”
The partner bike shops and local businesses have “already picked a spot where they want us to go to work,” Quinn added. “It’s just to either repair an existing trail, look at things that can be improved. Sustainability is a big issue and it’s something that we’re really trying to focus on. So how they will build a trail to make it last for many years and make it rideable and make it flowy.”
Quinn said she has noticed an explosion in mountain biking’s popularity in the five years since she’s joined WAS, particularly in Latin American countries such as Mexico, especially, but also Chile, Colombia and Argentina, she said. She estimates about 15 per cent of the school’s students are now travelling to the resort from those regions.
