It was a late Wednesday morning in mid-January when Paul O’Mara came across an older skier lying in the snow near the top of Emerald Chair.
She’d broken her femur. O’Mara said he stuck around while a doctor and a team of patrollers delivered the “best on-mountain care” he could imagine, but the accident scene sparked concern. The injured skier had ridden off what O’Mara described as “an unmarked five- or six-foot drop.”
The incident prompted the longtime local to write a letter to Pique’s editor about an injury he believed could have been prevented. His letter, in turn, inspired other Whistler Blackcomb regulars to raise their own concerns about hazards they’ve perceived at the resort in recent months.
In an interview, O’Mara highlighted two main observations from his 50-plus days of skiing this winter that caused him to question safety on the slopes: a “dramatic” reduction in the amount of groomed terrain compared to previous years, he said, and fewer yellow-jacketed mountain safety volunteers across the resort. “I’ve noticed that the skiing and the riding is a little more hectic than I remember it,” he added.
O’Mara said he could name “a litany of things the mountain has messed up,” but no others directly related to safety. “It was just this one day where this particular snow-form occurred in a really dangerous spot, that wasn’t properly marked and it ended up hurting somebody,” he said.
Safety first
Issues like the one O’Mara witnessed are what Whistler Blackcomb’s team strives to prevent. Mistakes happen, vice-president of mountain operations Doug Macfarlane acknowledged, but he wants to make one point clear: “Everything we do is founded in safety.”
Macfarlane got his start in the ski industry as a patroller in 1988, rising through the ranks as a safety risk manager before moving on to mountain ops. “From the very first day we open, there’s hundreds—if not thousands—of decisions we make before we bring people up on the mountain,” he explained.
That includes everything from patrol’s systematic morning trail checks to groomers keeping an eye out for any concerns during their shifts. “Every morning meeting, every conversation our teams have—whether you’re a lift operator, patroller, groomer—all has a safety component embedded in it,” said Macfarlane. “That’s just in our DNA. To say that we don’t would be kind of insulting to all my team that put their lives into this place.”
That said, guests’ observations hold weight for Macfarlane. He encouraged skiers and riders to continue providing constructive criticism he and his team can learn from. “I do look … and pay attention to our guests’ feedback in the surveys,” he said, while guests can also send concerns to [email protected] to be passed along to the appropriate manager.
“We really, really do want to make a difference,” he insisted.
To O’Mara’s first point, Macfarlane acknowledged the pandemic had a lingering impact on the resort’s grooming operations in terms of both staffing and equipment.
A number of new groomers joined the team this year after tenured staff members moved on, he explained. “To replace a groomer that’s worked for you for 30 years, and think that someone new, just starting out, is going to be able to do that same body of work is just not feasible,” said Macfarlane.
As those newer staff were trained and mentored over the course of the season, grooming resources continued to be carefully orchestrated on a nightly basis, said Macfarlane, based on a variety of factors ranging from weather—for example, “Do you want to invest all your hours in a piece of terrain you’re not going to open tomorrow?” he said—to guests’ shifting skiing habits.
“Certainly, that team is growing and learning and going in the right direction,” said Macfarlane. "And, at times, this season and the conditions have been challenging to work in. I would say the this last half of the year has been fantastic though, and exceeding my expectations."
A decline in volunteerism
As for mountain host and safety volunteers, those programs were combined this year, with every volunteer donning a safety jacket during their shift. Macfarlane acknowledged neither program boasted quite the same volume of participants as they did prior to 2020, falling in line with a wider trend that has seen volunteerism decline from coast to coast. Senior patrol manager Adam Mercer and patrol manager Seamus Frew echoed that point during a sit-down with Pique on Monday morning, April 24.
“Volunteerism has been consistent over the last couple of years, but pre-pandemic, the numbers were higher,” said Frew. "So we have seen a bit of a drop.”
It makes a difference “having that head count to support what we’re trying to do,” Mercer added, but volunteers are just one part of Whistler Blackcomb’s team.
While it’s a program Macfarlane said he’d like to see grow, the resort’s bigger priority this winter was rebuilding its paid employee roster after the blows it suffered during the pandemic.
“We were really hyper-focused on competitive wages, having enough staff to run all our essential services—patrol was definitely one of those—and securing enough of those employees to make us whole,” Macfarlane explained. Those efforts paid off, with patrol reportedly running with a fully-staffed team over the last few months.
“Quite honestly, having paid positions is sometimes more effective than someone who just works one day a week for you," he added. "You can have consistent communication, and the expectations, the whole understanding, is a higher level with a paid position. And that's ideal."
Still, during the pandemic, “Certainly we shrunk back as a company, as business fell off with COVID … [the volunteer program] was one of those things that was impacted,” said Macfarlane. Building it back up, “is a process that we’re building through,” he admitted.
But did those hazards O’Mara cited explicitly result in more injuries this winter?
On patrol
It’s a difficult question to answer definitively, but in speaking with patrol, it doesn’t appear so. As business returned to more normal levels this winter, Mercer and Frew said the volume and seriousness of injuries suffered on-mountain were similar to pre-COVID seasons.
“As long as I’ve been here, it’s just one of these,” said Mercer, motioning a wavering line with his hand. “Some weeks are a little bit more, some months are a little bit more or less.” Generally, in terms of both incident rates and acuity, “it’s about the same,” he said.
Patrol can usually count on the severity of injuries going up when conditions are hard and fast, and light is good, just as they can count on seeing more twisting injuries pop up in heavy snow and low visibility. Anecdotally, however, “I think that there’s probably more people skiing these days that require more assistance from patrol in general,” Mercer observed.
“Which is OK,” he added. “We’re happy to do that—it’s super gratifying.”
That could be due, in part, to everything from an aging contingent of baby-boomer skiers, as Mercer theorized, or a higher volume of newer skiers and snowboarders needing patrol’s help, for example, getting down a steeper-than-expected slope they mistakenly landed on, or after suffering an injury—say, a sprained wrist—that some more experienced in those sports might feel comfortable riding out with.
Though Vail Resorts declined to share Whistler Blackcomb’s current injury rate, Macfarlane said that data helps inform decision-making on both mountains throughout the year—for example, whether grooming patterns or run merges need to be re-evaluated.
“I certainly pay attention to where accidents are happening and if there’s lessons to be learned,” he said. “It’s the same in our bike park, in our terrain parks, on our ski runs … Is there a trend? Is there anything you should be looking out for? That’s our job, and how we react to it. If I saw something was built incorrectly, or my team did, they’re empowered to change it.”
Whistler's ER saw its visitor levels jump this winter
Pique reached out to Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) to ask whether the Whistler Health Care Centre's emergency department saw any changes in the volume or severity of issues patients sought care for this winter, compared to previous years. The health authority did not provide any data regarding the nature of patients' injuries or illnesses, but confirmed Whistler logged a total of 12,166 emergency department visits between November 2022 and March 2023.
That's about a 20-per-cent rise year-over-year, after Whistler's ER recorded 10,100 visits over the same period in 2021-2022. It also marked the highest number of visits tallied within the last five years, according to data provided by VCH. Between November and March, the Whistler Health Care Centre's emergency department reportedly saw 7,286 visits in 2020-2021; 8,448 visits in 2019-2020 and 8,977 in 2018-2019.
Within a similar time frame, Whistler also saw its permanent population rise as its family physician shortage worsened. Statistics Canada's most recent census showed the municipality’s population reached 13,982 in 2021, representing a 19-per-cent increase from the previous census conducted five years before, in 2016, when Whistler’s population stood at 11,746.
Meanwhile, one year ago this week, Town Plaza Medical Clinic closed its doors for good. The clinic's Main Street location, which offered walk-in appointments, served approximately 200 patients each week prior to its closure. That news came exactly two years after family practice Coast Medical Clinic announced it was shutting down in 2020.
Since, the Whistler Medical Clinic—the resort's sole remaining primary care practice following Town Plaza's closure—merged with Whistler 360 Health Collaborative Society to become a non-profit operation. The organization recently opened a satellite clinic in the space that previously housed Town Plaza, and hired a new family doctor who began seeing patients a month ago. Two more care providers were expected to begin accepting new patients this spring and summer.
