Whistler’s elected officials and friends came together with a provincial visitor to cut the ribbon on Rainbow Park a few days before the public were welcome to enjoy the space.
While the fences come down on Friday, June 28, provincial tourism minister Lana Popham was in town on June 26 to talk shop, while Mayor Jack Crompton talked up the new park, how it was the "birthplace of tourism" for Whistler, and how its improvement was important to the community’s ability to share a little of itself with visitors.
“This place has a legacy of hospitality and trade between Nations … for us as a community we’ve taken that desire to host people very seriously, and we’ve learned from it and we’ve built on it, and it is exciting to see this as one of the ways we will be able to continue to host people,” said Crompton in remarks before a small crowd of municipal employees and other elected officials. The public was not invited to the ribbon-cutting.
“The project will improve the visitor experience here, and it really balances the needs of our community to host,” Crompton said.
“This place was not able to keep up to the number of people that were visiting, so the investment in this park was really important to ensuring that we get it right in this province and in this community.”
Highlighting some of the changes to the park, Crompton said it was the result of community feedback and engagement, with a bigger beach, new docks, more seating, picnic areas and shade, and a raised grass area.
Minister Popham also made some brief remarks—the provincial government provided the funds for the work through the Resort Municipality Initiative (RMI), which is vended out to tourism-focused communities annually to support tourist-facing projects.
“The investment that the province makes is really supposed to be the wind at your back in the community, and we hope to be able to continue to do that,” said Popham.
“We really appreciate all the thoughtfulness that has gone into this plan. We know there’s a lot of hours at every level of government when you’re considering what needs to be delivered in a space like this,” she said before cutting a ribbon that was NDP-orange.
The municipality spent millions of RMI money on the redesign for the park, which was closed in 2023 to allow the works, which themselves were informed by community input, and pushback on initial designs.
Notably, initial plans to have the Valley Trail parallel to the waterfront were deleted, and changed to create a more open grassy area close to the beach.
Speaking with Pique before all the officials rode off into the rain for a tour of Whistler's bike network, the Resort Municipality of Whistler’s (RMOW) manager of parks and planning Martin Pardoe ran through some of the benefits of the re-engineered park, starting with how it is now dry.
The park previously suffered from long-term drainage issues, according to officials.
“The lawn is dry—it hasn’t been dry before in a long time, so that’s a big piece,” Pardoe said.
“We obviously have the shade sail, [and] we tripled the number of picnic tables in the park so there’s more spaces for people to gather. We’ve more than doubled the number of seating opportunities, whether they’re benches or specialty chairs or the hammocks. We’ve added more than three times the amount of seat logs so people can sit on logs as well. There’s a lot of places for people to sit and gather.”
Speaking of the seat logs separating the beach from the grass, Pardoe said they were also part of keeping the gangs of Canada geese a little more contained.
“What we also understood through research is that geese are discouraged by riparian planting, as well as any vertical change of 18 inches or more, hence we have logs along the edge that provide that vertical separation, and once [the planting] grows in the geese won't be coming through here,” he said.
Staff will also be setting up a barrier when the park closes in the evenings to further discourage geese from taking over the space—but they aren’t completely banished.
“There will still be opportunities for geese to get between beach and lawn as opposed to it being a wide-open system, which really didn’t do much to discourage them,” Pardoe said.
While the fences barring public entry from the open spaces of the park will be removed on Friday, there will still be some work underway through the summer. Notably, there will be no further Valley Trail detours.
