Not all summer residents of Alta Lake came to the area for the fishing or a mountain holiday. When Everett Valleau moved his company, Valleau Logging Ltd., to the area in 1955, he came to log timber around Alta and Green Lakes.
Valleau Logging was a family business, and over the years each of Everett’s sons (Bob, Eugene, Gerald, Howard, Laurence, Lindsay, and Ron), at least 10 of his grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren all worked for the company in different capacities. The Valleaus operated from Parkhurst on Green Lake and later moved their logging camp to Mons. As skiing opened up in the area and development increased, the Valleaus formed a subsidiary company, Alta Lake Contractors Ltd., to provide excavation work, road-building, and more. In 1965, they were hired by Garibaldi Lifts Ltd. to build the road from the valley to the midstation of Whistler Mountain while the logging side of the company removed the usable timber from some of the runs that were cut. The Valleaus and their crews also built roads and parking lots for the Cheakamus Inn (now Whistler Vale), the Highland Lodge, and the Alpine Villas development.
In 2023, the museum spoke with Karyn Smith, one of Everett’s granddaughters, who remembered coming to the area with her family each summer, though they lived on Vancouver Island throughout the rest of the year. She remembered Parkhurst as “a fun place to be” and also a busy place in the summer as it was a working camp with the mill, bunkhouses, and a dining hall, though each of Everett’s sons had their own cabin with their family.
With so much family around, Karyn spent a lot of time with her cousins. The kids would often go swimming, though Karyn recalled that her grandfather was “the only adult I ever knew who would swim in Green Lake,” having grown up washing in Galway Bay in Ireland. They would also go on Sunday outings where they would walk down the railway tracks to go horseback riding at Buckhorn Ranch or to the Tapleys’. Mr. Tapley (Myrtle Philip’s brother Phil) would collect their mail for them and they would have a ball game and eat the meal provided by Mrs. Tapley (Phil’s wife Doreen).
By the time they moved the logging camp to Mons, Karyn was old enough to start working as a “flunky” in the kitchen, peeling potatoes and other vegetables, fetching the meat from the walk-in freezer, doing the dishes, and keeping the coffee going. As Whistler Mountain developed more, Karyn got other jobs working at the Christiana Inn and the Highland Lodge.
Throughout the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, it was not uncommon for the Valleau name to pop up whenever there was a community project that needed support or an unexpected job that needed doing. In 1956, when a train crash led to three boxcars loaded with lumber jammed in place and blocking the line, the railway’s equipment couldn’t move the cars. The Valleaus used their logging machinery to pry out the cars and then drag them up the track and into the forest, where they are now a popular destination.
The Valleaus also offered office space in their administration building at Mons to serve as a post office after it moved out of Rainbow Lodge in 1966 and made their kitchen at Mons available to the Alta Lake Community Club to prepare fundraising dinners. When some residents of Whistler started up an Ice Stock Sliding Club during a cold-but-snowless winter, the Valleaus set aside an area of blacktop for them to continue playing throughout the year.
In the early 1960s, when the Alta Lake District Ratepayers Association applied to lease acreage for a dump, the Valleaus donated equipment and labour to excavate ditches and fill them in once full. They also provided equipment to help the Alta Lake Sports Club build a bridge over Fitzsimmons Creek when they were building Nordic ski trails around Lost Lake. Laurence Valleau was named Whistler’s Citizen of the Year in 1974.
As Whistler became larger and more emphasis was placed on the resort development of the area, Laurence and his sons Rick and Dave moved Valleau Logging to Pemberton.
