squamish

The first time I heard of Squamish was in relation to an outdoor music festival near Vancouver. It sounded like a lot of fun but was too expensive for a dishwasher like me at the time. I thought of it like as I thought about Osheaga, a Canadian version of one of the famous American music festivals, with all the screaming and drugs and hot people in bathing suits. I would have loved to go if I had the money or the time.

I finally made it to Osheaga several years later, but it was a few years past my prime of outdoor music festivals. I enjoyed it, but I was also annoyed by the teenagers and the noise. I couldn’t enjoy crowds pushing together as much as I used to, and I wasn’t as obsessed with famous musicians as I used to be, relating all the lyrics to my unrequited loves and personal problems.

At my age now and having lived through a pandemic, I can’t imagine ever desiring to go to a giant music festival again. Which is all for the best, since the Squamish festival ended up being relatively short-lived, permanently cancelled after its 2015 show. I guess when I first heard of it it was still a new thing, lasting only 5 years, but thanks to advertising or my own warped attribution of meaning and longevity, I thought it was a music festival staple, a who’s-who of both musicians and attendees.

I’ll never know what it was like to party in Squamish in my 20s, but I finally made it out for a pandemic day trip shortly after re-moving to the west coast. The drive there from Vancouver is a trip on its own along the Sea-to-Sky highway, one of the most beautiful one-hour drives I’ve ever done. There are multiple parks to stop along the way for a hike and a lot of places you could stop to take a nice photo, though I was apparently too cautious of a driver to do that, so here’s a photo stopped a red light in town.

In the city itself, the mountains are so close that they completely dominate the landscape. It feels like you could touch them. I wonder if it does anything noteworthy to the weather patterns there, or blocks much sunlight.

There are a lot of hiking trails in Squamish, though we only did a couple shorter ones when there (had to make time for the breweries and the eagle run). I read that they were working on a trail network that would connect up to Whistler, which sounds like a dream. I don’t know that I’d do that trip unless I was an avid cyclist, but the idea of towns and communities connected by trails – an alternative to taking a car on a highway – paints a picture of a lifestyle out of a book. I wish I could walk between all the cities. Maybe I’d buy a nice bike.

There are a few neighbourhoods in the town, but aside from the trails, we mostly just hung around what I’d call the downtown. It had a lot of low-rises and apartments on top of ground-level retail. It wasn’t huge, but everything you needed was there. I think they had some car share too, and a couple bus routes. I’m sure it got noisy and rowdy on the summer nights before the pandemic, and I wonder what living there permanently would be like. It reminded me of a lower-key version of Banff.

There were a number of bus stops that didn’t have shelters, but instead random-looking chairs at the stop. The chairs all looked completely different and not suited to outdoors. It looked like someone had just brought old kitchen or dining room chairs they had lying around and left them at random bus stops, or someone went around collecting discarded chairs and put them at their usual stop so they wouldn’t have to stand. I’m sure the bus doesn’t come that frequently. It made me nostalgic for small town west coast, even though I’ve never actually lived in small town west coast, just passed through enough to find it endearing and like it’s a little sliver of home.

Squamish isn’t too far from where I live now, so I’ll likely make it back at some point. When I do I’ll probably do a longer hike or drink more beer at the breweries I’ve come to know better (drank a couple from Backcountry last night) or maybe it’ll be on the way to Whistler for my inaugural ski. The nice thing about visiting somewhere like that is that even if you have nothing to do and shit falls through, you at least know you’ll be somewhere that’s pretty objectively beautiful.