Exploring Whistler Village: Biggest Ski Town in North America

A walking tour of Whistler's main village. I'm Chris, this is Yellow Productions, and I'm gonna take you from the entrance to Whistler's Mountain Bike Park and the Whistler Village Gondola all the way over to Olympic Village. I'm gonna turn the camera out so you can see what I can see. This is the Fitzsimmons Express, where everybody's coming down and up off their mountain bikes, and this is the ticket line for the Whistler Village Gondola. Over on the right, we just passed Garbo's and the Longhorn Saloon as we take this tour. Now, Whistler is North America's largest ski resort. Obviously, I'm doing this in the summer, so you're not gonna see a lot of snow here today, but that's what a lot of people come here for. Of course, for those of us who don't snow, if you come here in the summer months, you'll get great rates on rooms, hotels, food, because, well, I don't wanna say you'll have the place all to yourself, but there's definitely a lot less people here in the summer than in the winter, and there's a lot of cool stuff to see and do, which I will show you in this walking tour, and I'll point out some of the shops and restaurants as we go. Here is the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, where you can get those great apples, chocolate-covered apples, caramel apples. If you're looking to buy tickets for the lifts, you'll find them at the Whistler Blackcomb Shops and Services. By the way, if you want to see the upper village, which is where Blackcomb Mountain Gondola is, that'll be another video, so find the link in the description below or at the end of this video for that walking tour once it's done. Lululemon, super popular athletic attire. You know, athleisure is definitely popular here in a place like Whistler. There are tons of hotels in this village, and so most of the things you see up above the shops and the restaurants are indeed hotels. This one right here is the Carleton Lodge, this big hotel. I'm gonna widen this out so you can see the tops of these a little bit better. And then behind the gondola over there, behind the Whistler Gondola, was the Weston. All right, and this whole area we're gonna be walking through, it's entirely pedestrianized. The center of the village is entirely car-free, bicycle-free, and skateboard-free. Although there are a ton of places selling bicycles and renting bicycles, since that's the season that it is, you know, change this to winter, and you'll see the bicycles replaced by snowboards and skis. I'm shooting this at about 5 p.m. on a Sunday in October, and it is about 26 degrees Celsius currently, so still pretty warm. Interesting kind of phenomenon about summertime weather here is like the warmest time of the day is like four or five o'clock, and it's like shorts and t-shirt weather. At nighttime, it gets quite cold, so then you want fleeces and long pants. We got some Roots clothing, hair salons, bike racks to park people's bike, people pushing baby strollers around. This says it's the Pangaea Pod Hotel, and I really wonder if those are like capsules or things like that. I don't know, we're not staying here. Here's a souvenir shop, because no doubt you'd want to pick up some souvenirs while you're in Whistler. Great Canadian souvenirs like Canadian flags, maple syrup. Over on the left is peak performance physiotherapy and massage therapy, because also people no doubt get sore from riding on all those slopes. Here's the Hot Buns Bakery. Most of these hotels, or I should say a lot of them, don't really have breakfast restaurants in them because there's just so many restaurants that are out in this village that you find that people are just eating their breakfast in one of these restaurants or coffee shops. We're gonna be having dinner a little later after I shoot this at this restaurant right up here called Restaurant Araxi, and we passed it I think already, but there's a Old Spaghetti Factory here, which we love the Old Spaghetti Factory. If you don't watch Yellow Productions a lot, you should know we have a two-year-old daughter who travels with us, and so that's great food for the whole family. If you're looking for a supermarket, there's a supermarket right here called the Grocery Store, Coffee Shop, Drug Store, and then we're gonna turn around the Araxi Restaurant and Oyster Bar. My wife, OC Girl, is really looking forward to some of those oysters tonight. After ski or snowboard drinks, popular Amsterdam pub, you'll find a lot of outdoor drinking spots here along the stroll. That's what they kind of call this walking area. This is the village stroll. On the right, I was just passing Whistler Hardware, kind of like a Ace Hardware, old-style hardware store that then also had a bunch of things like Frisbees and everything a tourist could want. Here's another bicycle shop, but you can tell they're already getting ready for winter as they've got their skis right out there on display. Now, this area is traditionally where the First Nation lived, which is what they call the Native Americans in Canada, so they pay honor or tribute to them with some of these welcome figures or this wooden sculpture. Turning to the left, we go by Mongoli Grill, like a Mongolian barbecue. Oh, and there's another shopper's drug mart back here, kind of grocery store and pharmacy, little bit all together. Helly Hansen clothes. If you're looking for something to ski or hit the slopes or to keep you warm. Oh, they have a lot of, there are bears around here, and so they got these signs that say, bears and selfies don't mix. Give bears space. You will find I will not be taking any selfies with any bears today or really on this trip. Now, a lot of the food here in Whistler is quite expensive, but cheap pizza by the slice here at Avalanche Pizza, one of my favorite clothing brands, Columbia Sportswear has a shop right here. Of course, we'll find North Face coming up a little more. Oh, by the way, the trash cans here are really interesting, bear-proof trash cans. They've got food, garbage, bottles and cans, and a separate one just for coffee cups. People drink so much coffee that they have a special place where you can recycle just coffee cups right there, and I guess it's a whole separate process for coffee cups. Where might you get coffee from here? Coffee cups, if you didn't get from all the local coffee shops, well, Tim Hortons, classic Canadian donut chain right there if you're looking for a cheap and quick breakfast. All right, we're coming up on this bridge that goes over the main road driving into Whistler, which is pretty neat. Actually, walking this path reminds me a lot of downtown Disney in Anaheim, California, where they've built bridges over the main roads and you hardly know you're going over it. I wanna show you this walk that I'm doing today on this map right here, just so you get a sense of space. We started right here at the Fitzsimmons Express chair, Whistler Village Gondola. We're walking along here, we saw the welcome statue. We're going over this bridge and we're walking to the Olympic Plaza. The second walking tour is gonna be of the upper village right here. It takes you to Blackcomb Mountain. All right, so this bridge, as I say, goes over the main road coming into Whistler. And if we look that way, we can see the tops of the really big peaks that people are skiing or snowboarding on. All right, turning our perspective back to the path, you can see it's a busy evening here in Whistler. There are a lot of people enjoying their stroll down this main promenade. And boy, this is like a super touristy shop right here. The Whistler Cool as a Moose store. You definitely wanna bring back home a moose that says Whistler on it. We'll just pass an ice cream shop on the right, Billabong, if you wanna get your surfing attire. We are so far from the beach or the ocean. I always find it funny to have surf shops in locations like this, but hey, apparently they make their money here. This is the trading post at Whistler where you can take your selfie with a moose. That's right, if you didn't get enough mooses at the previous store. What's the plural of mooses? Is it meeses or, no, that doesn't, I guess the plural of moose is probably just moose. Hey, some Canadians watching this, please let me know what's the plural of moose. Not really, I don't often talk about many moose together. Some cool rocks right here in this little plaza with a whole bunch of restaurants around the plaza. A neat little gazebo. And again, all these different things, these are likely hotels or timeshares above these. Where are we staying? We're staying at a hotel called the Summit Lodge. It's a kind of small boutique luxury hotel. That's how they describe it. I don't know if it's that high on the luxury. Of course, we like to do video hotel reviews here, so we're also staying at the Fairmont Whistler Hotel. We've not yet stayed at that one, but we're looking forward to it. Anyway, you'll find reviews for both those hotels in my Whistler playlist, link in the description below, also at the end of this video. I like the name of this gift shop. This is Cabin Fever Gifts. Do you have cabin fever? I think if you're snowed in, oh, you might have cabin fever. Hey, I wanna go up here and say another classic thing to do in Whistler is to ride ATVs, all-terrain vehicles in the summer, snowmobiles probably in the winter. And so there's a lot of these places where you can do some more adventure, some things. If you didn't have enough money, there's a Western Union right here. You can get some money sent to you from your mom or dad or your brother or whomever. This is interesting. This is a place called Stinky's on the Stroll, and I guess because it gets cold, they've also got blankets out here that you can put on yourself as you're seated in these outdoor seats. Not necessary today because as I mentioned, it is quite warm. Hey, look, it's some deer. No, wait, they're statues. They're not moving. But there is a lot of this public art along on the Stroll, so it just makes for a neat evening walk or two or three. If you're wondering how long the walk is from here to the next village, the Upper Village, that's about 20 minutes from this Olympic Plaza to the Upper Village. This bridge goes over a little creek here. The water here is this interesting kind of blue, milky color. Very, there's a green lake over here that has some water that looks like that. That's pretty neat too. Now, this is the Olympic Plaza where you'll see the Olympic rings right there. Whistler was home to the Winter Olympics in 2010, so a lot of the developments, things like that to make it as cool as it is came along with the Olympics. I'm sure there's gonna be some people watching this who live in Whistler to say, Chris, Whistler was cool before the Olympics were here. Sure, but you know, anytime the Olympics comes anywhere, there's always a bunch of infrastructure built up, and so just behind that, there's kind of a big lawn, and there's like a children's playground over here. There's a Patagonia store, and then there's a really neat bakery right here. If you're looking for a bakery that has some tasty treats, check out Pure Bread. We had that for breakfast this morning, really enjoyed it. Not a lot of space to eat in the cafe, but you can eat out here in any of these spaces or back in your hotel room. All right, I had to stop recording because I had to get my Pure Bread for tomorrow morning for breakfast before they closed. Totally hashtag not sponsored, but they're just pretty good bakery items. All right, well, fellow explorers, if you enjoyed this video and you're coming to Whistler, you just wanna know more about Whistler, you might enjoy diving into my whole Whistler playlist where I've got videos about things to know before you go to Whistler, some hotel reviews, the walking tour of the Upper Village, so dive in, check it out. If there aren't that many videos right there, well, they'll be there as soon as they're done. They get edited and they get uploaded, so subscribe so you make sure you see all those. Well, fellow explorers, as usual, I wanna say goodbye because I'm gonna see you over there.