The conversation in the hot tub in Radium went something like this:
Young Calgary Woman: Where are you from?
Squamish Residents: Squamish.
YCW: Squamish! I'd love to live there.
SRs: Oh, you've visited?
YCW: No, but it's such an amazing place!
When did Squamish become the hip place to live? Whistler is too exclusive; Nelson, too hippie; Victoria, too old, and Vancouver, just too expensive. But travel around these days and tell people you're from Squamish and you gain almost immediate "cred."
Not "crud," which, if I think back to my first 15 or 20 years here, was what people outside the town seemed to think about it. Those of us who have lived here long enough remember the days when the only time Squamish made the news was for thuggery. In those days, Squamish was perceived as the redneck cousin in the Lower Mainland family. The best people could say was that it was where the McDonald's was on the way to Whistler.
But now, it seems, people positively gush when they talk about the town. "Oh, everyone is so fit there! And it's so beautiful."
And that's true - but it's always been true. More than 20 years ago, Cliff Miller and a group of eager mountain-bikers got SORCA started. Kevin McLane and others have been climbing here and building their community for more than 30 years, and Logger Sports has been showcasing the logging community's athletic prowess for 56 years. So it's not like this is a new phenomenon.
Recently, though, Squamish has turned some kind of corner in the media zeitgeist. We've become the flavour of the month.
Who knows why? I'm going to speculate that it's the confluence of several things: Events like Logger Sports, Test of Metal and the climbing festival put Squamish on the map, but that map had a relatively small distribution. Other things like the GranFondo and Squamish Valley Music Festival opened up that map to a very large population.
I remember sitting at the Brackendale Bean coffee shop after the first "Live at Squamish" concert when an ex-student - and pretty insightful young man -approached us and said, "This event is going to change this town. All of a sudden there are 5,000 young people who think that Squamish is the coolest place in B.C."
At the time, I thought it was hyperbole, but maybe he was right. The secret was out: Squamish is the coolest place in B.C. to live.
