Squamish opinion: Goodbye Sea to Sky

I wish I could be the kind of person who sneaks away. Pops up in a new place. Prompts a confused scroll or two.

But, in a way, this is the end of a love story, and it deserves acknowledgement.

Whistler took me in 12 years ago as a lost, mildly depressed 20-something. 

I hated it for a while, but then, thanks to some people who turned out to be an important stop, I learned to love the mountains. I learned to just be for a minute after years of hustling and moving and striving. I learned to run and hike and sleep in the alpine, miles away from other people. 

Most importantly, the thing I will always carry with me: I learned to appreciate small moments of beauty in a way I had proclaimed I never would. 

In my early days at Whistler’s Pique Newsmagazine—when I was still struggling to make sense of Whistler, with people lugging snowboards down the highway, everyone partially employed by choice and sharing a bedroom with multiple people—I distinctly remember a coworker trudging upstairs to look out the big picture windows one late afternoon. “Look at the alpenglow!” she dreamily mused, gesturing at the haze of pink on the snow. 

I didn’t get it. 

“I will never,” I thought, “get that excited about light on a mountain.”

But here I am, more than a decade later, an admirer of and fawner over not only the alpenglow but also wildflowers, dewy moss, unfurling ferns, the first pop of yellow on a spring skunk cabbage, salmon tails that slosh in the rivers come fall, the rhythms of the seasons that quietly carry us through one year to the next.  

And my life is so much richer for it.  

The mountains in the Sea to Sky Corridor ushered me from the edge of new adulthood into middle age. 

A wife. Mom of two. 

Mount Currie watched me say “I do” to my love in the midst of global chaos. Calm, steady, a metaphor for what I hope our marriage will be.

On an impossibly hot July night the next year, I became a mother under the shadow of the Stawamus Chief. Two years later, on another sticky summer night, that towering monolith was there again as our family became complete. 

“What’s that mountain, Mom?” my three-year-old asked me from her car seat this morning. 

“That’s Atwell Peak,” I told her. 

“And that one?”

“That’s Cloudburst.”

“Mom, do you know everything?” 

No, I certainly don’t, but I’ve come to intimately know so many of these mountains and I’m deeply sad to let them go. 

It just suddenly became harder to picture a future here—but also impossible to picture a future that wasn’t here. So we looped around and around for months until we were so dizzy we couldn’t stand it anymore. And we made one of the hardest decisions of our life. 

We love this place, living in Squamish, but we long for a deeper connection to family. We want a little more space that doesn’t come at such a steep cost—a cost that cuts into our girls’ future.  

Life and priorities change and that can be a good thing—even if sometimes it’s painful, too. 

We’re saying goodbye, but the truth is this place will forever be etched in me—taking up an outsized portion of my life story because it holds the most important moments.

I became who I needed to be here, and now it’s time for the next adventure.

Alyssa Noel is a former Pique Newsmagazine and recent Squamish Chief reporter. As of this week, she resides in Edmonton.