Whistler Diaries
Posted on September 17, 2007 @ 9:37 AM
WHISTLER DIARIES 65 HATE THIS By Seb Kemp
And so another season of bike park tomfoolery kicked off in Whistler in May. Anyone who rolls on 26’s and is worth the contents of their skanky old Camelback bladder must have heard of Whistler Bike Park and wishes to make the pilgrimage. It’s the place where (if you believe the hype) all trails look like something from your favourite section on The Collective, where all trails lead to beer fountains, where the bears stop grazing to have their photo taken with you, where Hugh Hefner’s harem of dirty blond tarts go to have a real party, and where you can eat as many beef dips sandwiches as you want without ever getting fat. Well believe the hype…it is all true. It really is. However it’s not all a fairy tale, there is another side to the story of Whistlerington, Canadiashireshire that I think you should understand before you make your merry way over here. I want you to picture yourself spending hours upon hours sat at the bottom of the bike park. All around you it seems half the riders are wearing old plastic knee pads over jeans and old sweaty body armour that leaves such a rank fug lingering in the air that you struggle to breathe. The other half of the riders are wearing about a thousand dollars worth of NASA spec Teflon Troy Lee fabric that is so bright it feels like someone has rubbed chillies into your eyes. The lift lines are just a crowd of guys giving each other high fives and saying things like “WHOA! Did you see me totally rip that trail? The look on that newbie’s face when I went past him, eh! Ha-ha. What a loser!” You cringe every time someone calls you ‘Dude’ and you come over in a cold sweat every time someone tries to give you a bro–shake. Then if you allow your eyes to wander up the hill you would see a constant supply of lemmings throwing themselves off the famous GLC drops with their knees and elbows more bowed than Tina Turner dancing to Nutbush City Limits (Google the name kids). You will feel a quiver of revulsion and a sudden severe need to vomit due to the putrid spectacle of out of control riding that your eyes are witnessing. 
It might be about now that you realize that the bike park lifts are just a conveyor belt of mountain biking ugliness, gruesomeness, hideousness, and repugnance err…ness. Well if you decide to stay a little longer you would soon find out that all the money you have saved all year for will only pay your first months rent to stay in a cupboard in a garage in a distant part of town. Oh yeah, and you will be sharing it with a group of dirt bags who clean so rarely that the inside of a dustbin will smell better than your house does. One of the only half decent jobs going will be sperm donating. The problem with that dream job is there is no fertility clinic in town so you will just have to just have to clean toilets for the rich and famous. Then when you finally are given some time off from your slave labour you might be tempted to go and ride the bike park yourself. But once you do you will find out that although the overall drop in elevation and sheer number of trails is only dwarfed by the drop in your own hygiene standards, it will take you approximately negative five minutes to snap your tin donkey in half or to injure yourself so badly that the season will be over for you. Which will mean you will be relegated to sitting at the bottom of the hill again. And we know what that entails. You get the picture yet? Well what I’m trying to say is that even though Whistler is as good as the stories you have heard and goes beyond the hype, the above is equally true. So if human interaction and slightly challenging life experiences bothers you then maybe you should reconsider making the trip over here and you should stay at home riding your garden by yourself. I have met cynics who become so obsessed by hating everything around them, but it comes down to the old saying ‘What you hate most in others is what you hate most in yourself’. I had to live with one of these people until he became so hate ridden that he buried himself in his own excrement, and we made a table top out of him. RIP Little Big Man.
Seb Kemp is part of the infamous whistlerdiaries.com online dance troupe, whose unholy mission is to provide a ridiculously amateur documentation of the riding scene in Whistler area and a satirical lens through which to view the wider mountain biking community.
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