Summer Activities
May to October in the Coast Mountains
Whistler is a bigger place in summer than it is in winter. The two mountains open their alpine trails and the Peak 2 Peak Gondola, the valley floor turns into forty kilometres of paved Valley Trail, five lakes warm up enough to swim in, and the tour operators who run snowmobiles in February switch to quads, buggies and canoes.
The list below is everything worth doing between May and October, grouped the way you would actually plan a week rather than in one long alphabetical wall. Most of it can be booked through us, and where an activity belongs to someone else we say so and send you straight to them.
If the weather turns, our indoor activities page has the rainy-day plan, and what is on tracks the festivals, races and free concerts that fill the Village all summer.
The lifts run all summer and they change what a day here looks like. A gondola ticket puts you in the alpine in twenty minutes, the bike park drops 1,500 vertical metres of machine-built trail, and two zipline companies work the forest between the mountains.
Whistler has trails at every level, from a flat loop around a lake to a glacier day with a certified guide. The hard part is picking the right one for the weather and the group, which is what the guides and our own trail guide are for.
The valley floor is strung with lakes that are genuinely warm by July, linked by the River of Golden Dreams. Rentals are cheap, the water is calm, and the mountains reflect in it from end to end on a still morning.
This is the group that gets you somewhere you could not reach on foot in a morning. Quads and buggies climb the forest service roads, helicopters land on the glaciers behind Blackcomb, and a float plane will take you out over the ice fields towards the coast.
Off site
Off site
Nobody does six days of adrenaline. These are the afternoons that keep a long trip enjoyable: a tee time, an hour on a court, a spa, a gondola ride up for a long lunch, or something indoors that works for a ten-year-old and a grandparent at the same time.
Summer nights are long here, and the valley does not simply shut down at six. A night walk through a lit forest, a progressive dinner through the Village, a coached hour in an axe-throwing lane with a beer, or the four nightclubs that keep the Village going until two.
Every activity on this page that shows live availability is booked through the operator who runs it, with Whistler Wired as your point of contact for everything around it. If you are building a week and want the order to make sense, send us the dates and the group and we will lay it out.
Looking further ahead, our winter activities page covers December to April, and activity companies explains who actually runs what in this valley.