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| The Blackcomb Mountains, Whistler, BC. |
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| The Blackcomb Mountains, Whistler, BC. |
Six years ago, a brand new restaurant halfway to the top of Whistler-Blackcomb Ski Resort, was built to accommodate the enormous increase in skiers who have made this ski area, 60 miles north of Vancouver in the Canadian Cascade Mountains, one of the most popular in the Northwest.
Whistler-Blackcomb is located in British Columbia's Coast Range, a 100-mile swath of majestic mountains and fjord-like inlets that stretches from BC to southeastern Alaska. Adjacent to Blackcomb and Whistler Mountains is Garibaldi Provincial Park, one of the province's 450 provincial parks and one of the most frequently visited in southeastern BC. Garibaldi encompasses 480,000 acres of forest, alpine tundra and ice fields featuring volcanic peaks, alpine meadows and lakes. These features drew a huge throng of summer and winter visitors including some two million skiers to the ski resort in the 1998-99 ski season, an all-time record high for any ski resort in Canada. Ski Magazine rated Whistler-Blackcomb the number one ski resort in the world. No wonder the Canadian Olympic ski team chose Whistler as its training ground.
Because of Whistler's lofty stature among ski resorts, these record numbers of visitors who flock to her slopes put demands on all her facilities, including Glacier Creek Restaurant. There, thanks to a Muffin Monster, restaurant wastes are ground up before they are directed through a single sewer line down to the bottom of the mountain where it joins a municipal line which directs it to the area's wastewater treatment plant.
Glacier Creek Restaurant, located above the gondola at Blackcomb, seats some 1,200 hungry diners who drop in from a morning on the slopes for a quick snack or larger meal before heading back out to the ski runs.
According to restaurant sanitary engineer John Milne, sewage and kitchen wastes are collected in a catch basin and fed to the 6" sewer line where they are chewed up by the grinder located immediately behind the large building. "It's been performing excellently," said Milne of the grinder. "It has basically been trouble free since it was installed when the restaurant was built."
Two years ago, the unit was taken off line and sent to JWCE for free routine maintenance, according to Milne, who added, "When it was taken apart it was clean as anything. People flush down debris they shouldn't," Milne said, mentioning baby diapers specifically, "and the grinder has been very effective at grinding it up."
Milne also said that because of the hard objects that tend to get into the sewer line, a screen/pump arrangement would be far less effective and also more costly. "The screens can clog up the pumps and, if they have to be replaced, it could cost you about $3,500 a pump. That, plus labour, would make it extremely expensive."