Ghost Town vs. Party Town

Carefull of your hard partying ways and actions, one day some sellout could capture all your fond memories and publish a tell-all book, Stephen Vogle is cashing in on the now famous Whistler apre ski scene. This book coming out also reminds me of MTV's new "Peak Season" a "Laguana Beach" style reality show taking place in the underbelly of Whistler with Whistler "locals". The funny thing about that show is that, in a nutshell, that it IS exactly like ski towns. Yes binge drinking is the norm, yes STD's are rampant, No relationships never work, and ski towns will "eat you up and spit you out".
This new image that is being sold is about to go super mainstream.
Move over Las Vegas, the rest of the world is slowly finding out that living/visiting a quaint little ski town has its bad-ass darkside (which apparently makes amazing Facebook pictures). Live like a rockstar with a snowboard on your feet. No this is sooooooo not breaking news to us actual ski locals, this is so the norm. But, the rest of the world is catching on.
Next thing you know, Girls Gone Wild will be ditching South Beach for Fernie, The next big reality show will be over at Commit and drug dealers will be smiling like they've never smiled before. Drinking, partying and losing you life in a ski town is about to become as cliche as Spring Break in Cancun.
Shit, we all thought we had this little secret, like we discovered this awesome way of life that the rest of the mainstream world never caught on to. Well, all us ski bums and party'ers have paved the way for corporations (publishers, MTV, advertisers, beer companies, the Mexican Cartel) to serisouly cash in on. Where is our piece of the pie? We made this scene and now Ed Hardy is gonna make skis. Ugh. Nothing is original amymore.
One good way of looking at it is this: If Fernie City Coucil and the old timers that unfortunatley plan this town and decide the young peoples fate - if they are not going to do anything to attract business and enterprise to our town to try and balance our brutal shoulder seasons to try envoke some finanical stability then all us beer loving folks are gonna welcome the worldwide boozehounds to come and spend some money here. Sure a few windows might get broken and some piles of puke on the sidewalk, but hey, whats the difference if this town totally dries up, all the people move to Cranbrook and the seniors all die off. Ghost Town vs. Party Town. Hmmmmmmmmm. Interesting.