A Century at the Peak: Grouse Mountain Turns 100

By Elke Porter | WBN News Vancouver | July 29, 2026
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In 1926, reaching the summit of Grouse Mountain meant a full day's hike — until timber baron William C. Shelly funded a rough road up the mountainside and a simple lodge of local yellow cedar opened its doors. It was a modest beginning for what would become Vancouver's most visited attraction.

A century later, Grouse Mountain marked that milestone with its biggest celebration yet. From July 23 to August 3, the Centennial Festival transformed the mountaintop into a stage for "A Century of Stories" — a cinematic drone show weaving together synchronized lights, orchestral music, and Indigenous drumming to tell the mountain's history against the night sky. Live music, food trucks, a mountaintop marketplace, and the resort's resident grizzlies — celebrating their own 25th "bear-thday" — rounded out the festivities. This spring, the new Grouse Gravity Coaster opened, sending visitors twisting through the trees before the view opens up over the city.

The technology is almost unrecognizable from 1926. The world's first double chairlift arrived in 1949; the iconic Red Skyride tramway followed in 1976. Where early visitors trudged up a dirt road, today's guests ride gondolas, zip lines, and roller coasters. Where the lodge once stood alone on the mountainside, a resort now draws 1.3 million people a year.

And yet the pull is the same one that drew those first hikers a hundred years ago: the promise of standing above the city, with the sea and mountains spread out below. Grouse Mountain has been a place for first snow days, school trips, sunrise hikes, and family traditions for generations of Vancouverites. A century of lifts, lights, and drone shows later, it still offers what it always did — a reason to look up, and to climb.

Elke Porter at:
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