BC RIDER
Alf Alderson hits the road in a huge ‘RV’ to visit five of BC’s best
If there’s one way of guaranteeing first tracks on a powder day it’s to sleep next to the ski lift, which is why I found myself nodding off one night last February within spitting distance of the Silverlode Chair at Red Mountain, BC.
Snow had been falling since dusk some six hours ago, but I was safe and warm in a queen-sized bed in a monster-sized ‘recreational vehicle’, or ‘RV’; this was how, along with my mate and co-driver James, we’d managed to negotiate ourselves into pole position for the feeding frenzy that would occur come dawn.
James and I had decided to explore five of BC’s best ski hills on the ultimate road trip. Our fully-winterised, 28-foot long, 6.8 litre Ford E450 Super Duty RV meant we could stop when and where we pleased as we travelled a route that would take us almost 2,000 kms over mountain passes, through deep forests and alongside frozen lakes from Vancouver to Sun Peaks, Red Mountain, Whitewater, Revelstoke and Kicking Horse before rolling to a halt almost two weeks later in Calgary.
By 8.30am next morning we were both showered, breakfasted and on our second mug of coffee before venturing out of our RV, across the Red Mountain parking lot and smugly sauntering to the Silverlode Chair in lightly falling snow.
The smugness swiftly evaporated when we saw the rapidly lengthening lift queue – our assumption that being camped just a few yards away would see us at the front of the ‘lift line’ was naïve in the extreme, for the good citizens of Rossland, ‘Red’s’ satellite town, are nothing if not rabidly keen skiers; when it snows here people start queueing for the lift an hour before it opens.
A quick scan along the line reveals that all is not lost, however. My mate Roly, a former ski patroller at Red, is already in the queue and invites me to join him – no one seems to mind as I sidle in (James in his wisdom has decided to go into the base lodge to ‘deal with e mails’ – on a powder day; go figure…) and a few minutes later we’re all aboard and heading up towards a foot of fresh pow.
You couldn’t get a better guide than Roly, and despite today being what many locals are calling “the busiest day I’ve ever seen”, as soon as we hop off the Motherlode Chair at the top of 2075-metre Granite Mountain we leave the masses behind.
I follow Roly through trees, down very steep steeps, across the occasional bit of piste and on to the Grey Mountain chair to eventually end up on the summit of 2048-metre Grey Mountain. This terrain was opened a couple of seasons back and adds admirably to Red’s legendary ‘slackcountry’.
Even so, like most Canadian ski resorts is tiny by European standards (2877 acres of lift-serviced terrain, six lifts, 890-metres of vertical). But somehow the pistes never seem crowded and the off-piste is positively deserted – we lay down fresh tracks on run after run by simply traversing for a minute or two from the top of Grey Mountain Chair.
Even by late afternoon, by which time James has finally dealt with his e mails and decided to actually ski, we’re still finding powder stashes off the side of popular groomers such as Corduroy – were I back home in Les Arcs this kind of stuff would be squashed flat by 11am.
We’d been hoping to discover similar terrain at Sun Peaks over the previous two days, from where a ten-hour drive had brought us to Red Mountain. A newly opened slice of backcountry at Sun Peaks called Gil’s has similar features to those of Grey Mountain, but poor vis and poor planning (arriving at the access point to Gils’ ten minutes’ after it closed for the day) prevented us from doing so; no big deal, we just hammered the perfectly groomed pistes at full speed instead.
So having had great slackcountry at Red and great piste skiing at Sun Peaks we began to take it for granted that we’d stumble across good conditions at our next port of call, Whitewater.
We did. Danny Foster, the ski hill’s assistant ski school director, introduced us to no end of fluffy BC powder, mainly between the trees but also on a hike out to the open powder field of Catch Basin. Despite the fact that Whitewater is by far and away the smallest ski hill we visited it has serious attitude.
Everyone here seems to ride like a pro, and the über-high level of ability amongst the locals became apparent when Danny informed us that two out of the four top ranked riders on the 2016 Freeride Junior World Tour are locals (Nigel Ziegler and Sam Kuch since you ask). Not bad considering that Whitewater’s satellite town of Nelson has a population of just 10,000.
Heading on from Whitewater we enjoyed the most scenic of our drives across BC. The five-hour journey to Revelstoke took us along the shores of Slocan and Arrowhead Lakes (and over the latter by ferry) and gave us memorable views of classic BC scenery – lakes, forests and the big, untamed mountains of the Valhalla, Kokanee, Monashee and Goat ranges, which lay at the heart of many of the region’s heliski operations.
Drivers used to the jam-packed roads and tiny cars of the UK may blanch at the idea of sitting at the helm of a 28-foot long RV, but Canada’s wide, open roads are eerily quiet as soon as you get out of town – unsurprising given the fact that BC is four times the size of Britain but has a population fourteen times smaller – whilst in town the drivers are invariably polite and drive in slow motion compared to the frenetic pace of the average British ‘A’ road.
Just what Revelstoke has to offer other than the biggest ‘vert’ in North America I’m afraid I cannot say, however, since in our two days there we saw very little of it due to continuous heavy snowfall; this included four heli-drops with Selkirk Tangiers Heliskiing, which was unfortunate in that we couldn’t access the high alpine terrain due to poor visibility, and also ironic in that the following day we enjoyed just as good skiing amongst Revelstoke’s trees as we’d whilst heliskiing.
It just goes to show how good the terrain is at Revelstoke that in bad visibility it can compare with the local heliski operation; I obviously need to go back now and see how the two compare in bluebird conditions…
And so to our final destination, Kicking Horse, three-hour’s drive away and reached by means of the blizzard-whipped Rogers Pass. Tucked away at 1330-metres in the Selkirk Mountains, the pass averages 10-metres of snow every winter, but nothing could stop our mighty RV once in motion, the more so since James’ idea of getting up a mountain pass seemed to be foot to the floor and maximum revs until the summit was reached. If we were getting more than seven-miles to the gallon on the way up into the clouds I’d be surprised…
We both felt at home at Kicking Horse because the high ridges and bowls for which its famous are above the treeline and thus have a more European feel. For me it also meant a more relaxed approach to the skiing.
When I say ‘relaxed’ I actually mean ‘slightly less terrified’. Kicking Horse has, shall we say, ‘testing’ terrain – this means that only the locals really relax when launching off the likes of T1 South Ridge or CPR Ridge, but at least there were no trees to avoid as I careered downhill with only the slightest modicum of control, hence it was ‘relaxing’ to know that at least I wouldn’t be getting into an argument with a pine tree on my descent.
Two days of sunshine, dry, powdery snow and rarely less than exciting skiing saw to it that James and I were happy, if tired men as we stood at the top of Kicking Horse’s Golden Eagle Express ready for our final run of the road trip.
Down below the resort lay basking in late February sunshine; lower still the utilitarian logging and rail town of Golden nestled in the vast Rocky Mountain Trench at the confluence of the Columbia and Kicking Horse rivers, surrounded by mountains so innocent of humans that many are yet to be named.
The Trans-Canada Highway snaked past the town’s northern fringes, and tomorrow we’d be negotiating our luxurious ‘ship of the road’ along it to Calgary. I looked at James as we set off into Crystal Bowl and said “Well, would you do it again?” and then wondered why I’d even bothered to ask.
Of course we would.
FACT BOX
CanaDream (www.canadream.com) offers a winter RV which can accommodate up to four adults and two small children.
CanaDream is the only RV rental company in Canada that provides ‘winterised’ RVs. What this means is that their vehicles come with heater, generator and solar panels to keep you snug at all times, and they’re also equipped with winter tyres and snow chains (the latter we never needed as the roads in BC are kept clear in all but the worst blizzards).
Our vehicle had two double beds (one over the cab) and the option of making up a third in the living area, slide-out wall, cooker, sink, fridge-freezer, toilet and hot shower, plus stacks of storage space for skis etc. so were totally self-sufficient whilst on the road.
There were no ‘hook-up’ facilities for the RV at any of the resorts we visited, but it’s not a problem to stay in allocated parking lots free of charge.
BY NUMBERS
Ferry crossings 1
Helicopter flights 4
Resorts skied 5
RV engine capacity 6.8 litres
RV length 28-feet
RV fuel tank capacity 53 US gallons
Least vertical (but biggest attitude) Whitewater 632 metres
Most vertical Revelstoke 1713 metres
Kilometres travelled 1859
BOX ENDS
