British Columbia has started off strong this winter and our home-base of Whistler was no exception. Even Vancouver had a pile of snow including the first dump of snow in the city for over a decade! But there's always time for road-trips.
Flooding in BC had cleaned out a lot of highway infrastructure so it was with some sense of relief that we navigated the only intact west-east highway (DriveBC for Highway 3 if you're interested in road conditions) and made our way to Rossland settling into the Red Shutter Inn and getting to know its resident Big Red Cat.
image Lee Lau
image Lee Lau
RED RESORT
We sttarted off with a cold day cruising Red with one of the mountain hosts. The host service is free and an amazingly efficient way to download some mountain knowledge. We were lucky and hooked up with Mike who clued us in on how to figure out terrain. With three distinct peaks, lots of hidden nooks/crannies and side-country hits you'll need all the beta you can get. If you're not as fortunate or you want to get a hint of what's up then you can always download Red's super cool 3d Trail map.
image Sharon Bader
The next day we had 22 - 25cms new blower pow as an atmospheric river met an Arctic outflow partying over the south west Kootenays! Everyone in town must have had a sick day as the chair lifts were sooooo packed with some liftlines being almost 5 minutes long (sarcasm intended - we're used to Whistler lines).
Fortunately we met with our old friend Dipper who left the Lower Mainland gongshow more than a decade ago and towed us around into all the goods
image Lee Lau
image Lee Lau
image Lee Lau
It's still hard to believe the size of Red's terrain! There's 360 degree options off ridgelines with sniper entries every which way you look dumping into exit cat tracks ringing all the peaks (Red, Granite, Grey). With this cold snow and lack of solar effect every aspect skied well; all we had to was hang on and try to catch the local
image Lee Lau
image Sharon Bader
image Sharon Bader
We then hit up Big Red Cats for 3 days of mechanized skiing (more on that in Part 2 as it's so picture heavy).
After the powmageddon of over 50 cms of cold smoke over the next 3 days of cat skiing we then headed to Nelson to ski Whitewater. A nice place to hold up is the Best Western on Baker Street which must have the most efficient snow removal staff around as the sidewalks were bare even as snow kept falling and falling. Bonus is that Marzano is their inhouse restaurant and has insanely good dinner and breakfast. Perfect for the tired powderhounds.
image Lee Lau
image Lee Lau
As with Red Resort we've never, ever skied Whitewater so it was a treat to meet old friend Scott J and his now grown-up kids who would show us around. In keeping with our exceptional good fortune we woke up to 12cms new which turned out to be a good deal more at WH20. It was busy enough that parking shunted us all the way to the xc ski area. However, the snow delivered and it was good times inbounds. Scott spent a lot of time pointing out the various slackcountry accessible hits available from the lifts - we'll have to come back for those as there was more than enough snow to keep us busy in-resort.
image Lee Lau
image Lee Lau
image Scott J
image Scott J
image Lee Lau
image Lee Lau
image Lee Lau
image Lee Lau
image Lee Lau