It was another dreary wet overcast morning. I was kind of run down from the days of skiing/driving. I’d already skied 4 straight days and was beginning to think about taking a break; especially because this was Saturday and it was bound to be busy on the mountain. It didn’t help that Josh (the B&B house-boy), had a nice breakfast waiting for me when I woke up. And he nearly scared me about stories of people killing themselves riding out of bounds (and off cliffs) at Revelstoke. One glance at the webcam, however, and I immediately kicked myself for not getting out the door sooner.

Revelstoke has only been around, in it’s current form, for about eight years. There is a typical commercial village at the base but the town of Revelstoke (where most people stay) is only about 10–15 minutes away from town. Revelstoke is a key train junction; I was told that the train museum is a must see, but it is closed for the dead of winter.

There is a gondola to two main lifts. Everyone takes the gondola up and a 1/4 mile long line can form on a busy day! The gondola breaks through the dreary low clouds, into unexpectedly sunlit slopes. The storm that I endured the prior night had laid some fresh pow at the top of the mountain and it wasn’t wet despite it being above freezing.

From the gondola, the only option, aside from skiing back to the bottom, is the Stoke chair, so everyone will funnel in, there. 

You can ski the back to the Stoke lift or make your way to the Ripper chair on the north-bowl side of the mountain; it’s popular practice to hike up to enter the north-bowl.

It was in the high 30’s in town and the bottom was wet; everyone stays up on the mountain, which means crowds at either the Stoke or Ripper chairs.

Revelstoke is known for being steep, so it’s all steep blue, black or double diamond. It’s purpose-built for great tree skiing and steep bowls and steep faces. The steeper faces were still lacking coverage. The map doesn’t mark most of the runs, especially through the trees; I’m sure they expect that you can find your downhill on your own.

I was warned again, later, that if you can’t see where you’re going, you’d better slow down (lest you end up off a cliff). I don’t like not seeing where I am going and i especially don’t like cliffs, so I think I will be fine.

The warmth got to the snow and it gradually became heavier and in other places being polished to firm, fast featureless speedways.  The fresh snow in the morning was the best I’d hit, so far. The lifts closed at 3p—it was getting kind of dark.

Dinner was at the Village Idiot; typical bar-fare, but you’d better get there before 6p if you want to get a table.  A friendly Canadian (did I mention how much I like Canadians?) in front of me noticed that there was a table for four available, even though it was only him and his girlfriend, and asked if a few of us waiting could all share a table; so we did, avoiding a 45 min wait, and had rousing conversation, discussing what would happen if we introduced a polar bear to the Antarctic (happy feet? I think not).

This was going to be a long day. I only had 3.5 hours’ sleep after coming back from dinner at my new Canadian friends’ condo. I could have passed out immediately, but I wanted to start posting some of these posts. Then I’ll have the long drive to Revelstoke.

When I woke up, the day looked promising, with some snow falling. By the time I packed the car and got out on the snow, it turned dreary… and rainy. But the snow remained remarkably skiable on my last day at Sun Peaks. Unfortunately I had to leave the home I wanted to adopt.

Nancy Greene

Have you heard of Nancy Greene (if you’re American) I thought not. But, as you may know, all Canadians know of all famous Canadians, so I was made aware of Nancy Greene, former winter Olympic champion (1960, ’64, and ’68!)—she is the Jean Claude Killy of Canada (if you live in Canada). She is currently a Canadian senator and the “ski director” of Sun Peaks. She likes to ski with guests when she is in town, so I did that. I learned from her that the snow at Snow Peaks is usually like that of the Rockies, dry and powdery. Just my luck, today was wet and mushy. Anyway, I kept up with her just fine, though I’m sure she wasn’t pushing herself.

I was skiing my fat skis. Nancy was on Rossy slalom skis. I asked whether she ever skis fat skis and she said that it was too much trouble to think about what kind of skis to grab, so she sticks with here narrow skis. Which reminds me… really good athletes are really good, no matter what kind of equipment they use. If I were a better skier, I could go back to a single pair of skis.

On to Revelstoke

The drive to Revelstoke was to be long (Google Maps said 3.5 hours, Waze said over 4… I didn’t try to figure out why the disparity); I decided to use Google’s directions rather than Waze. Waze may have been correct, however, because the last hour and a half was pretty treacherous; dark, snowing, and slushy. I left a lot of room between me and the car in front.

Since it was the weekend, all the cheap places were booked. Thanks to my friend Jeremy’s suggestion, I was able to book a room at the Mustang B&B, a 118 year old house run by a young Aussie, Josh, for the past 4 years. The owners operate a cat-skiing service, Mustang Powder, that I’ll have to try some day.

From Whistler, I made it to Cache Creek after a long 4.5 hours of dark, sometimes foggy, narrow, country roads. Canadians who know, call it “Trash Creek”—it is where Vancouver sends its trash—seeing how small it was, the next morning, I was surprised it warranted a nickname at all). I would have stopped earlier if there had been a motel sooner. That put me within a couple hours to Sun Peaks.

So day 3 starts with a drive to Kamloops. Kamloops is a city. It has an airport. And it has a CostCo, which, of course, had the cheapest gas in the area.

Roadtrip tech tip: I use Gas Buddy to find the cheapest gas prices nearby, an app which is available for Android and iOS (and probably other platforms). Fortunately, it works in Canada too. If you don’t have a smart-phone, you can go to GasBuddy.com.

And Kamloops is only an hour from Sun Peaks. I stopped at a Tim Horton’s to make arrangements for a place to stay. Then I was on my way to Sun Peaks, an hour’s drive from Kamloops.

Roadtrip tech tip: I never take as much time to plan my trips as I ought to. Fortunately, Orbitz (or Expedia, Travelocity) exist. Since I often don’t know where I’ll be next, or when, I’ll often book a reservation sometimes just minutes before my stop via Orbitz. It lists options and is often cheaper than booking directly. The reservation goes through to the hotel/motel system immediately. If that doesn’t work, there’s always Google.

I only need a relatively comfortable place to sleep (relative to my car, that is), so the cheaper the better. I couldn’t find anything under $100. I had to dig deeper and go for the $130 entry. I only mention this because I was shocked to find it to be the fanciest ski accommodations I’ve stayed at. Ski in/out, ski valet, free wifi, pool, sauna, jacuzzi and fitness. The Sun Peaks Grand.

They took my skis to valet and I took my stuff upstairs. I quickly dressed, got a $44 late-afternoon ticket (less the Canadian discount), picked up my skis from valet and headed out for a few runs in the days’ last hour and a half, trying to hit as many lifts as I could. I ventured into a hazard marked narrow black-diamond run which would have been pretty good with coverage; as it was, I had to navigate around rocks and logs as my still-new boots began to hurt my feet (ugh… I hate new boots).

Apres ski involved a walk around the small village—sort of a micro version of Whistler’s village, maybe about the size of Squaw’s, but prettier.  I decided on a the Steakhouse because it had a rib-eye on the menu. I first had used the hot tub and a quick sauna to dry off before dinner.

I got a lot done that day.

It was a 2.5 hours from Vancouver to Whistler. I almost bypassed Whistler because getting from there to my next stop would have meant backtracking back to Vancouver in a “normal” winter, but it looked to be clear, so stopping at Whistler meant I would get to ski on day 2 and it would break up the long drive to Sun Peaks.

It took a while to get out of Vancouver, so I didn’t start sliding down the mountain until noon. My Squaw season pass gave me $25 off, leaving with a $98 CAD ticket for the few hours. Right now, we Americans get almost a 20% discount because the CA$ has been dropping.

I was going to ski the Whistler side, but there was a crowd because one of the gondolas had almost fallen off or something, so they’d shut it down for a while (something about kids getting crushed or something… but I probably have that wrong). So I headed across the plaza to the Blackcomb gondola.

They were supposed to have had some snow a couple of days earlier but, like everywhere, it’s been warm. I headed up as high as I could as quickly as I could. Getting up to Jersey Cream for a warm up and Glacier to get to the very top, I used the T-bar(!! There are two or three of them up there) to get to the sunny Blackcomb Glacier side to ski 7th Heaven a few times.

The snow report said “packed powder.”—any condition with the word “powder” in it is better than Tahoe these days. Nothing in the west is getting the amount of snow it should and Whistler-Blackcomb is no exception; most everything was covered, but some off-piste areas were a bit thin over the rocks. Considering that it had been a couple of days since they’d had snow I was surprised that there was still soft, loose snow to be found, off-piste. And you might manage to find patches of untouched in the trees. I found the soft stuff slightly warmed over… I’m probably being overly critical since I wasn’t on my fat skis—it wasn’t even what I’d call sticky or heavy, just not fluffy 🙂

So I managed to get in bumps (the good, well-formed kind), trees, (short) steeps, nice off-piste chop, and groomers. And, as expected, icy and crusty towards the bottom 1/4 of the run to the bottom.

And, I didn’t know this, Whistler closes at 3p until the third week of January! So that cut another hour of my day! (Although my legs appreciated the early retirement—it was only my 2.5th day this season).

All-in-all, a good first day of my trip. I love mid-weeks; the longest line of the day had two people in front of me.

I took a break for some food at Earls (because I remember they have really cute waitresses) and to try to figure out how long I might be able to drive and to know where my options for sleeping may be.

Tubing (for my niece)