Next Stop: In British Columbia, Little Big Resort

Written By Unknown on Jumat, 20 Desember 2013 | 17.35

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Skiers on Granite Mountain, one of three mountains at Red Mountain Resort.

When I first moved to the Pacific Northwest 18 years ago, a veteran outdoors writer and mentor told me, "When it has snow, Red Mountain is my favorite place to ski." Coming from a guy who had dragged his planks all over the globe in search of good turns, such praise about a British Columbia ski area I'd never even heard of — even with that baked-in caveat — made a lasting impression.

In the winters since then I gathered scraps of information about Red — about its legendary steeps and tree-skiing, its ghostly empty slopes, the great little village of Rossland at its foot, which Canada's Explore magazine has anointed the nation's No. 1 outdoors town.

Still, like most people I never rallied to visit Red (now called Red Mountain Resort). I had the usual excuses: For Americans, Rossland isn't particularly near anywhere, a two-and-a-half-hour's drive due north of Spokane, Wash., in a region of British Columbia known as the West Kootenays. The Canadian dollar, once our punching bag, is now nearly at par. And people again told me that Red really shines only when it has plenty of snow, which can be harder to predict in the inland Northwest.

The news that finally got me in the car came in the fall of 2012: The resort's owners had embarked on the biggest ski-area expansion in North America in years. The growth spurt onto adjacent Grey Mountain has added nearly 1,000 acres of skiable terrain to the resort, accessed by a chairlift that opened this winter, including about 250 acres of additional terrain on the lower Topping Creek area that will be accessible by snowcat for $10 a run. Lift-served terrain has ballooned from 1,685 acres to 2,682 acres, which suddenly lifts Red into the pantheon of North America's largest ski areas; think of Jackson Hole's inbounds terrain. Just as important, adding Grey Mountain plumps up the tamer, intermediate offerings in a ski area whose slopes are more famous for delightfully terrifying its paying customers than coddling them.

Clearly it was time to visit, before everyone else did.

Skiing's popularity in this corner of British Columbia goes back more than a century. In 1890 miners found gold-copper ore on 5,208-foot Red Mountain. The resulting mineral rush was so fervid that it precipitated the formation of the Toronto Stock Exchange. The gold wouldn't last, but a byproduct would: skiing. Many who came to the mines to work were Scandinavians who brought a passion for snow and skiing. In 1947 the ski club strung one of North America's first chairlifts on Red Mountain, cobbled from disused mining equipment. By 1968 the mountain hosted Canada's first World Cup races.

Today Red Mountain Resort includes three mountains — Red, 6,807-foot Granite (home to most of the skiing) and 6,719-foot Grey — that sit side by side. My buddy Scott Schell and I arrived one Thursday last February at the perfect time: About seven inches of snow had fallen the night before and broken a two-week snow drought. As we rode Granite's lower Silverlode chair, the mountain that unscrolled beneath our skis didn't seem like much, a skein of lazy beginner and intermediate runs. Then we transferred to the Motherlode chair, which stretches to the mountaintop, and the place got down to business. Mountain faces whiskered with hemlock and spruce and yellow cedar rose up on either side of steepening bowls.

The first person we bumped into atop the mountain, randomly, was the adventure skier Kasha Rigby, a friend and fellow American. We should've known better than to follow her. Without a warm-up run she led us into Captain Jack's Trees, a forest of tall, silent fir and hemlock perfectly spaced for a high-velocity pas de deux with the stout trunks. The sun had been shining for weeks, icing the old snow on other faces of the mountain, but in the shaded northeast-facing glades the snow remained cold beneath the new powder — a great example of how at Red, with its vaguely volcano-shaped mountains that often permit skiing around the peak, you can usually find better conditions by simply shifting a few degrees. Diving through the trees at highway speeds we whooped in happiness (and in fear of meeting lumber). It was one of the best forest runs of my life.

"If they're all like this," I wheezed at run's end, bent over my ski poles, thighs already howling, "I ain't gonna last long."


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