GCSA Summary

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For a long while, ever since I started buying the Mountain Collective Pass, I had been doing these trips. I’d pick a set of resorts based on physical proximity and travel from one to the other. The Mountain Collective Pass was limited to two days at each resort (50% off for additional days), so that was a lot of traveling.

I did three such trips. The first one was along the Pacific Coast, hitting Mammoth, Lake Tahoe, and Whistler. The second included Jackson Hole, Park City, Little Cottonwood Canyon, and Aspen/Snowmass. The third one was Sun Valley, Jackson Hole, and Big Sky.

GCSA The Long Drive Home

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Really, I should have titled this article based on the mountain/resort we visited, but it wasn’t worth it.

Lake Louise and Sunshine Village always show up in concert with a third resort, Mount Norquay. They form Alberta’s Big 3 on all marketing material, to the point that IKON passes are valid for 5 days total at any of their resorts, except for these three that count as one.

After Lake Louise and Sunshine Village, I was expecting another world class resort. True, people that had been in Alberta all told me Norquay was “not worth it,” but how bad could it be?

GCSA Sunshine Village

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Our time in Canada was coming to an end. It was Friday morning and the AirBnB was booked to Sunday. But between the insane cold and the realization that it was near impossible to make it in one go from Field to Lakewood after a day of snowboarding, we decided to leave a day early. Friday would be our last full day of snowboarding, then we’d do the first half of the drive on Saturday, sleep somewhere on the way, then continue to Colorado on Sunday.

GCSA Revelstoke

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It turns out that the extreme cold was only in the Bow River valley, and that temperatures to our West were much, much milder. We were familiar with the phenomenon from Denver, where under certain circumstances the East is bitter cold with Canadian temperatures, while the mountains of Summit County are relatively balmy, despite being a full mile higher up in the air.

We had skipped Revelstoke on our first attempt, but it was going to see a high of 32 instead of -10. Was it worth the two hour drive in potentially frosty conditions on potentially slick roads? You betcha!

GCSA Lake Louise

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We got up “late,” around 8. The storm had dumped about a foot of snow and the host (actually, the neighbor) came out to clear it. Then we got to the car, which was covered thick, to nobody’s surprise. At least, it started just fine and we could drive away with no issue.

The drive was what you’d expect after a major snow storm. While it’s just 28 km, less than 20 miles, it requires going up to Kicking Horse Pass and then down into the valley of the Bow river. Just to tell you how steep it is, the railway connection from Golden to Calgary had to be built over the pass, and necessitated two corkscrew, Spiral Tunnels cut into the mountainside, one to the North and one to the South of the valley. The trains would enter the tunnel, do a fully loop, and find themselves at the exit slightly higher (or lower) the where they got in.

GCSA Kicking Horse

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Let me shorten the experience for you: What A Let Down.

We woke up in the morning. Tim, who isn’t a hardcore snowboard aficionado, decided he wasn’t going up the mountain, but I thought it dumb to be in Golden, BC and not at least try out the local and pretty well-known ski resort. I had low expectations, based on layout and map, and I knew it was going to be mobbed.

GCSA RED Mountain

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Waking Up

The night before, lost in the middle of nowhere, Tim made a harmless comment. Maybe we could go to the mountain later, noonish. I lost it: I had been sitting in the car by then for 48 hours and I wanted to snowboard. Not drive, not sleep, not explore, but snowboard.

We woke up at an unreasonable time after an unreasonably short sleep and headed to town. Trail is a small place on both sides of the Columbia, dominated by an enormous hilltop factory that looks like a medieval castle, if the architect/stonemason had decided to make it as scary as possible. The factory does gases of some kind and seems harmless, but it certainly harshes the otherwise very touristable buzz of the town.

GCSA Schweitzer

[previous] Alright, so the first resort was technically not in Canada, and was a last second idea. I had read there was a resort on IKON right around Spokane, where I had to be, anyway. So I decided to try it out if I felt like it.

I woke up in the morning in Coeur d’Alene, checked my mojo after the mandatory six shots of espresso, and decided I was not going to spend all day moping around until I could pick up Tim at the airport. I was going snowboarding!

The Great Canada Snowboarding Adventure

The pandemic came in 2020 and ground all traveling to a halt. I had bought both IKON and EPIC passes that season, but by the beginning of March things started looking iffy. By mid-March the resorts all closed and travel, especially the international kind, had stopped. And for three years, all attempts at getting a trip together failed among successive waves of COVID-19.

Then, at the end of 2022, it looked good. There seemed to be a window of opportunity, with the world mostly immunized against the disease and quiet settling in for the moment. The war in Ukraine was going on, but that wouldn’t prevent us from traveling between the USA and Canada. Inflation was high, but that was no different up North. So I sat down with the trusted Tim and we hashed out a plan.