I'm wrapping up a four day stay in Golden, British Columbia, home of Canada's newest big ski resort, Kicking Horse. One of the American ski magazines wrote up Kicking Horse as "The best ski resort you've never heard of", which is a nice line. Unfortunately it's been a couple of weeks since Kicking Horse had a real dump of snow, so although the base is quite good the general conditions were tracked up and the resort's big promise ("Champagne Powder") was nowhere to be seen. That lack reduced Kicking Horse to a small resort with only three lifts, including the gondola.

The gondola is Kicking Horse's great new gateway, opening up access to the top of the mountain, the wonderful restaurant perched there, and two main skiable bowls on either side of a ridge line that lead down (eventually) to the area covered by the other two lifts. The green cruiser trail down from the top to the bottom is an impressive 10km in length, so it can easily take 30-45 minutes to complete a run down to the bottom. There are also masses of excellent mogel runs down, although they suffer slightly from having their steepest sections right at the beginning, which makes for a nasty shock when approached first thing in the morning without the benefit of a warmup. The main problem with all of this is that the gondola is only half populated with the 8-person cars, with large gaps between them. This meant that by midday, even yesterday (Monday), the lift line for the gondola was easily half an hour, and got up to 3/4 of an hour on the weekend. And the gondola is the only way up to the top, so there's no avoiding skiing the lower area and getting back into that line every time you want to go up.

I arrived on Friday night and checked in to Mary's Motel in Golden. Golden is a really small town in the bottom of the valley just at the mouth of Kicking Horse Pass, best known for its tortuous railway tunnels leading up into the rockies towards Banff and Calgary. Golden has clearly not completed its transition from a small logging town and highway rest stop to a modern ski village: the downtown 'core' (a short block long) has a number of indifferent but overly priced restaurants with drab frontage. None of Banff's big label shops here! Saturday morning I checked out of the motel and drove up to Kicking Horse Mountain Resort, a good fifteen minute drive up a winding road which looks much shorter and closer from Golden. After one run off of the gondola I decided the snow up the top (and the difficulty of those first steep sections) were not worth the wait in the rapidly lengthening line. I spent the rest of the day in the company of a local Snow Host, who kindly led me around the black diamond runs from the lower lifts, which had no line ups at all, a telling sign. In the evening I checked into the Country Comfort B&B in town, a large friendly household with a big common room, complete with fireplace.

Sunday I went back up the mountain, but after a single run up the gondola the line was again unbearable and I continued to ski the lower runs. I felt distinctly uninspired by the skiing and gave up early to go back to the B&B, where I played Civ 3 on the laptop for most of the afternoon, giving myself a painful crick in the neck. But Sunday evening it looked like it was going to snow, so I had good hopes for Monday.

Yesterday (Monday) dawned cloudy but without obvious new snow. However, it started up as I made my way up the mountain, and by the time I'd completed a warmup run on the lower area (getting wise at last) and made my way up the gondola (very short line up, still at 9:45 am) there was a layer of fresh powder at the top. The mogels that had given me so much trouble on Saturday were tamed by my newly energized legs and the safety blanket of snow and I started to really enjoy KHMR for the first time. This was dramatically improved as well when the clouds parted to let some sunshine through, which made it possible to see the bumps before running over them on the skis. (Sunshine good!) I broke for lunch in the restaurant at the top, which proved to be a full service, top quality dining establishment with surprisingly reasonable prices. I met up there with a couple of snowboarders who were staying at the same B&B in town that I was. They were unfortunately less happy with the skiing as they had hoped for fresh powder and didn't like the mogels at all. After lunch I went back to the hill and although the lineup for the gondola did build back up to a longer length it was now clear that it was worth the wait to get to the top.

KHMR will be a wonderful resort once they add more cars to the gondola and add another couple of lifts to the upper section (which will help to keep people up there and further cut the lineups for the gondola). It's probably fabulous with fresh snow; the bumps would be much more accessible and the lower area, which was quite bare in spots, comfortable for less experienced skiers. But for this trip, it was definitely outdone by Lake Louise, both in size, design, terrain, and quality of the snow.

Today I'm off to Fernie, a four hour drive from Golden. I may change my itinerary slightly thereafter, and stop overnight in Nelson on the way over to Kelowna. Apparently Whitewater resort is not to be missed... My original itinerary can be reviewed here.
posted by Tom at 12:33 PM | link |