“Don’t like the weather? Just wait a few minutes.” No one is certain if the humorist Mark Twain ever actually said this about the New England climate, but it has probably been adopted for every variable weather region on the North American continent, including our strip of coastal B.C. When I arrived fresh off the boat in Whistler many moons ago, I hadn’t experienced this type of weather before. Snowing one minute, raining the next, sunny after that, and—for when it really wants to mess with your plans that day—raining and sunny at the same time.
This is the coast. It rains here more than we like and that comes with the territory. We are historically blessed with more snow than our continental cousins in the Rockies, but (newsflash) our latitude has become increasingly sensitive to high freezing levels, heavy rain events and when it decides to get going, atmospheric rivers.
The atmospheric river we experienced last weekend is one I can live with. There’s nothing like an 84-centimetre dump over 48 hours to send early spring hopefuls packing. This storm spells the March return we always look for when January and February underdeliver.
We’re all familiar with a day of seasons, when you never quite know what’s going to happen at your summer barbecue or day in the mountains. But a reality I’ve been trying to wrap my head around is that our winter seasons aren’t feeling like seasons anymore. They feel like a series of powder days sprinkled throughout November to April.
But isn’t that what winter is? Sort of, but not quite. Powder days are always going to arrive in some way, shape or form. What the winters seem to lack now is consistency. The start of this season seemed like it was setting us up for success, until it paused for the better part of two months. Rather than follow through with consistent top-ups, we’ve had an extended dry spell in January and a strange roller-coaster ride in February of incredibly chaotic weather, little of which delivered decent skiing.
This might all sound like I’m yelling at clouds, but it’s more about how I’m recalibrating my expectations for winters in the Sea to Sky moving forward. I honestly can’t remember the last time we had a consistently good mid-winter month end-to-end. This doesn’t mean I haven’t had any good days. I’ve had some truly amazing days this season. But they’ve been just that—days. You get two or perhaps three in a row giving you a chance to ski the hill and hit the backcountry, then the rough-and-tumble temperature spikes kick in, and you wait days, weeks or sometimes even months for the reset.
The locals who have their lifestyles set up for 100 days of skiing per season will statistically fare better. If you don’t work mornings or you can otherwise access the mountain mid-week, you’re probably skiing in more favourable conditions than everyone else tied to the weekend rush. But remember back when you’d ski four or five days in a row, when your body would ache from surfing pow every morning and shovelling your driveway every afternoon? We’ve had a handful of those stretches in recent years, but they’ve become increasingly rare. I sincerely hope by the time this paper publishes that I’m proven wrong with another one of those legendary March storms of old rolling through the coast to evaporate our collective climate anxiety.
I’m not sounding the death knell of winter, not up here near the 49th Parallel, anyway. Protect Our Winters recently ran a story about the disappearance of snow from the slopes of Mount Lemmon near Tucson, Ariz. Given the extreme heat waves in Phoenix the last couple of years, I don’t think anyone reading this would be surprised that Arizona is running out of snow, even from a perch in the Santa Catalina Mountains between 2,500 and 2,800 metres of elevation. But every year, our weather gets a bit more volatile and our seasons feel more like a series of days you can count on two hands.
The point of this seemingly doom-and-gloom opinion piece? Don’t stop skiing. Make the most of every pow day, every bluebird day and every day in between. It might not be that long before days like this are relegated to history. To paraphrase local pro skier Kye Petersen: “Ski every day like it’s your last. But don’t forget to live forever.”
Vince Shuley is thankful he skied 84 cm of snow last weekend. For questions, comments or suggestions for The Outsider, email [email protected] or Instagram @whis_vince.
