Hitting the road in search of snow is one of Whistler’s many rites of passage. It can take years to properly figure out our expansive home resort, and even longer to start understanding the depth of the backcountry skiing in our region. Sooner or later, however, we start hearing about other ski towns that have their own character and mountains boasting their own unique terrain. I love Whistler, and its mountains are a big part of why I’ve spent the last 20 years living and skiing here. But to truly appreciate how good you have it at your home mountain, you have to hit the road and explore a bit more of B.C. With a friend celebrating his 40th birthday last month, joining a crew of seasoned skiers for an Interior road trip was an opportunity too good to pass up.
It had been well over a decade since I skied at Kicking Horse Mountain Resort. The town of Golden is a full eight hours of driving from Whistler (heading north over the Duffey Lake Road), making it a full-day affair unless you attempt to drive through the night (something I try to avoid these days). Driving over Rogers Pass on a sunny winter day is something every mountain aficionado should experience, and skiing it on a sunny day is a B.C. backcountry rite of passage in itself. More on Rogers Pass another time.
Like most Canadian railway towns, Golden grew from B.C.’s logging industry and as a staging area for moving primary resources across the country. The same railway also brought Swiss mountain guides to the region in the early 20th century, and the tourism appeal grew slowly over the decades. By the 1980s, Golden had its own lift-accessed ski hill with a chairlift, T-bar, and 2,000 feet of vertical, known as Whitetooth Ski Area. In the ’90s, ski-resort visionary Oberto Oberti saw the potential of Whitetooth, and with the blessing of the community of Golden, purchased the ski area and built what is now the four-season destination Kicking Horse Mountain Resort. It opened to the public in the year 2000 and was later sold to the Resorts of the Canadian Rockies (RCR) group.
Kicking Horse’s biggest draw is its alpine terrain, accessed directly by the Golden Eagle Express gondola. On a day of good visibility, stepping out of the top station reveals steep ridges with hundreds of skiable lines and sharp backcountry peaks (the Whitetooth namesake) in every direction. The Kootenays have suffered from the same poor season as the rest of southern B.C., so our group watches for rocks in the entrances to the chutes. Cold temperatures have preserved the snow quality quite well.
The only disadvantage to the gondola’s direct access to the high alpine is if you decide to ski the biggest lines, you have to descend all the way to the base area for your next lap. A series of steep, rolling groomers makes this travel both quick and fun, accumulating a lot of vertical skiing in the process, and the 12-minute gondola ride provides ample rest time before doing it all over again. According to the locals, the lineups to the Golden Eagle Express rarely get too deep.
After a morning of exploring the traversable alpine ridges, the rope drops for the hike to the Ozone face, where the resort expanded its boundaries back in 2019. After a successful Freeride World Tour that year, Kicking Horse decided Ozone shouldn’t just be for freeski competitors to enjoy. The public can now access Ozone via a traverse from the top of the Stairway to Heaven chair and a 10- to 15-minute bootpack. The effort proves very much worth it, with some of our best turns of the day in some of the most aggressive resort terrain I’ve ever skied.
Given that snow storms lose intensity as they pass over the Selkirk Mountain range, many road-tripping skiers never make it past Revelstoke, opting for fewer hours driving and higher annual snowfall. But Kicking Horse often gets drier snow, and has big-mountain alpine terrain that rivals anywhere in B.C. The key is having visibility in those alpine bowls, especially if you don’t have a local guiding you around the hill.
With the 2023-24 season as it is, taking a week off work to go road-tripping in search of great skiing might not sound like the highest-value proposition. But when you’re on the road, you go skiing whatever the conditions. By managing expectations, you might just get lucky with a bluebird day, a few centimetres and some great turns in exciting new terrain. That’s exactly what we found at Kicking Horse.
Part 2 of Vince Shuley’s B.C. Interior road trip will run in the next edition of the Outsider. For questions, comments or suggestions for The Outsider, email [email protected] or Instagram @whis_vince.
