Part 2 of a 3-part series of guest-posts by Maggie, documenting her second trip to the BC Interior.
After a few nights in Revy, we reluctantly left during a snowstorm and spent the better part of a day driving south to Whitewater Resort outside of Nelson. In that time, and then overnight, more than 60 cms of fresh snow piled up on the mountains. It was insanity.
It was snowing so heavily that every run was fresh tracks. Unlike the snow on the coast where I live, the Interior snow has a super low water content making it light and fluffy and a lot like riding in flour. You have no choice but to seek out the steepest lines just to keep yourself moving. The lodge is in a valley between two slopes and two chairs service the whole place. The chairs are small and sluggish, but the lifties know what they’re doing.
this was the slope going down into the parking lot. As you can see: fresh, fresh, fresh even at 3pm.
Of the three days we spent riding at Whitewater, I spent an entire day just playing in the trees. At Whistler tree-wells are a real danger, even in the glades between runs. Fall into one of these and you might not be found until the spring. At Whitewater, the trees were gladed so perfectly it was like riding between tight telephone poles.
We stayed at the Dancing Bear which was hands-down the sweetest hostel I’ve ever seen. The resort, Whitewater, is totally unassuming and homegrown. The food at the lodge is the best I’ve ever seen and stupidly cheap. If you come with a group, bring radios not cellphones – there is NO reception in these mountains and not even a payphone in the lodge.
Nelson is unlike a lot of the other towns in the area. Rather than being a mining town or a logging town like their (distant) neighbours, it was started as a government town. Nelson is a hippie town, I heard that it was a favorite destination for American draft-dodgers in the 60s, and it continues to attract the dreadlocked patchouli types as well as hardcore crunchy outdoorsy folks.
I have to recommend this apres activity: a 20 minute drive north will take you to Ainsworth Hot Springs — can there be any better place to chill out after a day of riding? I tell you there cannot.
Next stop: Red Mountain
About the author: Mags is a precocious, acerbic, blogger, snowboarder, hardcore lover of coffee, craft beer, and anyone who reads. When she’s not ditching work on powder days to slay the BC glades, or dogging the rest of us for not living in the PacNW, she blogs about art & stuff at Art Toronto.
