Ride the Powder Highway — Winter’s Original Adventure
By Mitchell Scott
Start with 50 feet (15 m) of annual snowfall. On terrain perfectly designed for skiing and snowboarding: steep trees, open glaciers, the pillow fields of your dreams. Link it all together with cities like Revelstoke, where a mile high gondola climbs a stairway to heaven. Or Nelson, where art, culture and perfectly dry snow bury old school double chairs. Think Golden, where giant mountains and huge vertical hide underneath crystal blue skies. You haven’t even made it to the quaint, quintessential city of Rossland, a vortex for ski bums from around the world. Or Fernie, where a vast infrastructure of lifts delivers riders to an irresistible confluence of terrain and snow.
Winding through never-ending experience, the Powder Highway follows the great valleys of the remote Purcells, the lofty peaks of the Selkirks, the life-changing tree stashes of the Monashees, the grandeur of the Rockies and the hallowed hideaways of the Gothics, Adamants, Bugaboos and Valhallas. Know that over 40 backcountry lodges hide high in the endless tracts of alpine above, where the sun rolls up and down glacially carved peaks, where you ride in a world entirely uninhabited, save you.
No surprise this is the birthplace of both helicopter and snowcat skiing, with over 25 different operators in the area, each offering something unique and rich. The forefathers of both disciplines knew there might not be terrain better suited to backcountry powder skiing on the planet. However, they would be the first to say that you need to ski it to believe it.
And that’s where the true inspiration of the Kootenay Rockies begins. On a road, deep in the heart of winter, embraced by mountains, hosted by beautiful, powder loving people. Here, riding the Powder Highway, know that your adventure only gets deeper around every corner.
A few of our Partners:
~ Backcountry Lodge of BC Association
~ BC Ski Resorts; “Ski it to Believe it”
~ Canada West Ski Area Association