My Impressions

Photos by Peter Dorfinger and Martin

The vastness of British Columbia did not make it any easier to choose where to go. As we drove north on Highway 93 through the rain, we decided that we might as well keep going until it got colder. We did take a break at Fairmont Hot Springs. After all, this trip was as much about hotspringing as about anything else. Beautiful though as these springs were – they came in the form of a waterfall – the soak remained brief as the temperature was more in the range of lukewarm than hot.

Fairmont Warm Springs

Kicking Horse and Golden

This part of Route 93 and other stretches of road in the area are not only infamous for life threatening truck traffic but are also known as the Powder Highway. It seemed like a misnomer – as in other parts of the American northwest, it hadn’t snowed for weeks and the latest low pressure brought warm temperatures and rain. But the forecast appeared promising and we decided to make Golden our first stop.

“Actually, we are fully booked.”

Canadian phrase frequently employed, in a proverbial or literal sense, to respond to most enquiries related to lodging and/or skiing in the month of February

Some, we’re not exactly sure who, claim that there is only a marginal difference between the US and Canada. Whether that’s true or not, we found a number of things more difficult here. For instance: There were certainly more skiers and it proved very difficult to find lodging. “Sorry, we are fully booked”, became the phrase we would hear most frequently, usually followed by a references to an obscure waitlist, availability around April 2024, or a call back we would never receive. The breathtakingly beautiful mountains, on the other hand, seemed separated from us by even longer stretches of thick forest. Maps or backcountry skiing literature seemed non-existent. The “fully booked” phrase was also what we heard from the countless guiding, helicopter and ski cat operators we called. Finally, the inconvenient truth about our Californian tires could no longer be denied, as we struggled even to make it up driveways that had more than a 2° gradient.

Spot the difference: Canadian means of transport in winter (left), our car (right)

None of this mattered all that much, except perhaps the dire tire situation. The skiing got good. We found a small rental apartment south of Golden and, by the next morning, temperatures had dropped to well below 0°C and rain had turned to snow. We had a great few days at Kicking Horse, hitting the Terminator runs, Stairway to Heaven and the subsequent descents back to earth, Super Bowls, and various places with excellent snow just beyond the ski area boundary. The forest off the road to Kicking Horse was not that thick after all, and we succeeded with a seemingly endless approach to ski untouched glades. Then, as temperatures dropped to below -20°C, there was Rogers Pass. But more about that later.

Incredible first days around Golden and at Kicking Horse

Aside from the excellent skiing, Golden also turned out to be an exceptionally friendly place. As the Family Day holiday passed and accommodation started being just a little less than fully booked, we moved house closer to town and settled at a place called Alpenrose. Richard, the owner, made sure the hot tub was heated to the perfect temperature every evening. During the daily après-ski soaks, we met families from Calgary and the northern edge of Saskatchewan, all keen on sharing their life stories and good advice about skiing, tires and fixing car heating systems. It was agreed that Craig, and other hotspringing acquaintances, would never find out that we now bathed regularly in artificially heated and chlorinated water. Golden, more generally, did not seem to lack life stories and words of wisdom. We met John at the laundromat, a self-proclaimed professional ski bum originally from Québec, who had recently returned from 25 years in Japan and was living in his Japanese-made van. He proudly declared that he does not use heating in tropical -20°C. Within 30 minutes, we knew everything we wanted and did not want to know about Japanese culture. Another Québécois ski bum in his 60s, who rode the gondola with us, proudly presented his season stats recorded on his phone – a whopping 612,000m vertical skied in the 2018/19 season, a record he was on track to beat this year. (The Covid-19 year of 2020/21 was, of course, an outlier.) Last but not least, there was Bend Café. The concentration of wise words posted on its walls made it hard to concentrate on having breakfast.

Golden from dawn to dusk

Rogers Pass

Golden is, by North American standards, conveniently close to Rogers Pass, which winds 150km through Glacier National Park in the Rocky Mountains to connect it with Revelstoke and other towns further west. The pass is one of the prime ski touring and mountaineering locations in Canada, not least because the highway is conveniently close to the base of the mountains. Thanks to Martin’s friend Yvan, our travel library also held a volume of Douglas Sproul’s Rogers Pass ski touring guide book.

But our first foray up the pass came with another, even less convenient truth about our car: it had functioning ventilation but no heating. This may seem like a minor detail, and indeed we had barely noticed it during the leisurely 2000km drive from San Francisco. But it is a problem whose magnitude is inversely, and clearly non-linearly, related to outside temperatures. To us weak Europeans, Arctic cold can be handled for as long as 1) it is dry; 2) there is no wind, and 3) one keeps the body active, for example through hiking or skinning up a mountain. The air in our car was indeed dry. But as the exterior thermometer read -27°C and cold air was blown at us while we sat and drove up the pass, toes and other extremities were numb within a matter of minutes despite our wearing of all warm layers we had packed. At snowy-road-with-Californian-tires speed, the 80km drive took us more than 1.5 hours.

An Arctic drive to Rogers Pass

It was a stunning day first day at Rogers Pass, with blue skies and fresh snow covering the peaks that surrounded us, which towered beyond 3000m in altitude. As we got out off the car and the thermometer had not yet climbed above -25°C, however, not only were toes frozen but it also seemed very difficult to think clearly. We looked for warmth at at the visitor’s center. It was closed due to Covid-19. We thus signed away through a shop window all of our rights vis-à-vis Her Majesty the Queen of England, in right of Canada and all her national parks. We did not read any of the fine print but did obtain a day permit for skiing. Martin wandered around the parking lot aimlessly looking for somewhere warm and had already accepted the thought that the day of skiing had ended before it started. We ultimately found refuge in the newly built restrooms at the far end of the parking lot. This suddenly seemed a perfect place to spend the day and we were in no mood to go outside. Some 30 minutes of heated floors and tea from our thermos bottles later, things became a little clearer. We got our gear from the car, changed inside the restrooms and set off for Ursus valley.

The skiing was heavenly and no words would do justice to how we felt. We climbed Ursus Minor but turned back below the summit as it got windy and descended in snow that was lighter than anything we had ever encountered. The scenery was breathtaking. Back at the parking lot, we warmed up again in the restrooms and got ready for the most difficult part of the day – the drive back. We returned to Rogers Pass for later in the week to climb the ridge of Little Sifton, ski and unnamed, steep and deep tree run, and to ski Puff Daddy, a classic descent visible from the road.

Touring magnificent Rogers Pass

We left this part of the Powder Highway after a great week, bound for Kelowna, where we would pick up Annikki, Peter’s girlfriend. Surely, our trip would become much smoother in female company.