SNOW ZONE
REVELSTOKE IS A BACKCOUNTRY MOUNTAIN WITH LIFTS
JEREMY DERKSEN / snowzone@vueweekly.com<


Underneath a cliff of cascading ice, I watched as my friend Clayton skied first one, then two icy ledges of a waterfall. He landed a couple metres away in a cloud of cold smoke. Below us were snow ghosts, pillows and cushiony hits leading back to the lift. The day before, I’d straightlined a narrow rock chute just over a metre wide. Hero lines were everywhere, and every new run revealed more opportunities for glory or disaster.

Opening week at Revelstoke Mountain Resort only happens once, but the hype that surrounds the new resort will last for some time. I’m here to tell you it’s justified: steep fall lines, a wide variety of intermediate and expert terrain, everlasting powder and impressive vertical.

And it’s not even half done. Just in case you’re not tired of hearing this litany, I’ll repeat it once more: when it’s finished RMR will have over 1829 metres of vertical—the longest vertical in North America—with lift, cat and heli-skiing all in one resort. Currently, the mountain has 1443 metres vert, still enough to pound your legs and leave you breathless. I have a couple basic measures for evaluating mountains these days. One is the lift-to-ski ratio. At many hills, you spend more time in lift lines and on the chair than actually skiing. Can I get far enough away from the crowds or high enough to ride out long, uninterrupted lines with short return times to the top? And the second measure: can I frighten myself while skiing here?

Check on both counts. In answer to the former, there were relatively few lineups, the lifts are fast and the distance from unload back to lift line is incredible. The runs are long. The Last Spike, a lactic-acid kneebuckler of a run, measures over 13 kilometres. As for the latter, close calls with trees, stopping just short of cliffs and bombing tight chutes definitely got my heart pumping faster.

In two days at the hill, my friends Clayton, Ryan and I lost each other more times than we could count. Sight lines were often obscured by tight glades or undulating ridges. I went hoarse by the second night from using our voices to track each other and make sure nobody was lost or hung up in a tree well. Fortunately, we managed to stick together and left the hill unscathed. Others haven’t been so lucky—in just the first week, six people had spent a night on the hill. By Dec 28, this fact was being advertised to all the guests via the message boards, as a warning not to stray out of bounds.

Unfortunately one of the missing skiers, Tal Hofstra, wasn’t found in time. Search crews fought through heavy winds and low visibility to find him, but it was three days later when he was finally discovered. The inherent risks of the sport are part of what makes it such a seductive and rewarding pastime. But his death underscores an important point: It is possible to get lost or fall into trouble in untamed terrain, even within boundaries. Not that this should intimidate anyone, but it should remind us that we need to respect the wild areas where we pursue our passion.

It was only several days later that my friends and I dropped into the same gladed area Hofstra had been skiing, off a run named Jalapeno. The skiing here was tight and intense. I brushed against several firs at high speed while picking my narrow line between the trees. Protected from wind and high traffic, there was still a considerable amount of snow to make riding soft, fluid and fast.

Halfway down I stopped in the silence of towering, snow-capped firs, and at once I was struck by the beauty and danger of it all. My companions were nowhere to be seen. With their whereabouts unknown, I considered the possibilities. And then, as we must if we are to keep progressing in all things, I put these thoughts aside. I waited and listened for a little longer. Finally, with no sign forthcoming, I rode out the rest of the line at top speed. I emerged onto the cat track below at almost the same time as my friends, a little ways away down the run. We merely waved and moved on.

The pilgrimages to Revelstoke are beginning already. On our way down the hill on our second day, we picked up a hitchhiker named Patrick. He had quit his job in New Hampshire and, along with his brother, moved to Revy in a bio-diesel van. He didn’t have a job but he had a place in town, and all he planned to do was ride the mountain. After two days of some of the best riding I’ve ever had, that didn’t sound like such a bad idea. I began to consider ways of following Patrick’s example.
Getting in on the ground floor makes sense. The town is bursting and real estate prices are skyrocketing. Sotheby’s International Realty, the agency managing land and developments for the resort, has a swank office in the centre of town where agents conduct their business, offering everything from basic ski-in/ski-out condos to single family units to luxury accommodations with parking for a helicopter. The local Re/max displays its listings in a storefront window not far from Sotheby’s, where prices are a little cheaper but still on the rise.

With the future growth and development expected for the area, buying a place in Revelstoke seems like a reasonable investment. But as things continue to get bigger, there is a risk that some of the small town charm and comfort might get buried in an avalanche of progress. Right now, Revelstoke is an alpine village with an authentic blue-collar air. Old pickups rumble past yards lined with snow over a metre deep. Backcountry skiers and sledders have known this secret for some time already. At Grizzly Sports Bar in town, most of the weekend patrons wore Fox Racing gear and sled films ran on the televisions. The pub at the Regent Inn nearby seemed more of a riding crowd, but neither was the type of swank, upscale place you’d expect in a big resort town.

Walking back to our hotel the first night, we could hear generators humming in the back of diesel trucks parked with their enclosed trailers on the town’s side streets. This seemed a bit mysterious to us until, from our cozy lodgings at the Alpine Inn and Suites, we saw people coming and going from the parties taking place inside the heated, enclosed sled trailers. Here was where the real parties were taking place.

The hill hasn’t reached mega-resort status yet and there are some kinks in the design relating to the temporary amenities. The riding terrain doesn’t need much work—in fact, the more they leave untouched the better—but the lift ticket office was slow and crowded on a busy weekend morning.

Similarly, the temporary daylodge was too full to find a seat during the lunch hour rush, and the single cafeteria serving all the hill’s patrons was bottlenecked at the tills. But then, the current daylodge will eventually be only a mid-mountain lodge, and there will be more ticket wickets, restaurants and space at the base once it’s completed. In the meantime, these small inconveniences mean little if you’re serious about your riding and smart enough to plan ahead.

One of the most novel parts of the hill is the magic carpet that ferries patrons to the gondola loading area situated above the lodge. Though it’s slower than walking and broke down twice while we were there, it was too good to pass up at a hill where less than seven per cent of runs are beginner. It instilled a sense of momentary humility to shamble on and off the rubber treadmill before loading the gondola back to the gnarly terrain up top.

Back in cliff and chute territory, a few skiers sidled up to observe as Clayton manoeuvred his way off the waterfall. They told us of another great cliff area to challenge ourselves on, where one of them had just dropped a 20-footer. The excitement of discovery hung in the air, the impatience and adrenalin of conquest fuelled our every descent. Massive as it is, most of this hill’s secrets will soon be uncovered by the faithful and the dedicated, the Patricks of the riding world. That alone seems motivation enough to be among the first. V

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