They stand there improbably, straining against gravity, reaching for the sun, eating soil and drinking rain, silent to our ears. They are cathedrals to the heart that beats faster in the wild lands, and they are, hallelujah, stewards of the best powder skiing we have ever known. They are the trees, pillars of redoubt against those who shouldn’t be there and narrowly opened doors of perception for those who should. You can have your bowls, your faces, your cirques, and couloirs—the trees are the most hallowed ground of the greedy, hungry, powder-crazed skier.

Trees shelter the snow from the destructive breath of the wind and the burning stare of the sun, from passing skiers too lazy or cautious to probe the risky slotted lines, and they preserve it for days or weeks, keeping it pure and cold and waiting: a snow bank. As protectors of the powder, trees should be honored and preserved, but tree skiing isn’t just about getting the good snow–that’s only the half of it. Tree skiing is at its heart an aesthetic, an altogether different style of skiing that’s one of the most beautiful and satisfying you can hope to experience.


Nothing built by man can begin to approach the awesome splendor of an old growth forest perched on a 40-degree north-facing slope, fat snowflakes filtering down from the canopy more than a hundred feet above. The air is so still, the quiet intense. Light in such woods is dim and soft, like a medieval chapel with frosted windows. You sink into your turn, arc around a tree, and open to a new space and then another, each revealed in its own right time as if the route were being created in just that instant, right there before you. Tree skiing is discovery, temporary and fleeting, and at the bottom you marvel in the sheer awesomeness of what you’ve been given. Soon enough, though, you forget the specifics of your line and you’re back at the top, looking again, because in the trees, thank you, there’s always another.

The trees that grow fattest and tallest and most perfectly suited for skiing are in the interior ranges of British Columbia, the Kootenays, Selkirks, Cariboos, and Monashees, on the steep dark slopes above finger lakes and twisting creeks. B.C.’s happy confluence of topography and location bring arctic air masses down from the north, moisture-heavy Gulf of Alaska storms broach the shore, and then—BAMMO, maelstroms hit the interior mountains and massive amounts of light and dry snow fall, helping the trees to grow fat and tall and far apart.

Depending on where in B.C. you’re skiing, you might start above tree line, but then you drop through stands of subarctic fir, tall and narrow and streamlined like a rocket because they can’t handle a heavy cap of snow. Interspersed with the fir are Engelmann spruce, some rising more than 150 feet. In the next zone, you whisper through hemlocks and beautiful, gigantic red cedars, B.C.’s official tree. This arbor vitae—“tree of life”- can live up to a thousand years and grow enormous; there’s a cedar outside Revelstoke nearly eighteen feet in diameter. You want to hug it, but your arms aren’t near long enough. Cedars are big.

Big is good: The bigger the trees, the bigger the spaces between them. Although the higher elevations often have the coldest snow, the connoisseur knows that the cedars and hemlocks found at lower levels often have better skiing because the alleyways are broader, the light a little brighter, the beauty of the woods even more sublime. Skiing through a cedar forest is like a meditation in a Zen garden of alpine construction: One tree is perfectly placed here, another there, and in their midst are vast stretches of unblemished white. This is the emptiness between the notes, the place above all others where we feel pure and right.

Skiers: Woody Lindenmyer, Wendy Fisher. Location: Somewhere in British Columbia.

Tagged as: environment, essay, skiing, weather