BOUNDARY? IT’S ALL JUST SKIING
A somewhat squashed perimeter loosely defined by the ski resorts of Fernie Alpine Resort, Whitewater Ski Area, and Red Mountain, the Powder Triangle is rough and rustic country, regarded as much for its mining and logging as its recreation, and skiers weaned on the manicured milieu of Vail may be left wanting.

There’s a Starbucks at Fernie and gourmet restaurants near Red, but in general high art is a pitcher of beer and a guitar-strummin’ folk singer in blue jeans and a t-shirt. You come here to ski, to ski hard, to ski deep. We’d converged–former U.S. Ski Team racer Wendy Fisher, her husband Woody Lindenmyer, also an ex-racer, and me–primarily because the triangle’s snow conditions are legendary but, too, because there’s no richer powder-skiing culture on the planet. Knowing nobody, we were still among friends, and we found no shortage of guides or places to ski. Aside from the lift-serviced trilogy of resorts, the Powder Triangle boasts heli-skiing operations, cat-skiing lodges, backcountry cabins, ski-touring outfitters, several passes where you can ski down and hitchhike up, and innumerable drainages where you can head off on your own. It’s assumed that you will hike or skin, and there are few seams between ski resorts and their surrounding lands to act as barriers, as in the States; at Whitewater, a goodly chunk of the season-pass holders never ski the moderate in-bounds trails, they just use the lifts to access the backcountry.

Alas, timing is everything and we’d had the misfortune to land in the Powder Triangle during a three-week drought. It was as if someone had forgotten to pay the snow bill: No matter how hard we looked at the sky, nothing fell. Wherever we went, our hosts were apologetic with typical Canadian graciousness, but, coming off a January in which it had snowed almost every day, they made things worse by relating the epic days we had just missed. We were sanguine nonetheless, simply happy to be there, and, besides, the theory of relativity dictates that what they call “just okay” in B.C. can be pass for “good” in Colorado and “damn good” in Vermont.

Too, when you’re in mountains, especially big mountains, there’s always hope of finding better snow a little higher, farther north, or right around the next corner. Southern B.C. is riddled with microclimates–Fernie’s location tends to wring more snow out of northwest storms, Red and Whitewater more from southwest systems–and blue skies at one area don’t preclude a foot or two elsewhere. The most common strategy is to hit the resort with the best or freshest snow first, hike to in-bounds or out-of-bounds (O.B.) stashes second, then go touring third or, if you have the bucks, pay for heli or snowcat time.

Fernie, our initial stop, was coming off a pounding, but we were a week tardy and thus went straight to the hiking, which is big part of the Fernie culture, even after an expansion that doubled terrain a few years ago. Now 2,500 acres, about four times the size of Aspen, this former locals hill is being groomed and marketed as a destination resort, and the three-hour drive from Calgary seems to get longer every year thanks to the increasing number of skiers who find Fernie’s deeper and more consistent snow tastier than the closer but drier Banff resorts. There’s plenty for the kiddies–lots of rolling, tilled terrain–but gunning moms and dads have a lot to chew on, too, with great woods skiing and five alpine bowls stretching from boundary to boundary–Siberia, Timber, Currie, Lizard, and Cedar. Hot on the heels of local guides Dave Hawrys and Trent Scarlett, we broke trail up the far right side of Cedar, spectacular views of the town below and the Lizard Range ahead, for the bowl’s first tracks of the season. The rocky, treeless summits above the resort offer little in the way of anchors for the deep snow, and avalanche hazard in the bowls is an ongoing concern. It takes clear weather, stable snow, and a few well-placed bricks of explosive dropped from a helicopter to open Cedar and its brethren; being granted the first shot for the season was fortuitous, an honor, the white carpet unrolled.

We stayed close to the shoulder, skiing one at a time, and I tried to not to embarrass myself with ungainly turns. The snow was a bit weathered–you’d be, too, if you were exposed to winter wind and sun and cold for a week–and gusts from the southwest picked up crystals churned by our skis and whipped them into big sheets, a simulacrum of powder-day face shots. The surface grabbed at our edges but was easily tamed by fat skis, and we roundly labeled it fun skiing, way better than hardpack, if not quite the fluff that made Fernie famous.

With appetites whet, we looked in every corner for more and better, but were clearly late to the party. Rolling the dice on a tour up a peak called Mammoth Head, just south of the resort, we gloried in sunset light that saturated the sparkling surface hoar pink, the snowy hoodoos orange, then tiptoed our way past some slide-prone pockets and through ultra-tight trees, catching a few decent turns here and there before slipping back across the area boundary. It was beautiful, stunning in fact, but the snow wasn’t what we wanted, so we said goodbye to Fernie and everyone said they understood. They were powder skiers, after all.

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