12.24.2014
With the promise of more snow coming overnight, my family and I decided to forgo our original plan of driving back 7 hours to Edmonton on Christmas Eve and ski instead. Merry Christmas to us! However, the promised white Christmas never came and we were left with the couple-of-days-old snow.
A powderless Christmas didn’t deter us from hitting the slopes after a late breakfast at LaBaguette, the small cafe at the base of Revelstoke mountain. A trail mix muffin and a London Fog was the perfect calorie-packed breakfast I needed to start Christmas Eve.
Day 4 at Revelstoke was by far the best of the trip. We managed to find the best run and it only involved skiing one run past where we usually go down off the Stoke Chair to make it to the Tasty Glades. This run, Vertigo, was just inside the avalanche warning boundaries and had moguls with the perfect amount of powder on them.
Plus, the view was incredible. There were finally clear blue skies and sunshine for one of our runs at the top.
After lunch, we went exploring in the lower trees in between Vertigo and Critical Path. I made the mistake of following my brother, the overzealous adventurous one. He was a ways ahead of me, and as I was too busy trying not to run into a tree, I followed his tracks, which lead into a thick concentration of coniferous saplings. I literally had to dodge in between them in an effort not to hit one, while following the tracks through the powder. I hadn’t even made it through the dodgeball field of trees, when I saw the steep trench of a drainage ditch. With no room to even contemplate stopping, I braced myself to either get stuck in the snow bank, or be catapulted out of the trees.
In a miraculous turn of events, I managed to land the catapult from the ditch. Granted it was in the splits, however it was better than landing on my brother. (He was laughing, so it would’ve been a deserving punishment.)
We continued skiing until the hill closed that day. I was not too tired, as I had taken most of Day 3 off. So as the hill was closing, my dad and I decided to take the 15.2-kilometre ski out, The Last Spike, to the base of the mountain.
The green run soon bored us, so we started finding unmarked runs and skied down those. It wasn’t the best idea, as they were still crusty from the freezing rain the day before and were iced over from the sunshine earlier that day. When we made it over to the last half of the gondola, the visibility had also weakened and we bailed out of The Last Spike instead.
The Revelstoke trip may have been early in the ski season, but it is definitely a hill I would go back to. Maybe next time during the spring season, which I’ve heard rave reviews about.
