Mountains are nature’s playgrounds. Period. Doesn’t matter if it’s winter or summer. In fact, summers in the mountains offer a more varied range of adrenaline activities than the tried-and-true “slap boards on feet, slide downhill, repeat.” The summertime offerings at Kicking Horse, a popular ski resort in Golden, B.C., illustrate this as well as anywhere. The cracked limestone of the Spillimacheen Crags are just 60km to the south, offering routes all the way down to beginner-friendly 5.6, and further challenges await in the granite spires of the Bugaboo Mountains. But then look at everything else the Golden area offers in the summer: horseback riding, mountain biking, bungee jumping, paragliding, hiking, white water rafting, ATV tours, and so on. They even have the one thing most visitors to the Canadian Rockies in summer fear encountering but secretly hope they will anyway: grizzly bears. The Kicking Horse Grizzly Bear Refuge is a 20-acre enclosed habitat accessible by chairlift that guarantees that most ineffable of thrills: a sighting of Boo, the resident grizzly.

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