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A Powder Highway Ski Trip Through Canada

About halfway into the 18-minute, high-speed gondola ride up the mountain, my brother-in-law turned to me. He had a concerned look on his face. Beyond us in the distance we could see the steep vertical drops along the south ridge of the forebodingly titled Terminator Peak, the 7,900-foot mountain that caps the southern portion of Kicking Horse Mountain Resort.

Concerned is not the look you want to see on your skiing partner, especially when your skiing partner happens to have a good 20 years more of experience than you and is arguably at peak condition. Oh, and did I mention, had successfully trained at and passed the Police Academy?

“Just don’t tell my sister,” was the best I could come up with.

We were on the first lift up marking the beginning of a road trip through Canada’s famed Powder Highway. Despite the name, the Powder Highway isn’t a highway at all, but the unofficial name given to the region of southern British Columbia located on and between the Rocky Mountains and Columbia Mountains that is home to roughly 30 ski-related destinations ranging from traditional Nordic-style mountains, heli- and cat-skiing operators, and backcountry lodges.

Kicking Horse Mountain Resort - Golden BC

Kicking Horse, located in the small mining town of Golden, is what is truly known as a “Skier’s Mountain.” Featuring the fourth-highest vertical drop in North America and over 2,800 acres of skiable terrain, Kicking Horse is one of those mountains that remind you of the footage you see in hardcore skiing movies you watch back when you’re safely on flat ground.

Having only started up skiing again the winter before after a decade-long break, the tentacles of trails plunging precipitously downward underneath our gondola had me racking my brain as to what level of skier I had told our guide that I was.

“I did mention on the email that I probably fall closer to the novice/intermediate level than advanced, right?” I asked Emile, a former ski instructor from Whistler and recent transplant to Golden.

“Don’t worry, we’ll stick to the beginner and intermediate trails,” he responded.

A memory popped in my head of someone telling me how the trails out West were graded on a curve, meaning many of those black runs back on our icy mountains on the East Coast were given such fuzzy labels as “Beaver Tail” and “Jelly Bean” here.

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