October 25, 2018 By ASN

This article, and distribution, was paid for by the Canadian Ski Council and produced in conjunction with POWDER.

Words by Rob Story.

 

Sometimes, skiers overthink things. For the past couple decades, many of us seemed bent on traveling to little-known hills … That are little-known for good reason: They’re hills that are little. Who knows why? Me, I simply can’t understand pulling four-minute-long top-to-bottoms on today’s fantastic gear, a true waste of thoroughbred boards engineered to vacuum 100 vertical feet of terrain in a single turn.

I want to ask my confused brethren: “Did I miss something along the line? Does our sport now have a ‘Quaint Hillock’ subgenre? Because the last time I checked, skiing revolutionized itself and became hands-down the most awesome winter sport on the broad shoulders of the Big Mountain movement, on the glorious act of freeriding the planet’s most magnificent geological giants.”

Follow me, if you will, to Canada’s Banff National Park and its SkiBig3 resorts: Banff Sunshine, Lake Louise, and Mt. Norquay. We begin at Banff Sunshine, whose 3,514-foot vertical rise makes it one of Canada’s tallest ski areas. A ride on a Skittles-colored gondola car delivers us to the spine of the Continental Divide and the resort’s upper village, where the unreal beauty of the Canadian Rockies slaps us upside our brains’ assorted pleasure receptors.