Hut Series: Elizabeth Parker

March 21, 2026March 18, 2026 / Maria / Leave a comment

If you’re at all familiar with backcountry huts in the Rockies, chances are you have heard of the Elizabeth Parker Hut. It’s an ACC hut located in Yoho National Park, approximately 0.5km from Lake O’Hara. Lake O’Hara is one of the most popular and exclusive places to visit in the summer because it is incredibly beautiful, offering access to the breathtaking Alpine Circuit. I’ve been to Lake O’Hara in the summer and I wrote an entire blog post about that trip and how to secure permits, so I won’t be getting into those details here.

Let’s talk about the Elizabeth Parker Hut. In the summer, access to the hut is managed through a paid lottery system. You pay a fee to enter the lottery and if you are successful, then you’re invited to book into the hut for a further fee. I entered the lottery once, with no luck, so I decided to abandon that strategy. I planned to visit in the winter instead. The hut is still busy on the weekends (and weekdays to an extent), but there’s no lottery, so as long as you are an ACC member and pay attention to the booking windows, you should be able to secure a booking. We decided to visit on a weekday in the winter, making the process even easier.

The challenge about visiting this hut in the winter is that there’s no shortcut to access it. In the summer, you can take the shuttle up the bus road, cutting out 11km of road-walking. In the winter, there’s no shortcut, you have to walk in the entire 11km road, plus the 0.5km trail to connect to the hut. This might not sound like a lot, but it is quite draining in the winter. It’s not a hard trail, but it is long and has a pretty steady uphill for most of it. The road does pass through a small section of avalanche run-out terrain in the first 5km, but for the most part, it’s a pretty safe trail. The one section goes through a run-out zone, rather than active avalanche terrain, so if the avalanche rating isn’t high, you don’t have too much to worry about.

There’s a few ways that you can get there. The most common way seems to be cross-country skiing, which surprised me a little bit because there is a lot of uphill on the way there. I’d recommend having skins, but it’s a wide trail and very manageable. The attraction of cross-country skiing is that the skis are so much lighter, so it makes for a faster journey along the 11km road. Another option is ski touring, which is what we did. This is great if you want to do some touring and skiing from the hut, but touring skis are a lot wider and heavier, so we did find it very tiring. The last option is snowshoeing. There was no one on snowshoes when we stayed at the hut, but there was a big group heading in on snowshoes when we were leaving. I wouldn’t recommend spikes unless you’re sure it’s hard packed with no fresh snow incoming.

If you’re planning to visit, give yourself ample time as there is limited daylight in the winter. We didn’t do a great job at this because we had stayed at the A.O. Wheeler Hut the previous night, which meant we had to hike out 1.5km in the morning, drive to Field, and then do the 11.5km hike to the Elizabeth Parker Hut. This was made worse by the fact that we transitioned from Pacific Time to Mountain Time and lost an hour.

We didn’t start hiking until almost 1pm. It was mid February, so we had ~5.5hours of daylight. It took us 5 hours, compared to some cross country skiers, who were able to do it in 4 hours. I was feeling pretty good when we started, I figured I’d probably skied around 2km when I came across the trail marker for 1km, and that’s when I had to stop myself from despairing, as I knew we were in for a long day. If we’d started earlier, we could have taken our time and lots of breaks, but because we had limited daylight, we pretty much pushed forward all afternoon. We took one lunch break at the 5km mark, but otherwise only stopped to pee or re-adjust layers and equipment.

The biggest challenge for me was temperature control. It was around -20 degrees celsius when we did the trail, which is extremely hard to manage when you are working out. Normally, I would ditch my warm layers and just wear a base layer so that I wouldn’t be sweating into everything, but the challenge was that I was quite a bit faster than Brandon, who uses a splitboard. So I was continually having to start and stop, and I would get cold whenever I had to wait, so I didn’t want to layer down.

I managed well for the first half of the trail. There’s some picnic tables and a beautiful viewpoint at the 5km mark, so we stopped for a late lunch there. The weather was quite nice, mostly overcast, but there was some blue sky and we could see all the mountains, so it was very scenic. Around ~8km there’s a beautiful view of the glacier, so it was a nice hike, just very long. I definitely started crashing out around the 8km mark. I ate my snacks along the way, but our water bottles were becoming more and more frozen and I really needed an energy boost and a hot drink. Brandon put electrolyte powder in his water, which I wouldn’t recommend, because it turned the whole thing to slush. The trick is to store your water bottle upside down so that the lid doesn’t freeze on, and carry a thermos.

We finally made it to the hut around 6pm and I was so relieved to see the steam rising out of the chimney. There was a large group already inside the hut and I all but collapsed on the bench and started removing my boots, enjoying the toasty warm heat from the woodstove. The group consisted of 3 families and a lot of kids and they quickly encouraged us to move over to the Wiwaxy Cabin next door.

I didn’t realize there was a second sleeping cabin and their assumption that we would be more comfortable not sleeping with their big group was correct, but the group rubbed me the wrong way for most of the trip. It wasn’t appealing having to immediately go into another cold space and start a fire immediately after arriving. We managed fine, but the group was not respectful of the shared kitchen and dining facilities, spreading out and leaving a mess. Every time we tried to use the dining area I had to ask someone to move things so we could use a corner of the table. Although I will credit the dads for changing out one of the outhouse barrels while we were there.

But the Wiwaxy Cabin was very cozy. The main hut has a large bunk room that sleeps 16 people in the same room as the dining tables and woodstove. There are lots of racks to hang gear, but it definitely has more of a cluttered feeling than the Wheeler Hut, though that may have just been because the 3 families spread out everywhere. The Wiwaxy Cabin sleeps 8 on the bunks and has a small table and a woodstove, but no kitchen, so everyone has to use the main hut to cook. We quite liked the Wiwaxy Cabin, it was very cozy and we were the only ones in there on the first night, though we were joined by 3 more people on the second night. Once we got the fire going, it was quite warm. The woodstove was very efficient and it was pretty hot overnight, but we didn’t want the fire to die with -20 degrees outside, so we kept it going all night.

On our second day, there was less blue sky, but you could still see all of the mountains and it snowed pretty lightly throughout most of the day. We had breakfast and did our chores, namely restocking our woodpile (Brandon did a great job), before going out for a tour. It was the middle of the week, so we didn’t encounter any day users, it seemed to be just us and the family in the area. We didn’t have a lot of concrete plans of what to do for the day, and we debated between hiking up to Schaffer Lake or down to Lake O’Hara. Neither is very far, so we opted to hike up to Schaffer Lake to take a look at Mount Schaffer, which I’d read is popular for skiing.

There’s no trail markers to follow in the winter, but there is a pretty obvious route up through the trees. It’s only 1km from the hut, so it’s not a long way to go. We hiked up to the lake, which has a great view looking up on the base of Mount Schaffer. There was a lot of fresh snow and we could see a few lines coming down from previous visitors. We hadn’t actually planned to ski because I am pretty nervous in avalanche terrain, but the conditions were ideal when we were there. There was some fresh powder, but the avalanche rating was low to moderate and there were no slab problems. So we decided to hike up through the trees to ski down the main slope.

There were ski tracks coming down from quite high, but we only went about two thirds of the way up because we didn’t want to be in super steep terrain. So we hiked up and then picked a spot to transition. As with the previous day, the most challenging part of the trip was temperature management. It was still very cold, so it was challenging to transition and I added a lot of layers before skiing down. It was a short ski out, but probably one of the coolest lines I’ve ever done. It was my first time skiing in avalanche terrain, and I keep having second thoughts about it when I look back on the experience, but at the time I was feeling confident about the conditions and everything went according to plan, so I guess it was our first real touring line.

We just did one line since we’re pretty new to touring, but if I was to go back, I think I’d do a few more. My ski touring journey isn’t really driven by skiing epic lines, which sometimes makes me feel a bit at odds with other ski tourers I meet, as most seem very obsessed with skiing remote terrain. But maybe I’ll care more as I get more comfortable in avalanche terrain, but for right now, I like just being outside on skis, enjoying nature, and building up my experience.

We had a fun second night as we were joined by a couple that we had met at Wheeler Hut, as well as a single guy on holiday from Korea, who we were all impressed with as it was his first time skiing! They all came in on cross-country skis, which seems to be easier on a long access trail. We spent the evening playing cards and the couple shared a special moment the next morning and got engaged in front of the mountains!!

The sun came out to play on our last day and we woke up to a bluebird day in the mountains. It was still very cold, but at least we had the sun shining down to warm us up a little bit. We weren’t in a big rush to leave, but after packing everything up, we skied down to Lake O’Hara to enjoy the view before skiing out. Lake O’Hara is one of the most renowned views in the Canadian Rockies and it does not disappoint. It was very smoky when I visited in the summer of 2023, so dare I say, the winter view is even better? I felt like I was on another planet as we skied across the lake to get an incredible view of the surrounding mountains. Plus, we were the only people there, so it felt very special.

Usually the ski out is a lot more fun than the ski in, but the road is not a simple downhill the whole way, so it was still a lot of work to ski out. Ideally you would take off your skins and just ski down, but there are still lots of flat sections. I planned to just skin the whole way down, but there was still a lot of powder on the trail and it was really hard to pick up any speed on the downhill. So eventually we took our skins off and I was planning to just skate ski the flat sections, but it was too powdery for that too. However, because I was on skis, I was able to just put them back in touring mode without the skins in order to ski the flats and I did several kms that way. But Brandon was on a split board so he ended up carrying his snowboard through the flats.

It was still faster than the way in and we stopped again at the picnic tables for lunch, where there was a large group of women snowshoeing in. It’s 5km from the picnic tables and I put the skins back on for the first 3km, which are really flat. But the last 2km is the steepest part of the trail, so at that section, I was able to properly transition and ski out the final 2km pretty quickly. In total, it took us 5 hours on the way in and 3.5 hours on the way out.

Lake O’Hara is definitely a beautiful place to visit and we had a great time, but it is a slog on that road and I was really glad that we had planned to stay for two nights. It would have been a lot to ski in and out for only 1 night. If you’re dying to visit O’Hara and haven’t been able to secure summer permits, I definitely recommend checking out the hut in the winter. It’s much easier to reserve and in my opinion, the experience is even more special because there’s barely anyone around (at least on the weekdays). We had a great time!

Hut Series: A.O. Wheeler

March 14, 2026March 13, 2026 / Maria / Leave a comment

Last winter I set myself a goal of visiting more huts, planning 3 separate trips across the season. As is often the case in winter, the avalanche conditions didn’t align with my trips and I ended up bailing on two of three huts. Fortunately, I had a fantastic time at the Elfin Hut, but was left feeling a bit disappointed about the other trips.

This winter I planned 4 hut trips! The first trip was a bust again, due to weather, and one trip has yet to happen, but I was successful in visiting two of the ACC huts in mid February! The ACC is the Alpine Club of Canada, which is a great organization if you’re looking to grow your mountaineering skills. It has an annual membership, but one of the unique features of being a member is access to a large network of huts throughout BC and Alberta, as well as the ability to participate in trainings, trips, and events. You can still stay in the huts if you are not a member, but you get priority booking as a member (and a small discount on the cost), so it can be hard to book some of the huts without having the advance booking privileges.

I’m no stranger to snow camping and have spent many trips sleeping in the snow in a tent. But since I’ve taken up ski touring, I have to admit, there’s a certain advantage to staying in huts and being able to travel with a smaller pack. It’s much harder to ski with a full pack that includes a -30 degree sleeping bag and a winter tent, so we’ve largely switched to hut camping in the winter.

Since most of the ACC huts are located in the Rocky Mountains, this year I decided to plan a whole trip around skiing in the Rockies. I took one week off work and planned to do a few days resort skiing at Revelstoke with friends, before doing some ski touring with Brandon to the A.O. Wheeler Hut in Glacier National Park and the Elizabeth Parker Hut in Yoho National Park. We planned to finish with a day of resort skiing at Kicking Horse, but I ended up bailing on that day to rest and watch some of the Olympic finals.

After 3 days in Revelstoke, Brandon and I overpacked his 4runner to drive an hour to the Wheeler trailhead in Glacier National Park. I am, of course, talking about the Glacier Park located in BC, and not the one located in Montana. I feel like this park is hugely underrated and I’ve been wanting to explore more of it, so we booked one night at the Wheeler Hut to check it out.

The Wheeler Hut is one of the ACC’s most accessible huts and it’s a great option in the winter especially. In the summer, it’s basically located at the parking lot next to Illecillewaet Campground, but in the winter, you have to use the winter lot, so it’s a flat 1.5km hike to the hut instead. There’s a small picnic shelter and outhouse located at the trailhead. It’s a short walk up through the trees, and then it’s dead flat for 1.5km on a wide winter road. There’s no avalanche risk along the road, so you can feel pretty confident in visiting it at any time of year, regardless of your skill level.

When we visited, literally everyone in the cabin was on touring skis, most of which were planning to ski some bigger terrain nearby, but this would still be a good hut to visit on snowshoes or cross country skis. It was the middle of the week, so I think the hut likely attracts more families on weekends. I didn’t have any trouble booking the hut for a weeknight, and it wasn’t full, but I believe it’s very popular on the weekends. Booking through the ACC, you get access to bookings 6 months ahead of your travel date if you are a member, or 3 months ahead of your travel date if you are not a member.

In addition to the hut booking, there are several permits that are required from Parks Canada. You will need the standard Parks Canada Pass to leave in your vehicle, which is currently free in the summer, but still comes for a fee in the winter. You can buy it as an annual pass for your party, which we already had, or you can buy a day pass for each person on the trip. If you’re going to spend more than a week with 2 people in National Parks, I recommend the annual pass.

In addition to the Parks Pass, you are also required to obtain a free Winter Permit from Parks Canada if you are recreating in Glacier National Park. It’s a really interesting park because the Trans Canada Highway runs through the middle, which is extremely mountainous and potentially dangerous in the winter. The road passes through Rogers Pass, which has a bit of a reputation locally. Because the highway runs straight through the mountains, there is considerable avalanche risk, which is managed using explosives. In fact, Glacier National Park is home to the world’s largest mobile avalanche control program.

As a result, sections of the park are regularly shut down for avalanche control and it is completely illegal and extremely dangerous to be in those sections of the park when they are closed (as they will be setting off explosives and triggering avalanches). In order to manage the risk and ensure that people know how to check where they should and shouldn’t be, Parks Canada requires every single visitor recreating in the park to obtain a free Winter Permit every winter. In order to get the permit, you have to learn about the avalanche control program and complete a 30 minute quiz. It’s not difficult, but at the end you will receive a winter permit and parking pass.

If you’re staying at the Wheeler Hut, you’ll require a hut booking, the standard National Park Pass, the Winter Permit, the Winter Pemit Parking Pass, and an Overnight Parking Pass, which you can obtain from emailing Parks Canada (instructions are included as part of the Winter Permit process). It does sound quite complicated, but once you complete the Winter Permit quiz, the requirements will become much more obvious.

Once you’ve obtained all the appropriate permits, you’re ready for a fun trip to the hut. I was on touring skis and Brandon was on a splitboard, so it didn’t take us too long to get to the hut. The trail looks flat, but I think it might be ever so slightly uphill on the way there, because we were a lot faster on the way out. We arrived at the hut around 12:30pm and it was completely empty because all the current residents were out ski touring for the day. We had lunch and set up our beds before getting ready to go out and do a little exploring of our own.

I’m not super knowledgeable on the terrain around the Wheeler Hut, so I’ll just give a quick overview. If you don’t have Avalanche Safety Training, you’ll want to stick pretty close to the hut when exploring, but there are a few relatively safe options to check out. There are two trails from the hut, which includes the Perley Rock/Sir Donald Trail and the Asulkan Valley Trail. I didn’t do the Perley Rock Trail, which is closest to the hut, but you can follow it along the river in simple terrain for 1-2km. Stick to flat terrain – once the trail starts to get steeper or exposed to open mountain slopes, it’s time to turn around.

We opted to take the Asulkan Valley Trail, which starts in a meadow as opposed to the trees. We followed the trail until we hit a branch, where we took the left fork onto the Great Glacier Trail. We followed that trail for ~1km, until we hit the Illecelliwaet River, where there is a great view of some really big mountain terrain. That’s where we opted to turn around because we didn’t want to expose ourselves to any risk and the avalanche forecast was considerable.

Another option is to continue further up the Asulkan Valley Trail, from what I understand, you can go another half a kilometre up that trail until you hit a bridge, after which point it’s time to turn around. So overall, there are 3 potential routes, which are all ~3km round trip from the hut. When we visited the hut, we were the only people visiting for just 1 night. Everyone else was staying for multiple nights to go ski touring, with the most popular route being to tour the whole way up the Asulkan Valley Trail, where there is a second ACC hut, the Asulkan Cabin. I hadn’t done enough research to be comfortable with this route at the time, so we played it safe. I talked to a few skiers that did the trail and I think with a bit more background, this would be a good option for me in the future.

In spite of the higher avalanche conditions, the weather was quite nice. It was overcast all day, but it also snowed all day, leaving a nice layer of fresh powder to ski. We seemed to be the only people to take the Great Glacier Trail on that day, so there was several cms of fresh snow, which was nice. We returned to the hut for supper and the atmosphere was much livelier as people rolled in from their day of exploring. There was a large group staying at the hut, which is often annoying, but I will credit this group with being really respectful of hut norms. They took care of most of the hut chores, chopping a ton of firewood, keeping the woodstoves going, and making sure there was always a steady rotation of drinking water available in the large pots. So Brandon and I had it quite easy!

There is a creek near the hut where you can get drinking water. I’m not sure if the creek is normally open year round, but it was when we visited, which made water supply a lot easier. It’s so much faster than having to melt snow and a much nicer quality for drinking as well. Overall, the Wheeler hut is pretty swanky and exceeded all my expectations. It’s a large hut and it did feel busy, but it was under capacity on the night we stayed there, with lots of empty beds.

You enter from the back of the hut and there’s a small room to take off your boots, followed by the first of 3 main rooms. The first room has a woodstove and a table, but I would consider it to primarily be the gear drying room. There’s a bunch of racks for boots and lots of places to hang gear. The middle room is a large kitchen and cooking area. You don’t need to bring a stove or fuel, as there are several propane burners. You also don’t need to bring any dishes or utensils. We opted to bring our own small pot because we were just cooking dehydrated food and the provided pots tend to be quite large, but we didn’t need any other kitchen equipment, aside from some camp suds and a hand towel.

The last room is the main eating and hang out room and has a large fireplace. This is where we spent the rest of the evening. The large group was at one table, and most of the other smaller groups were at the other table. We had a nice chat with 2 brothers who were visiting from Ontario in order to go touring, and a group of 3 from Calgary. They saw me teaching Brandon how to play crib and recognized a fellow card lover, so I ended up joining them for several rounds of cards. I’ve already forgotten the name of the game. I only planned to play a few rounds before going to bed, but got sucked in when I couldn’t win a single hand. I ended up losing spectacularly, but I had a great time!

In addition to the three rooms on the main floor, there are 3 rooms of bunks upstairs, so it’s a very large capacity hut. Sleeping mats are provided, but I opted to bring my thermarest anyways because my quilt and thermarest together weigh less than my full size sleeping bag (and I didn’t want to lay directly on the mats in my quilt). Brandon brought his thermarest too because he was concerned about being cold on the mats, but it’s plenty warm in the hut with 2 woodstoves, so that wasn’t a concern.

It’s a nice set-up for sleeping, but I didn’t get much sleep because as soon as everyone went to bed, the symphony of snores started. This is to be expected at a hut and I did have earplugs, but it was so loud even that couldn’t drown them out. In future I would probably bring earbuds so that I could put on some music, I think that would have been more effective.

We were up early because we had to ski out, drive to Field, and then ski 12km up to Lake O’Hara on the same day. We were the first people to get up and the fire had gone out completely, so we got it re-started and then had a quick breakfast before heading out again. It was a beautiful day and we saw lots of blue sky on our early morning hike out. One night at the hut did seem a bit short, but it was a good length for what we planned to do, especially since we arrived early on the first day. In any case, Elizabeth Parker Hut was the real highlight of our trip, so tune back in next week to learn about that hut!

Ski Resort Series: Revelstoke

March 7, 2026March 6, 2026 / Maria / 1 Comment

I finally skied Revelstoke! This mountain has been on my bucket list for a long time. I’ve been doing an annual ski trip with my friends since 2016 and we had booked an awesome chalet in Revelstoke in 2021 that we ended up having to cancel. Because of the distance from Revelstoke to Vancouver, it’s been hard to find enough time to make the trip, but this year I was determined to finally ski it.

As a result, this was our 9th Annual Ski Trip, so I feel like we need to do something big for next year! To make the planning a bit easier, we didn’t rent a large chalet this time and just booked a series of hotel rooms. A few of us stayed at the Sandman Hotel because we were able to get a really good discount by booking early, and some others stayed at the Swiss Chalet Motel. The price of hotels has definitely gone up a lot in recent years, so it does require some advance planning.

Revelstoke is a well known resort in BC and much beloved by a lot of the locals. It seems to also have a pretty big reputation among Americans and international tourists, which surprises me because it’s not located next to any major airports. It’s ~6 hours if you’re coming from Vancouver, and ~5 hours if you’re coming from Calgary. But it is known for getting a lot of snow, and we were not disappointed in that regard.

Unlike a lot of other major ski resorts, Revelstoke doesn’t have much of a village. The town of Revelstoke is located right next to Revelstoke National Park, and while it’s only a 15 minute drive from the ski resort, there’s not a lot of accommodations at the base of the mountain. This is why we opted to stay in town, but this could change soon as there has been considerable construction of new condo buildings near the resort. That said, I didn’t mind staying in town because there are a lot more restaurant options (although it is still somewhat limited).

We visited over the family day weekend in mid-February, so we were expecting the mountain to be busy, but honestly, it wasn’t too bad. There were a lot of people, but it was not crowded like Whistler, or even Cypress. The bigger challenge was finding a restaurant to eat in, so I definitely recommend making advance reservations. We made reservations for Chesterfield on the first evening, and then waited in line to eat at the Village Idiot (they don’t take reservations), on the second evening. We also visited Monashee Distillery and Old School Eatery. Chesterfield had the best food, the Village Idiot had the best vibes, and the Distillery had the best drinks! Personally, we didn’t love Old School Eatery.

If you live in BC or ski a lot, you’ll probably know that a lot of the North American resorts struggled with snow in 2026. After a truly phenomenal December and early January, it was extremely warm and dry, with a lot of resorts having a shortfall of fresh powder. From what I understand, it was much worse in the US and some of their resorts didn’t even open. So we were a little concerned about what the ski conditions might be like, but fortunately the resort got 20cm of fresh snow just before we visited! The base of the mountain was still bare, but the skiing at the top was great.

Revelstoke has a reputation of being an advanced mountain. I can kind of see how it gets the reputation – there is a lot of steep terrain at the top of the mountain – but in my opinion, there’s still sufficient terrain for intermediate skiers. Aside from the gondola, there’s two main chairs; the Ripper Chair and the Stoke Chair. If there’s snow on the bottom half of the mountain, you could do a lot of beginner and intermediate skiing from the gondola, but when there’s not a lot of snow, you are limited to the other two chairs.

In my opinion, Ripper Chair is a great option for intermediate skiers. There’s lots of nice terrain next to the chair, including many blue and green runs. We spent a lot of our first day on the Ripper Chair and I had a great time. If that sounds boring to you, there’s also a lot of open gladed terrain that you can ski in this area, so it’s easy to find more challenging runs if you don’t want to do groomers.

Stoke Chair also has a few options for intermediate skiers, but tends more towards steeper terrain. I could see this chair not being very enjoyable without good conditions. The far east side of the mountain was icy when we visited, so we mostly avoided that area, but the west side of the chair still had lots of fresh powder, which in my opinion, reduces the difficulty of steep runs. I felt pretty comfortable on this part of the mountain because of the powder and ended up having a great time on both chairs. Plus there’s all kinds of fun hidden artwork around the mountain, so keep your eyes open because you’ll never know what you’ll find!

There’s lots of gladed areas that you can ski on Stoke chair too. I’m not very experienced with glade runs. They make me nervous if they’re too narrow and I’m not always sure where they will come out. So I could see how Revy might get a reputation about being challenging because of the number of glade runs. But many of them are located in the middle of the resort and pop out on other runs, so you don’t need to be too worried about going out of bounds, and you can usually exit early if you’ve had enough. My friend Victoria loves skiing glade runs, so on our second day, I did a lot of glade runs with her, which really helped to get my confidence up when skiing in the trees.

The real highlight of Revelstoke is the North Bowl At the top of Stoke Chair, there is the option to do a small bootpack further up the slope to access more terrain. Bootpacking is when you take your skis off and carry them in order to access terrain that isn’t skiable directly from the lift. I have done some bootpacking at Whistler, but it’s a fairly new concept to me. It sounds tiring, and it is, but we only had to walk for ~10 minutes in order to access the bowl at Revelstoke, and in my opinion, it was well worth it. In fact, we loved the bowl so much that we ended up hiking up there twice!

On our first attempt at the north bowl, Victoria thought we could access a run called Sweet Spot, which drops into the lower part of the bowl and bypasses the bootpacking. We gave it a try, but me and Brandon didn’t stay high enough on the traverse and ended up at the top of Vertigo Ridge instead. Victoria did manage to access the top of Sweet Spot via the traverse, so if you want to access this run, just stay as close to the rope as possible (which is located below the bootpack trail) until you get to the entrance.

We opted to just ski Vertigo Ridge instead. There are a few other runs that drop down the backside from the ridge, but it’s not part of the main bowl and it looked a bit steep for my tastes, so we ended up just skiing Vertigo Ridge the whole way down until you enter into some glades and eventually pop onto a main run. Vertigo Ridge was fantastic and even the glades I didn’t mind, but it is a long run, so I was happy when we finally left the trees. There’s no way to get down without going through the glades, so keep that in mind if you do any bootpacking or bowl skiing.

On our second attempt, we ended up just doing the bootpack, which is ~5-10 minutes of climbing uphill until you reach a little apex where you can put on your skis and traverse across to the main “Drop In”. The entrance is named after the first run down the bowl (Drop-In), but it’s really just an entrance to a traverse from where you can ski to any of the bowl runs indicated on the terrain map. There’s no formal runs back here, but you can ski across the bowl as far as you want and then drop in where you feel comfortable.

I was nervous about the drop in to the run, but I ended up being very comfortable with it. We thought that Sweet Spot was supposed to the easiest drop-in to the bowl, but I think it probably depends on the year and the conditions. The entrance to Sweet Spot was pretty narrow and steep, whereas the entrance to Drop-In was really just a narrow, but flat traverse. Steepness generally only intimidates me when the runs are narrow or icy. But because there was lots of powder in the bowl, which is obviously incredibly wide, I found it easy to drop into the bowl.

The thing about the bowl is that, once you drop in, you are committed to riding it the entire way down to the base of Ripper Chair. The main bowl funnels into one run called Big Woody, which involves a lot of glade skiing. I loved riding the bowl, it was honestly a dream, although we did spot a drop into a crevasse near the bottom, which was scary to see. But once you hit the bottom, you are committed to skiing out through the trees. I’m sure there are multiple routes you can take, but there’s definitely a natural path through the trees that most people seem to follow. I didn’t mind it at first, but the further we got, the busier it got (from more runs converging), and the more chewed up the snow was. The last section had a lot of exposed tree roots and rocks and a lot of the powder was brushed away. I managed okay, but I was really glad when we exited the trees.

But because we had so much fun in the bowl, we decided to go back for one last run to do Sweet Spot, which is on the far side of the main bowl and has an alternative exit that spits you out near the top of Ripper Chair instead of the bottom. We still used the Drop-In entrance, but then kept to the left side of the bowl so that we wouldn’t get forced back onto the Big Woody Run. I really like this section of the bowl too and we had some nice skiing until we hit the trees again.

Overall, there’s a lot less glades on this run and it’s much shorter, but it was also a lot more of a challenge for me. It was the steepest run of the day and because it was so steep, a lot of the powder had been brushed away and there weren’t a lot of choices for how to get down the run. It’s only a very short narrow section before you drop back into a wider run, but it was one of the scarier runs I’ve done. I relied almost entirely on a sideways slide to get down the steep section, which still worked for me, but I was definitely sweating! Victoria cheered me on from the bottom and Brandon cheered me on from the top and eventually I made it out to the wider part of the bowl. It was still very steep, but easier to actually ski. I felt very relieved when I got back to the groomed run.

I decided to call it a day after the second bowl run, so overall on my second day, I only skied 4 runs, but the runs were so long and involved that each one took the better part of an hour. I definitely felt accomplished by the end of the day. Brandon and Victoria decided to ski a few more runs without me. We had a bit of an incident on our first day. Originally there were 5 of us skiing, but we got separated almost immediately on the first run when Me and Kristine went one way, and Brandon, Victoria, and Tess went another way. There’s no service on the mountain, so Kristine and I skied the Ripper Chair all morning before learning that poor Tess had caught an edge on her first run and had to be stretchered out. Fortunately, she was okay and Seth came to pick her up at the base and take her to the hospital for some tests. But Brandon and Victoria lost a whole half day, so they were keen to make up time.

They didn’t take a lunch break on the first day, but I took a lunch break on both days. There’s really only one place on the mountain to eat, a small cafe at the top of the gondola. It pretty much only sells burgers and fries, but they are very delicious burgers! The problem is that the cafe is inadequately sized, so you will have to queue for a while (it moves fast), and more problematic, there’s almost no indoor seating. We ate outside at the picnic tables on both days. It was sunny when Kristine and I ate there on the first day, so it didn’t bother me to eat outside, but on the second day I found myself getting quite cold. There’s a small warming hut, so we crammed in there for 10 minutes after eating to warm up again. Since Revelstoke is growing a lot in popularity, I think it would be very advantageous to expand some of the on-mountain infrastructure. There are several warming huts, but in worse conditions, I would be concerned about staying warm and taking breaks on the mountain.

Overall, I enjoyed skiing Revelstoke a lot more than I expected. I was worried about the lack of snow throughout the season and that the mountain would be too advanced for me. I’m a nervous nelly when it comes to skiing, but I have been expanding my skills in recent years, especially since I took up backcountry skiing. I really enjoyed skiing groomers on the Ripper Chair with Kristine on the first day, and had an equally fun time skiing the back bowl with Victoria and Brandon on the second day.

I would love to return again in the future, but cost is definitely a concern. Skiing has always been expensive, but as more and more resorts fall under the ownership of big American conglomerates, it seems to have gotten prohibitively expensive. Shockingly, Whistler is actually one of the cheapest mountains I ski because I buy the 5-day edge card, which greatly reduces the cost per visit. I was shocked to learn that resorts like Revelstoke and Kicking Horse now cost $200 a day for a lift pass! Like any resort, the key is to buy your passes earlier rather than later.

We thought we were going to have to pay $200 a day to ski Revelstoke, but we did discover a local hack by using the Sunshine Super Card. It’s a ski card targeted around the Sunshine Village Resort in Banff, but it includes Revelstoke in its promotion. Basically, you buy the Sunshine Card for $120, which includes your first, fourth, and seventh days of skiing free (which includes Revelstoke). So basically, we got our first day for $120 instead of $200, and then all subsequent days are 20-25% off. So if you skied up to 7 days at participating resorts, you would get one day of skiing for $120, 2 free days, and 20-25% all remaining days. So overall it saved me ~$120. Despite the cost, I definitely recommend the resort and I’m so thrilled to finally cross it off my bucket list after 12 years in BC and 9 years of group ski trips! Where should I go for the big 10th anniversary trip?