I’m really excited to be writing about my experience skiing in Manning Park, because it took 2 attempts for me to get it right! If you’re familiar with my blog, you’ll know that I love E.C. Manning Park and I’ve spent a lot of time snowshoeing and snow camping there. But there’s limited accommodations inside the park, so it can be a bit of a challenge to visit it without driving all the way from Vancouver and back in the same day. In 2024, we booked a big cabin at the resort with a bunch of friends and we planned to ski the resort over the weekend.
Unfortunately, if you remember the ski conditions in 2024, they were not good. We just didn’t get a lot of snow that year and the weekend that I visited Manning for my ski trip, there was only one run open in the entire resort! I did buy a half-priced pass to ski for a day, but it didn’t feel right to write about the experience when I had barely skied any of the mountain.
I went back to Manning Park in late December 2025, while my parents and sister were visiting for Christmas, and I finally got the opportunity to ski more of the mountain! BC was inundated with snow in the mountains in December, so all the runs were open when we visited, although our trip coincided with a bluebird day, so there wasn’t actually a lot of fresh powder when I skied there. But the conditions were still quite nice and I feel like I got a good sense of the available terrain.
In contrast to my first trip, this time we drove up and back on the same day. I live in Coquitlam, so I figured it would be similar to driving to Whistler and back, which I do all the time. However, even from Coquitlam, it is a longer drive to go to Manning. We left early, at 6am in the morning, and it took us ~2.5hours with a breakfast break at McDonalds. I found we couldn’t drive quite as quickly to Manning as to Whistler because the road through the park is very winding. But we still arrived just in time for opening.
Manning remains pretty affordable when a lot of other ski resorts have significantly increased their prices. I’m planning to ski Revelstoke and Kicking Horse later this year, and I was shocked to discovered that it’s almost $200 for a single day lift pass! I know Manning Park is a lot smaller than those resorts, but I paid $90 for my pass during the Christmas rush. This is the most expensive time of year to ski there, it’s normally priced closer to $75 on weekends, and even less on weekdays.
Manning Park has two main lifts, as well as a few T-bars along the bunny hill. I didn’t venture onto the bunny hill, but it had an interesting set-up as it was located below the main resort. Arriving at 8:30am, we didn’t have any trouble with parking and got a premium spot right next to the resort. It was a decently busy day, but we never waited longer than 10 minutes for the lift, so it was very reasonable. The views from all over the resort are incredible! You can see the iconic Hozomeen Mountain from the top of the chair, as well as all the surrounding mountain peaks while you’re skiing.
The two lifts are the Bear Chair and the Blue Chair. The Bear Chair is the main lift servicing most of the terrain. It’s a quad chair – it feels a little bit slow, but speedy compared to the Blue Chair. From the top of Bear Chair, there’s a nice green run on the west side of the chair that you can take all the way to the bottom, or there’s several blue runs going down the front and east side of the chair. There is lots of black terrain on the east side of the chair as well, but it’s a little more challenging to access. The black runs that cut off from the main green run on the west side are simpler to get to.
Since I was with my family, we mostly did the green and blue runs, but I went back later in the afternoon to check out some of the more challenging runs. There are some really nice wide gladed runs on the east side of the mountain, but I’m not sure if you might have to do a bit of boot packing to reach some of them. I tried a few of the more easily accessible ones. There’s a blue run that bisects the black runs about half way down, so it’s a good exit option if you’ve had enough.
Blue Chair is a two person chair that moves quite slowly. There’s less terrain on this side of the mountain, but I ended up really liking this area. The conditions were slightly better on this part of the hill when I was there and I liked that the mountain was fairly open, so you could easily choose your own adventure. There’s a long green run that wraps around the backside, but if you go down the large area of the front of the mountain, you can choose between more mellow blue terrain and steeper black terrain. So I spent more time skiing over here than I expected.
We took a break for lunch and ate in the resort cafe. We didn’t have too much trouble finding a place to sit down, but I thought the food was a bit expensive for the quality. It was pretty much the same price as Whistler food, but they mostly just had burgers. We had a nice break and ended up skiing most of the day. My mom hadn’t been skiing in 10 years and was very nervous, so we were expecting her to quit after lunch, but even she ended up skiing almost all day.
We were able to make it back to Hope before it got dark again, so at no point did we have to drive the winding Manning Park roads in the dark, which was nice. I had a great time and I think Manning Park and Sasquatch are both great alternative skiing options for those living in Vancouver. They’re not much farther away than Whistler and they don’t have the crowds of the local mountains. I ended up having a great time and I would definitely go back!
The Road Goes Ever On 