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?