You can Keep Your Expensive Ski Trip: We’ll Ski Whitewater

You don’t have to cross oceans to get the good stuff.

(Well, unless you’re coming from another continent.) But this post is mostly intended for my south of the border skiing compadres. I want to give you a mental smack upside the head.

Why are you wasting so much time and money on your ski trips?

Since moving to Nelson from Utah, I’ve tried to get some select States-side friends (the kind that value the law of keeping powder stashes secret) to make the trip up here. It’s a day’s drive away and they have a free place to stay if they want it. Heck, I’d even cook ‘em meals while they were here.

Although they all dream of skiing the Powder Highway—supposedly “dying” to come ski BC—for some reason, many have decided to spend their life savings, foregoing season after season of accessible road tripping, to make one giant leap to Japan or Europe instead.

Meanwhile, Nelsonites are all here skiing powder on the cheap; the all-winter-long, day-after-day, untracked kind of powder we get here on the Powder Highway.

I get why us locals would want a change of scenery once in our lifetime; it’s fun to have a change of pace, even when we have it so good that it’s hard to tear ourselves away. It gives us renewed appreciation when we come back to our home hill’s deep snow and the lifetime of terrain it has to explore.

But, for anyone other than us locals, if you’re hopping a plane anyway, why are you going anywhere but here? It’s a short trip across the 49th parallel. We all speak the same language (once you get used to calling beanies “toques” and our other little Canadianisms). You don’t have to exchange your greenback. Plus, that greenback gets you more bang for your buck than other ski meccas around the world.

Road trip? If you’re loading your car up for skiing anyway, what better place could you go than the region named precisely for its awesomeness in ski tripping-ability?

I mean, c’mon. Whitewater is located along the “Powder Highway.”

Not sure how much clearer one can be with pointing out exactly how good it is up here.

The friends I have managed to get up from the States are now repeat visitors. It makes sense; Nelson’s an easy drive up but just out of the way enough to make visitors feel like they stumbled upon a quietly held secret.

Eh. Maybe I’ll just shut up about the benefits of being a Whitewater skier and let ‘em keep their inconvenient plans. They can have their busy resorts. They can keep their expensive flights, long layovers, and jet lag. They can keep their credit card bills and long lift queues.

Those skiers and riders in the know will keep on hitching a ride on the WH2O shuttle, ski untracked lines under Ymir’s gaze, pull back a few Backroads beers at the Glory Lodge and have enough money to wake up the next day and do it all over again.