My First Big White Experience!
After graduating from the University of Loughborough, I decided to take some time out to explore the world before making a decision about my future. I decided to go to Canada as I have always wanted to explore the wilderness and visit my cousins who moved to Toronto when I was six years old and who I have not seen since.
After a couple of months in Toronto, I got itchy feet and so looked into my options. As Autumn was becoming Winter, I thought about doing a ski season...I bought a car and decided to drive to Whistler - surely a couple of days should do it, right? Wrong...!!! My decision to drive the width of Canada was met with incredulity. It reinforced the fact that we Brits really do live on a small Island!
I was tempted by the prospect nonetheless and set off on God's good humour! What an adventure it was, taking in big cities, tiny and remote villages and some of the most stunning scenery in the world. By now, Winter was blowing in a big storm in the mountains and so I decided to rest up in Kelowna, British Columbia roughly one day's drive short of my destination. Checking out the local area I found out about a ski resort just an hour up Highway 33 called Big White and so thought I might check it out before moving on.
On arriving at Big White, I was hit by a winter wonderland just as the season was beginning. The pristine white snow was everywhere - very unexpected for early December...! I checked into the hostel and went out for a ski. By the end of the day, I had bought a season pass and had forgotten any notion of hitting up Whistler!
The skiing was awesome: I have skied extensively throughout Europe and it is always an unexpected pleasure to be able to get in and ski some trees. Not so in Big White. The trees were everywhere and, the best thing about it, the people were not! I can't imagine that there were more than fifty people on that hill that day and this was at a ski resort of some 3000 acres...that is sixty acres of phenomenal skiing per visitor! Tell me, where in Europe can you get that kind of treatment? It is more like sixty people per acre!
When not in the trees, Big White has a lot more to offer...it is just like a big playground! The Cliff area has some seriously steep pitches and some tight, rock-lined chutes that I knew I would be hitting later on in the season when my skiing had improved. A short, ten-minute hike from the top of the Cliff Chair also opened access to a whole new section of the mountain known as East Peak where fresh snow through tree-lined slopes can be almost guaranteed throughout the season. Big White's long term plan is to build onto the back-side of East Peak and create a second-village. I will certainly be back when that happens!
As well as the Cliff, you have some great pisted runs down in Gem Lake and over in Black Forest which offers access to Easter chutes - again, an area that you should not even think about it unless you have balls of steel!
The terrain park at Big White is extremely well looked after and I spent most of the late season hanging out there and practicing my freestyle skills in the spring sunshine. The hits are graded like slopes and so you start on the Green jumps before progressing up to the Double-Black table-tops that require you to clear up to 35ft before hitting the downslope. Likewise with the metal...you find yourself 50:50'ing on to a wide box in December and by March, you're hitting huge kinked S-rails!
I turned up in Big White in December for a day's skiing and I did not leave until 10th April. There is such a strong sense of community in Big White and this is, of course, great for finding friends to rent a property with and for socialising with, but it is also great for your skiing. By the end of my season, I was doing things at Big White on skis that I would never have dared myself to do had it not been for the welcome peer pressure my Aussie, Brit and Canadian friends exerted on me on an almost daily basis.
Canada is not just Banff and Whistler. Go to Big White, you will not regret it!
By Ross Adcock
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