A 200-pound stripper is like a car crash on the Trans-Canada: No matter how much you don’t want to see, you still stare. It was our fi rst night on the Revelstoke, BC, town and we found cultural collision at an even stranger intersection. The mix was odd inside the peeler bar: heli skiers lodged at the adjacent Regent Inn, blue-collar locs just off their mill shifts, and a few Alberta slednecks not afraid to get in close.
This scene occurred in 2004, and four of us were fresh from a week-long avy course on Rogers Pass. After passing our last CAA test at the Glacier Park Lodge, we’d walked across to the info centre and signed out a permit to tour into one small sector of Glacier National Park. We traversed one of the park’s glaciers, bunked in a tin shed lashed to bare rock and ripped a five-grand return though a mushroomed pillow field, then shuffled out the Asulkan Valley. Now we were celebrating with a tour of the working town down Highway 1. And after a scenic loop to the hot springs, the gear shop and the Regent’s pub, this was the last stop.
Rogers Pass is not Whistler side-country, and fatalities, from 62 rail workers killed in 1910 to seven schoolchildren tragically taken in 2003, are part of the story here. Complex terrain requires sharp skills but also delivers the goods in good stability. As a result, this rest stop has become a centre of the touring universe with international status and peak days in excess of 300 users, including a quarter skinning in splitboard mode.
During our shuffle toward the Asulkan triangle we stay one stop ahead of a Swedish crew with eyes on the same pillow line. We beat them to the drop, snake down a line too steep to see, and cycle back to hit the fingers, nubs and knuckles in one playground of a huge zone. We exit in fading light and drop our return ticket off at the centre. Then, as guests check in for the skier’s special and a foreign party plots their next big day, we recover with bottled beers in the lodge’s Grizzly Lounge.
It was a boozy night, and I left my tab open at the bar. The next morning I’m retrieving my credit card in the Regent swarmed by a powder panic. It is fresh and blue, causing a mad rush among a clientele anxious to get pow for their euros, pounds and dollars. On the lobby’s wall, daily rosters keep an individual tally of runs needed for the million-foot one-piece. This exclusive market is the target Sotheby’s, and RMR has it in its crosshairs.
As an integral part of its vision, Revelstoke Mountain Resort purchased SelkirkTangiers Heli Skiing and Cat Powder, two mechanized operations with prime tenure bordering Mount Mackenzie. This upcoming season, visitors will swipe one magic pass—at drastically different rates—for lift, tHe Great miGration heli or cat. Groomed cat skiing, single-family heli pads and a boutique experience that will compete with CMH, but get the whole family into an appreciating property, are all possible in this hybrid model.
Six days in, we are back to local reality. The forecast looked grey, so half our crew headed home, but Edgers and I stick around for the weekend shred at Smith’s place. In the bathroom is an archive of snowboard mags, and on the wall are topo maps that piece together the surrounding ranges. As the pellet stove cranks and Radio Paradise plays, we get a warm feel from this pre-existing scene.
In the morning we grab organic fair-trade coffee at the Modern Bakeshop and Café but find an accident, a slide or both has closed the Trans-Canada. So instead of a reprise on Rogers Pass, Smith and Sabina take us to their secret Monashee spot on the other side of the tracks. We gain ground though a clear-cut under hot sun until we
switchback into the cover of tall timber.
“We were glad to get out of a resort town and move into a real community,” Smith says. “That was something we were very conscious of when we moved to town here, and I hope that a lot of these people coming to town here—the young kids especially— that if they are leaving those places for those reasons, don’t come here and turn this place into what they are running away from.”
Breaking trail and gaining ground over rises committed to memory, we climb 4,500 feet and top out at heli flags marking CMH’s 112 Chute. This is poaching tenure, but we are about to taste a connoisseur’s line thanks to local hospitality. We’ve been welcomed to a special neighbourhood with the float of Monashee pow at our feet. Ripping our lane under the cover of ancient old growth, I hold out hope that both this sweet stash and this distinctive place will not be gutted by the new resource boom.
But anyone who has tried to make it work on the village margins knows the economy of reality. The 10-year progression to a company town with a transient population is entirely possible in Revelstoke, even if intentions are good and direct flights keep landing. Building community strength as lifts and condos rise is a paradox no locality has dialed, even one swelling with such local pride. The natural emotion is to root for the hometown, yet it’s also rational to brace for an impact this town seems keen to feel.
“It’ll be more like when I moved to Whistler,” Pearcey says. “When I moved to Whistler, I wasn’t thinking of buying a house, I was thinking about doing Late 180s and Backside 720s and Rodeo Flips. That’s what the kids moving here are thinking about. If they want to buy, there is nothing to buy around here. But if you’ve got money, you’re in. There are defi - nitely people bitching about their taxes and that nobody is going to be able to afford to live in this town. But before it was just a little piss-ant town, and now there is something.”
On Sunday, Edgers and I scrap for leftovers on Vertigo ridge and strike out south while comically falling for lack of legs. We grab one last Oso (a great local coffee) at the lodge, where every weekend seat is filled. With the dusting cleared and cars lined up out of eyeshot down the road, we don’t feel guilty calling it at noon. As we change out of boots in the shadow of new construction, a young shred with Ontario plates and a car packed to the windows hints at what might come next. Fresh with optimism but short on cash, he asks to clip our media tickets, foreshadowing that the next chapter in Revelstoke may be a story we all know by heart.
