But How Was the Skiing?

Two days of posting about my trip to Banff, and I haven't gotten to the main point of said trip -- the skiing. (I could totally become a recipe blogger!) Alright, time to get down to business.

My husband and I have the Ikon Pass this season, giving us access to three different locations in Banff collectively known as SkiBig3: Banff Sunshine, Lake Louise, and Mount Norquay. We had four full days in Alberta, and our loose plan was to try each resort on one day and then, if we weren't too tired, return to our favorite.

On day "zero," though -- the night we arrived in Banff, we needed to pick up our rental gear. We'd decided not to lug skis, boots, and poles in our luggage, so we picked those up from a shop in town. This was my first time using rental gear since I'd struggled to learn years ago, and it was... fine. Once you know enough to know what feels right, anything else is, quite literally, "not right." But it would get the job done.

We went to Banff Sunshine on day one, which also turned out to be the coldest ski day we were there. After mistakenly exiting the gondola at a "mid-station," it took us a while to find our way to the more interesting places to ski. (And I should note that for us, "interesting" means "groomed blues." We're really not into moguls. A chance to ski into some trees -- but out again quickly -- is acceptable, but not required.) We tried a lot of different trails and found the skiing to be decent.

• At a moment I turned weird on (apparently) some patch of ice (?), I caught an edge and went down hard. I was glad to have my helmet from home... but I probably gave myself whiplash from the impact. My neck hurt to varying degrees for the rest of the trip. I'll blame it on the rentals.
  

• On one particular lift, you pass a sign telling you that you've crossed into British Columbia. And then, before you get off the lift, another telling you you're back in Alberta. I have to check out a map and see what strange spur of cartography made this possible; I'd thought the border between the two provinces was more-or-less straight.

• When you are ready to leave for the day, the run all the way to the bottom is rather nice. It's green, but not too green, and is a nice, long trail to end the day on.
  

Day two, we went to Lake Louise. It was almost twice the drive from where we were staying, and ended up having its pros and cons. The scenery is breathtaking, with beautiful vistas almost everywhere. Plus, there were long, blue runs everywhere -- just to my liking.

...but, we could only ever seem to find like two of them. It seemed like no matter which lift we took, no matter which way we decided to exit and start down, we'd very quickly link back up with a run we'd taken before, and find ourselves on the same trail to the same destination. The weather changed more than the skiing, from a biting wind up high, quickly down into a sunny day, and then into a low-riding fog bank, before back out into the sun again.

I hear there's more variety on the back side of Lake Louise? But I also hear it's mostly in the form of mogully blacks; we never went to see it for ourselves. It didn't take many of these long top-to-bottom runs to wear ourselves out (and doubt we'd ever find a different path). So, beautiful as Lake Louise was, we soon had our fill of it.

Day three was the mistake. "SkiBig3" turns out to be more "SkiBig2-and-a-quarter," because there simply isn't much to Mount Norquay. We knew going in that it was smaller, and we also knew that not as much snow had fallen there this early in the season, so not as many runs were open. But we really weren't expecting what was basically, two adjoining "learn to ski" hills, each with its own very slow lift. We skied at Norquay for barely an hour before deciding to just rest up and save ourselves for the final day.

We decided to go back to Banff Sunshine for that final day, and were glad we did. The weather was warmer than it had been on day one, and we were able to explore more widely. I got a photo on a run inexplicably called "Star Trek"...

...and we generally found the resort to be better than we'd thought on day one.

It was a good four days of skiing overall. But also overall, I think it made us appreciate just how good we've got it in Colorado. Traveling itself was nice, and skiing somewhere completely new a novelty -- but Coloradans don't have to travel to another country to have amazing skiing. Though we did have fun, I'd say the "SkiBig3" still fall short of Vail, Aspen Snowmass, and maybe even a handful of others right here in Colorado.

Maybe I just missed my own ski gear that much. I still have several months of the season to test that theory.