Kelowna, BC

Big White boasts just that: "We use only dry, natural Okanagan Powder," is what their literature says. The village sits at 5,800 feet (the highest base area in B.C.), and the lifts carry skiers up to 7,500 feet. That's the same elevation as Whistler and Blackcomb, but the air and snow are ...

Fernie, BC

Fernie may be a bit off the beaten path, but the resort is well worth the time it takes to get there. A three-hour drive from Calgary International Airport, or 1.25-hour trip from the Cranbrook Airport, deposits you into an alpine realm of steep mountain slopes covered in spruce, fir, and larch ...

Golden, BC

The Purcell Mountains of eastern British Columbia are where heli-skiing was born in the 1960s, and until the 2000-01 season, people just flew over the high bowls and ridges of the front range. That's when a major resort finally opened, promising more than 4,000 vertical feet and big-resort ...

Jasper, AB

Marmot Basin is a gem of a resort tucked away in the relatively remote reaches of Jasper National Park in Alberta's Canadian Rockies. By the sheer quirk of geographic happenstance, it's a place most skiers never reach. The bigger resorts at Banff and Lake Louise, some 150 miles south, swallow ...

Revelstoke, BC

Need a reason to visit the world's newest major ski resort? Here's 5,620 of them—the figure that represents Revelstoke Mountain Resort's lift-serviced vertical rise, the largest in North America and surpassed only by a handful of European Goliaths. Two more: cliff-studded terrain that would ...

Silver Star Mountain, BC

First-time visitors to Silver Star love the frontier ambience of the 1890s Victoria Gaslight village. With a street full of wooden buildings and no cars, Silver Star has a compact touch of elegance, even with 5,600 beds, 13 restaurants, plenty of shopping, and a new bowling ...

Sunshine Village has the Banff area's only slopeside lodging, featuring a small, high-mountain village surrounded by ski slopes. To reach the village (cars are prohibited), skiers and snowboarders ride a six- passenger gondola from the parking lot. Skiing began back in 1928 in the vast Sunshine ...

Mont-Tremblant, QU

It wasn't long ago that Tremblant appeared destined for obscurity; then Intrawest, the company that turned Whistler Blackcomb into an elite resort, took over in the early 1990s. The new owners have poured roughly $500 million into Tremblant, turning the base village into a replica of a Paris ...

Whistler, BC

Welcome to Whistler/Blackcomb, Land of Oz. Like Oz, Whistler is a magical place—especially when the guy behind the curtain lets the sun out. The stats foreshadow the enormity of the possibilities.

Whistler and Blackcomb are separate mountains and were once separate, competing ...