Kicking Horse staying open for Easter

Kicking Horse staying open for Easter

With the best precipitation in years, Kicking Horse Mountain Resort has announced that the lifts will turn for a bonus two weekends and will close for the season on Easter Sunday, April 24th.

The mere thought of April skiing makes me giddy with excitement. By the end of April the days are already significantly longer, they’re warmer and the combination of slushy corn snow with late afternoon beers in the sun – there is surely no better way to end the winter. Please email [email protected] to inquire about April availability.

The regular season ends on Sunday April 10th. The lifts shut-down Monday through Thursday for the next two weeks and turn again Friday April 16th until Sunday April 18th and on Easter weekend April 22nd to 24th. In pre-Kicking Horse days when the lifts were owned and operated by the community of Golden as the Whitetooth ski area, similar weekend operations were the practice and Fridays after a week of snow were known as powder-Fridays. They were days many members of the community took leave from work for. Who knows maybe we’ll even get a chance to relive powder-Fridays this spring?

It has been 10 years since the Whitetooth Ski area was bought from the community and re-launched as Kicking Horse Mountain Resort. It is easy to forget how young this resort is and how much further it has to go. A revised Master Plan of development has been under scrutiny from the provincial government for the past year-and-a-half and has just been announced approved and signed. This is the final step in the provincial approval process.

The document provides a path of expansion unobstructed by provincial, environmental or native opposition with the ultimate build-out goal of 20,000 beds, 14 ski lifts, 4,186 acres of skiable in-bounds terrain and an 18-hole golf course. It is a significant step forward but doesn’t mean that all the pieces will now magically fall into place and that development here will steam ahead.

The approval of the Master Plan lays out a future to look forward to, but part of Kicking Horse’s allure is its frontier feel. There is a priceless moment when, after travelling base to summit in a gondola full of cherry skiers and boarders, I find it’s just me and the mountain only minutes later, not another goretex-cladded soul in sight and the spectacular Columbia Valley beckoning me below. Magic!

23^rd February 2011