Cold and windy skiing at Castle Mountain

I'm going to make this a quick one because we only took one photo at castle mountain and you might get a bit bored otherwise.

We stayed in Pincher Creek on Thursday night, with some friends, before heading to Castle Mountain for Opening time. I always find the prairies so depressing, there's this low lying homogeneous cloud that seems to be there every time we go down. You would think the mountains would be foggier, but it's not the case.

Anyway, the long and the short of skiing at Castle is that it had amazing snow while we were there, even the groomed runs had 5cm or so on them. The black diamond bowls were lovely and deep in powder, and the tree runs were the best we've done so far, with nice wide trees in between a lot of the runs you can jump off a groomed run to do a stint in the trees just about anywhere. 

The two major downsides are the lack of facilities and the wind. There only one small day lodge, which is not too bad and serves alright food. The chair lifts are soooo old and terrible. There is a two seater chair to the top. Ridiculous. Even on a day with very few people we always had a bit of a wait to get on it. And they are the most uncomfortable, squishiest, oldest chairs ever. The signage on the hill is also pretty minimal. You can find the start of a run, but then trying to find where it goes is near impossible! We tried to follow a blue from the top, but failed because there were no signs halfway down to tell you where to go. The advice of someone who works there was not to go to the back side to the shoots unless you're with someone who knows the hill or you will get lost. The problem with getting lost is that there are all these contour banks that are made mainly of large rocks. You can see them as you go up on the chair lift, but as you're skiing down, there's no way to tell there's a rock bank coming up except for a small 10cm square sign that says "Caution Rocks". 

There is one chair that mainly services blue runs, so we did one stint over there. The runs were nice and you could go into the trees easily. But the chair run so slow, I think we could have walked faster. And there is a traverse out. Which was actually an OK traverse, it's just the wind was whipping snow at you and it felt like a thousand tiny needles piercing your face. I had to go into the lodge to warm my face after that run. So we didn't do another run in that area.

Overall we really enjoyed skiing Castle Mountain, and other than the wind, most of their issues are clearly a lack of funding. I wouldn't recommend it for beginners, mainly because the best part of the hill is the black diamond bowls and the black diamond tree runs. We did a couple blue runs, and they were definitely easier than Fernie blue runs, but nowhere near as nice at the black runs. 

Bonus photo of me falling over when I tried to run back to get in the photo with self timer. I was hurrying and so didn't do my gloves up properly, and my gloves and jacket ended up full of snow. Yep, that only made me colder. It was a windy -15 degree day.