Epic days at Big White

 The past two days we have been skiing at Big White, near Kelowna. It has been amazing! Especially considering it's spring skiing. It is by far the most beautiful ski hill we've been to so far, and also the farthest from town. We didn't get there for opening either day, since we knew the bottom would be hard, as it always is with spring skiing. The first day was magnificent! Sunny and beautiful. The top of the hill was soft and fun and, as the bottom softened, it got sloppy and fun too.

Sitting on top of a tree!

The trees at the top were absolutely caked in snow, and it just blew my mind how that could happen, and how they could still be alive under there. We parked at the first chair lift you come to, called Gemlake Express, which I definitely recommend doing because the main village is another windy 10kms away. After you get to the top of that chair, you can definitely have fun skiing straight back down again. Or you can go to the Falcon chair and lap it. We stuck on that side of the mountain all day yesterday and it was great! 

Today when we got to the hill, the top had the thickest cloud ever. So we did two runs down Gemlake and then stopped for lunch. The two runs had taken us two hours! Mainly because we had to go super slow at the top or risk running into a snow covered tree, or falling into a ditch.

After lunch we headed over towards the main side, where they have a 6 seater lift! The very top of there was good, then the powder was super hard and rather skied out compared to the other side. So we did one run from the top of that chair then it was time to head back towards the car. 

Unfortunately when we got to the top of the Powder chair, the side of the mountain where we wanted to head down to get to the bottom of Gemlake had been closed off for some reason. Presumably because the chairs on that side close earlier than the other side and they don't want people getting stuck. Anyway, that made us a bit stuck. We had to do a slight sucky traverse through some trees to get back to the bottom of Powder chair and then walk.... It was a long walk, but we were pretty annoyed and felt like we should have just gone under the rope and down where we had planned to go. The walk ended with a super long cat track out. At the end of which I lay on the ground dying... 

Anyway, despite the annoying bit at the end, Big White had been my favourite ski hill so far! If it weren't so far from town we would consider it for next Winter, but 40 minutes on windy, icy roads doesn't sound nice at all.