One week of every year, I don't want to see the sun.
Winter storms are usually harbingers of doom: transit delays, dangerous driving conditions, back-breaking shovelling, school closings. It's never good news.
But snowboarders worth their salt pray for bad weather. Big storms deliver deep snow, and every inch counts. Snowboarding in powder is a religious experience, like coasting on the wind.
My home province of Ontario gets plenty of storms. There's one problem: There are no mountains.
So I pack up my board every winter and head west. I've hit a lot of the big resorts in Canada and the United States, including Revelstoke, Red Mountain, Fernie, Kicking Horse, Whistler, Big White, Sunshine, Lake Louise, Snowbird, Steamboat and Tahoe.
One feather was missing from my cap.
Jackson Hole, Wyo., the ultimate expert hill in the middle of frontier country. Land of double-black diamonds, narrow chutes, steep cliffs and Corbet's Couloir, which has been billed as “America's scariest ski slope.” Beginners need not apply.
Jackson Hole is doing its best to market itself as family-friendly, with groomers and more moderate runs, but let's be honest, this is a resort that, first and foremost, draws the extreme crowd. The upper mountain is not for the faint of heart.
I've had Jackson Hole on my list for many years, and a favourable U.S. dollar exchange made the timing right for me and my pack of fellow boarders. We booked the trip, and then we watched the weather reports.
When we landed in Jackson in early January, it hadn't snowed for a week. Bad sign? Depends on how you look at it. There would be no powder conditions on the hill, but Jackson Hole has a legendary reputation for big, regular snowfalls, so it must be due. Right?
We could only hope. The resort had measured eight feet of snowfall for the season, but the bulk of it fell around U.S. Thanksgiving. We were disappointed to learn that an upper bowl, Casper Bowl, the chutes, and Corbet's Couloir were closed because of poor conditions (read: lack of snow).
This is, of course, not the fault of the resort. The truly dedicated skier or snowboarder lives on or near the mountains, and waits for the right conditions before hitting the hill. I didn't have that luxury.
And the forecast for the rest of the week wasn't promising.
We made the most of the Sunday, Day One, crisscrossing the mountain to get our bearings and build some endurance. It's a huge, imposing hill, with incredibly varied terrain. We kicked things off with a ride up Big Red, a gondola-like tram, completed in 2008, that whisks up to 100 passengers from the base to the top of Rendezvous Mountain, the highest peak at 3,200 metres, in about 12 minutes.
The view from the top is impressive. You're surrounded by mountain ranges on all sides, and low-cloud-cover days act like a blanket over the valley, with only the peaks exposed.
As the wind whipped across our faces, we walked past the infamous warning sign, which reads, in part: “Our mountain is like nothing you have skied before! It is huge, with variable terrain from groomed slopes to dangerous cliff areas and dangerously variable weather and snow conditions.”
We dropped past the entrance to Corbet's Couloir – a two-storey plunge off a cornice onto a 50-degree slope – and into Rendezvous Bowl, a steep, mogul-infested run down the far east side of the resort. From there, riders have the option of going out of bounds to get to Cody Bowl, an avalanche risk, or continue in-bounds toward a trio of steep faces that lead to a traverse back to the base.
The lack of snow cover made for a rough ride down, peppered with crusty moguls and rock hazards. But as I often say to myself in a Zen-of-snowboarding way: “Man, if this had a fresh foot of snow on it, it would be awesome.”
