The Greatest Ski Trip of a Lifetime Is in a…Rainforest?
While skiing in the remote backcountry of interior British Columbia, I keep glimpsing an unexpected shock of green dangling like tassels from seemingly every tree bough. “Witch’s Hair,” my ski guide explains, when I stop to give my legs a rest. “It’s a lichen.” It’s also a reminder this is no ordinary glade of evergreens. My friends and I are skiing in an inland temperate rainforest, a rare ecosystem that doesn’t exist anywhere else on the planet except for here, as well as small remnants of Siberia and eastern Russia.
Like its sister rainforests in the tropics and on the coast, this type of forest stays wet all year, dripping with mosses and lichen. But its moisture content mostly comes from snow, not rain, making inland temperate rainforests some of the best places to ski on Earth—for those who know where to find them.
My trip began in Hills, BC, a smattering of homes and farms located in a valley in the Selkirk Mountains, about 3.5 hours east of the Kelowna International Airport. My friends and I left our cars in a pull-off along an old forest service road and, with our suitcases and ski gear, boarded a snowcat, a truck with tank-like treads. The cat climbed steadily into the mountains, gripping a snow-covered path through Western red cedar and hemlock. After about an hour, it crawled to a stop in a clearing containing a two-story wooden lodge.
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Our ski guide and the lodge’s owner, Jasmin Caton, unbolted the cat’s back door. “Welcome to Valhalla,” she said with a grin. Valhalla is the name of her rustic yet well-appointed lodge, as well as the subrange of the Selkirk Mountains where the lodge is located. For those in the know, it’s also a term from Norse mythology referring to the great banquet hall where warriors go when they die. Caton was basically saying, “Welcome to paradise.”
Valhalla Mountain Touring’s lodge holds 14 guests, who come for four- or seven-day stints to experience what inevitably ends up being the greatest skiing of their lives. Caton’s operation encompasses 19,000 acres—more than twice the size of Whistler-Blackcomb—and includes everything from alpine peaks and ridges, to 40-degree pillow lines through mature stands of evergreens, to mellow glades of ideally spaced, lichen-draped spruce and fir trees. By mid-winter, it’s already blanketed by 10 feet of snow.
With terrain like this, it’s no surprise the mountain ranges of BC’s inland temperate rainforest are the birthplace of both heli-skiing, in 1965, and cat-skiing, in 1975. I chose Caton’s lodge because it offers neither. Besides the snowcat that shuttled us to the lodge, the skiing is non-mechanized. You have to earn your turns—skinning uphill with skins affixed to the bottom of your skis for traction before every descent. This method appealed to me, as both a recreational endurance athlete and as an environmentalist. It felt like the most respectful way to experience the winter wonders of the inland temperate rainforest.
On the skin track, forging ahead of me, Caton listed off a slew of animals she’s spotted within her acreage: “Wolverine, porcupine, pine martin, pika, marmot, ermine, flying squirrel, mountain goat, lynx, moose, whitetail deer, black bear, grizzly.” About three-quarters of the way to the ridgetop, we spotted a set of hare tracks in the otherwise pristine powder.
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Caton grew up in the hamlet of Hills and spent her childhood exploring these lands year-round. She took over operating the lodge from her parents in 2009, after earning a university degree and an Association of Canadian Mountain Guides certification. Now 43 years old, she’s become increasingly aware of just how unique this ecosystem is, and the threats it’s facing.
The North American inland temperate rainforest once covered 40 million acres, stretching in a broad arc from central Idaho up into western Montana, through the BC interior up to the city of Prince George. Today, logging and development have left it heavily fragmented. Some of the largest swaths of still-intact sections—the ones with the old-growth trees—are in the BC interior. These are magical places, Caton says, where 1,000-year-old cedars and hemlocks stand sentry over the lush understory of fern and moss, where Devil’s Club grows nine-feet tall, and endangered mountain caribou still roam.
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Caton tells me about the Incomappleux River Valley, an undisturbed section of inland temperate rainforest to the northeast, not far from here. Scientists put it on the same scale as the Amazon for its ability to absorb substantial amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, reducing the effects of climate change. Last year, the BC government protected 185,000 acres of the Incomappleux as its newest nature conservancy.
At the top of the ridge, we catch our breath and revel in the 360-degree view of forested slopes set against a backdrop of snow-covered peaks. Directly below us, a wide opening in the trees beckons.
“That’s our line,” Caton says. One by one, we drop into the perfectly angled meadow, our turns light and effortless in the feather-weight powder, adding the first human tracks of the season to the mountainside.
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