Updated April 1, 2026 10:04AM
On southeast British Columbia’s Powder Highway, home to the world’s most-concentrated collection of ski resorts, heli-, and cat-skiing operations, it’s easy to miss the exit for Panorama Resort.
It’s not quite the end of the road—that’d be the Jumbo Glacier, just up the winding Toby Creek Canyon at the roof of the Purcell Mountains—but it’s close. It doesn’t help that it’s not on the way to anything; conversely, skiers in the closest major metropolis, Calgary, three hours east, must drive past Alberta’s Banff Sunshine Village and Lake Louise and B.C.’s Kicking Horse to get there.
That, and the lack of name recognition compared to its peers on the Powder Highway, has kept the nearly 3,000–acre Panorama relatively quiet, even amidst the post-pandemic surge in skier visits. That said, the resort isn’t without its own unique superlative: Panorama ranks first among the world’s 100 largest ski areas in terrain per skier. That, combined with a vertical drop of nearly 4,300 feet, makes Panorama as big as its wide-angle name implies.
Although the stats suggest sprawl, Panorama’s topography actually minimizes traversing, with three of the resort’s 10 chairlifts hop-scotching skiers to the summit. Between the long fall-line and short lift lines, skiers can maximize their vert without playing mid-mountain musical chairs.
“A lot of places, it seems like you’re always on your ski out,” says Nat McGrath, Panorama’s grooming supervisor. “At Pano, your run is worth a lot.”
McGrath has been skiing for 23 years—nearly his entire life—up at Pano and working for the mountain almost half that time. I met him a decade ago when I walked into the local bike shop where he was working and asked if he knew anyone who might be interested in doing sunrise bike photos the next day. Without hesitation, McGrath said, “I’ll do it! What time?” That’s been McGrath’s attitude over his last 10 years of adventures, summer and winter. And throughout that time, I’ve come to realize that his is the prevailing attitude at Pano. Think of it as the world’s biggest small ski hill.
Nowhere encapsulates that sense of scale and solitude better than Pano’s 750-acre Taynton Bowl. Formerly heli-skiing terrain, Taynton now lies within Pano’s boundaries, patrolled and avy-controlled. The north-facing bowl plunges off the windswept alpine prow of Goldie Ridge—where, on a clear day, skiers can just make out Mount Assiniboine and the rest of the Canadian Rockies on the Alberta border—into small cliffs and the stark silhouettes of winter-bare alpine larch.
The resort sells one-ride bowl bumps via its Monster X Cat; for the price of lunch, skiers can access world-class subalpine terrain without the requisite gear or commitment of a heli day. (The regularly maintained cat-width road also allows fast and free access to those willing to hike a half hour or so for their turns.)
“Other than the last cat track out, you’re pretty much just straight down the mountain for nearly 4300 vertical feet,” says McGrath. “Going really hard, I’ve done six Taynton laps in a day.”
Meanwhile, the frontside Extreme Dreams zone offers low-hanging, fall-line fruit directly from the Summit Express chair. Skiers can point their tips straight down toward the village through the steep trees and small cliffs of runs like Gun Barrel and the quarter-pipe ripples of double-black Dunes.
Averaging around 200 inches of snow a year, Panorama receives about half the snow totals of its Kootenays neighbors Kicking Horse and Revelstoke, owing to its location on the edge of the Upper Columbia Valley, the great green north of golf courses and vineyards. But that’s balanced out by the lack of traffic, so powder stashes stay protected in the steep chutes of Taynton Bowl and Extreme Dreams and the low-angle glades of Sun Bowl days after a storm.
“It’s hard to beat when you feel like you’re the only person skiing through Taynton Bowl,” says McGrath.
That feeling is frequently real: My family and I visited late last season, arriving on a Thursday night right after a one-shot storm broke a week-plus dry spell, and we continued to find untracked Taynton glades and frontside powder stashes, even in terrain visible from the chairlifts, through our last chair on Sunday afternoon.
“It’s definitely come a long way from the old saying of ‘Oh, it’s just Ice-O-Rama,’ and people are starting to notice us,” says McGrath.
For now, however, skiers can take advantage of the resort’s status as the easy-to-miss, can’t-pass-up destination on the Powder Highway.
“You do have to take a bit of a detour to get out here,” says McGrath, “but I’d have to say it’s well worth it.”
