B.C.’s Red Mountain Has No Liftlines—Even on Holiday Weekends

Few things will test a skier’s sanity as much as long lift lines. We’ll tolerate pre-dawn flights, crappy conditions, $21 burgers, and weak coffee, but inching along in a cattle queue while our return-on-investment melts like a snowball in Fiji? No thank you.

Which is precisely why I packed up the family at the height of ski season and headed to Red Mountain Resort, in Rossland, British Columbia. With a mediocre ski season in the West, combined with Red’s boast that skiers can find powder two weeks after it snows, we decided to let this under-the-radar ski area put its money where its mouth is.

And what better time to test this claim than on the mother of all overlapping three-day weekends—President’s Day in the U.S. and Canada’s Family Day, which Red’s marketing team informed me is the busiest weekend of the ski season.

Red Mountain is home to 3,850 skiable acres and a 2,919-foot vertical drop, a formidable swath of terrain over which to spread out skiers. But the resort also spins only six chairlifts, none of which are high-speed, along with a short T-bar that mostly services a terrain park, creating the potential for lift-line bottlenecks.

We arrive on Friday to find Red Mountain virtually empty, likely due to weekenders heading up in rush-hour traffic and the fact that a thaw-freeze cycle had turned most ungroomed terrain into coral reef. So we—my wife Cathleen and teenagers Kai and Christina—skate onto lifts, rip groomers, and sniff out some chalky, soft-packed snow on north-facing aspects.

That night a steady snowfall bumps up the mood at B&T’s Hard Knock Café, a local hangout in the old mining town of Rossland, two miles down the road from the resort. As I order a beer at the bustling bar amid a sea of denim, flannel, knit beanies, and laughter, I wonder if the conviviality—locals co-mingling with tourists, a discernible joyous vibe—will translate to the ski hill.

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On Saturday, we wake to six inches of fresh snow which, while far from an epic powder day, is enough to prompt a five-minute (convivial!) first-chair line-up at the Silverlode quad at Red’s base.

This stoked-but-relaxed aura is a matter of simple math: Like most resorts along B.C.’s Powder Highway, Red Mountain is hard to reach, with no large airports or cities in easy striking distance. Further, Rossland, while growing, has an estimated population of just over 4,000, about a third the size of Nelson, the base town for Whitewater Mountain Resort, and about half the size of Revelstoke.

Factor in Rossland’s skier visits of 200,000 people and the uphill capacity of Red’s lift system—9,300 skiers-per-hour—and you can get a sense of what even the busiest day on the hill might look like.

For comparison, Sun Valley, Idaho, which is similarly remote and known for its lack of crowds, has a population of 2,500 (including the town of Ketchum), around 425,000 winter visitors on average, and an uphill capacity of 29,717 skiers per hour.  And Jackson Hole, which is home to a destination airport and does endure crowding on holidays, has a population around 11,000, more than 1 million winter visits, and an uphill capacity of 17,833 skiers per hour.

OK, enough numbers. More skiing.

As we ascend Red’s Motherlode chair, the possibilities of this throwback resort begin to crystalize: Untracked lines abound, in the walls of forest rising around us and even in the show-off zone beneath the chair, where the resident junior freestyle team sends aerials off every available feature.

 A local steers Kai and I to a sequence of memorable runs—the north-facing woods of Booties, the steeps of Coolers, and the plunging fall line of Needles—some of which we return to multiple times and find only our prior tracks.

Lift lines? None more than eight minutes.

We feel so fortunate that Kai and I decide to push our luck.

“You guys scored today; this is the first time we’ve skied this zone all season,” our guide Kauri Howell says on Sunday morning as we stand in brilliant sunshine atop a 7,000-foot mountain with feathery, boot-high powder beneath our skis and the snowcat that delivered us here trundling back down the ridge.

We’d snagged spots for a day with Big Red Cats only 18 hours prior when we walked into their office at Red’s base to inquire. (“Super lucky on a holiday,” says Lauren Mask of Big Red Cats. But, she adds, “We account for walk-ins and we try to get everyone skiing.”) It’s worth noting here that Big Red Cats are independent from Red Mountain’s Mt. Kirkup pay-per-run in-bounds cat skiing, which wasn’t operating during our visit.

We’re slotted in with two groups of snowboarders—from French Canada and Southern California—and a couple from the Bay Area and, by the end of our final run of sun-sparkled, buttery turns through a Christmas tree glade, we’re hugging each other, sharing beers, and vowing to stay in touch for life. Yeah, it was that good.

On our final day at the resort, with a new storm in full, inch-an-hour fury, the skier-dad dream comes true: Christina tires of groomers and announces she wants to ski in the trees. We spend four hours lapping glades off the Paradise lift, with each of us finding lines to suit our ambitions and barely enough time in the lift line to agree on who will ride up with whom on the triple chair.

I’d suspect this magic will last, even as new resort president Mark Shroetel oversees a significant base-area real estate development and is considering adding more lifts soon.

But for now, the only thing that tested my sanity at Red was heading home, knowing there was still powder to be had.