Virgin Power Appreciation Society

Red Mountain, BC, Canada

I first went to Red Mountain in February 1999. Those of you that remember the 98/99 season will recall that the buzz word of the year was El Niño. It messed up weather patterns the world over, and dumped a huge amount of snow on the Pacific North West. Our drive up to Rossland was a clear and sunny morning. That afternoon it started snowing. For the next 2 weeks, it snowed every single day. Although not every morning was a powder morning :-)

When there's that much snow falling, it wasn't hard to find great lines... Powder Fields, The Slides, Pampoose Bowl, you name it you could shred it. It didn't get much better than this.

However, Red doesn't normally get snowed on every day, and when the stuff stops falling, you need to look for the untracked sections. As the whole mountain is covered in trees, there's usually something lurking around. When there isn't... it's off with the board, and time to hike some vertical.

Except of course, when there's virtually no snow anywhere. Over the New Year for 2001, they had sucky conditions... but then so did everyone else. During the first few days, I did manage to get some untracked powder (which I have on video as proof :-) but after a couple of days most of "my" runs turned to sun crust.

Other runs were found, and made the most of, but it didn't take long for those to get tracked either. One day, whilst on a trip down Slide 2, I decided to take a look at the snow pack. I didn't even need to get out my shovel, as my fist could go straight to ground. Almost half the snow pack was made up of Depth Hoar, which isn't exactly a good base to build on.

Anyway, I digress from the search... which was put on hold until some more snow came.