Down Into the Wapiti, and Back Up Again

The strangest thing about skiing near Grande Prairie is that you drive down to do it. Everywhere else in the mountain world, the hill rises up to meet you. Here you head south on Highway 40, the canola and the gravel trucks fall away, and the land just opens. The Wapiti has spent a very long time cutting its valley, and the result is a ski area that begins where the prairie ends.

People from the mountains like to be polite about Nitehawk. They shouldn't bother. It is not Marmot and was never trying to be. It's a river-valley hill, short-ish and steep enough where it counts, and its great virtue is proximity. You can leave work, ski under the lights until your thighs file a complaint, and be home before the dishwasher finishes. That is not a consolation prize. For a lot of families in this city, it's the difference between skiing and not skiing.

The valley also makes its own weather, which you'll learn the first time you walk out of a mild afternoon in town and into a cold sink of air near the river. Dress for the bottom of the hill, not the top of your driveway.

Then there's the tubing, which deserves more respect than it gets. Adults treat it as the thing you do for a kid's birthday party. Fine. But a tubing run is one of the few winter activities that requires no skill, no rental fitting and no lesson, and it still delivers real speed. Watch a grown man in a work parka hit the bottom of a lane and spin out, laughing like he's nine. That's the whole case. Nobody has ever been cool on a tube. That's the point of it.

Summer is when the valley gets interesting, and when most of the city forgets it exists. The chairlift that hauls skiers all winter starts hauling bikes, and the slopes become a downhill bike park: berms, rollers, rock, and roots that will find the one flaw in your technique and announce it publicly. It's lift-served, so the climbing is someone else's problem. Gravity does the rest, sometimes more enthusiastically than you'd like.

A word for the timid, which includes this columnist: the easy lines are genuinely easy, and nobody on the hill cares how slow you go. Rent armour if you don't own it. The people who skip the armour are the ones you'll hear stories about at the lodge, told in the past tense.

Next door, the Wapiti Nordic Centre carries on its quieter business. Cross-country trails wind through the trees in winter, and the biathlon range gives the place a faint, orderly air of Scandinavian seriousness. If downhill is a party, Nordic is a long walk with a friend who doesn't need to talk. Both have their place. The valley is big enough for the two temperaments.

My one real opinion, and I'll hold it: the Wapiti is at its best in early autumn, before anything opens for the season. The poplars go yellow all at once, the river runs low and clear over the gravel bars, and the empty ski runs look like what they are, which is just a hillside waiting. Go for a walk. Look up at the chairs hanging still over the grass.

Then come back in winter, when the lights come on and the whole slope glows above the dark river like someone left the porch light on for the entire county.