The Hill Is Down

Grande Prairie has no mountains, and to the rest of Alberta that settles the argument. Drive south on Highway 40, though, and the canola and the grain bins carry on with total confidence right up until the ground falls away. That is the Wapiti valley. Our hill is not up. Our hill is down.

That inversion matters more than people give it credit for. At a mountain resort, you spend the morning craning your neck at what you're about to attempt. At Nitehawk, you park on the rim, look out over a river cut deep through the prairie, and the whole day sits below you like something you've already earned. It's a strange way to start a ski day. Then again, you also skipped five hours of driving to Jasper, so you can afford a little strangeness.

The skiing itself is honest. It is not long, and nobody who grew up here pretends otherwise. What it has instead is repetition, which is underrated. Short laps mean more laps. More laps are how children actually learn to turn, and how adults who swore off skiing in 1998 quietly discover they still can. Pick a weeknight under the lights in January, when the cold has the snow squeaking and the valley has gone blue-black. It is a better argument for living here than anything on a billboard.

Then there are the ski jumps, which most visitors notice the way you'd notice a giraffe in a cow pasture. Real jumps, steep and serious, standing on the valley wall above the run of local skiers working on their parallel turns. Watching someone launch off one is the fastest cure I know for feeling brave about your own blue run.

Tubing is the great equalizer. It requires no skill, no lessons, and no dignity. Grandparents do it. Teenagers who are too cool for everything else do it, loudly. The lift does the climbing, gravity handles the rest, and the only real decision is whether you go down linked up with the people you came with, which is faster, and also how friendships end. Dress for standing around, because tubing turns out to be mostly queueing between bursts of shrieking.

Summer is when the valley earns its keep, and it's still the season the town forgets about. The snow melts, the lift keeps running, and the same slopes become a downhill bike park. Dust, berms, roots, a chairlift carrying bikes instead of skis. If skiing at Nitehawk is pleasant, riding there is a little feral, which is a compliment. The valley gets green and close and humid in a way the open prairie above never does, and you come out of it filthy and grinning like you've been somewhere much farther away.

The best month for the place is September. I'll stand by that. The poplars along the Wapiti go yellow, the river runs low and quiet, the air is cool enough to ride hard, and the crowds have gone back to school. You can sit at the top, look down the valley, and watch the colour run all the way to the bend in the river.

Then the frost comes, the snow comes, and the bikes go back in the garage. The valley turns white and does the whole thing again. The drive is still twenty minutes or so, the bridge over the Wapiti is still at the bottom, and the hill is still down.