Panorama Mountain Village, Canada - BC

Derek from CANADA writes:

I have such a yin-yang thing with Panorama, living in Calgary having skied it occasionally for 15 years. Lets start with the good stuff.
The mountain has a lot of terrain. The whole Shoeber's Dream/Sun Bowl areas is a great place to play in the trees, as is Founder's Ridge. There's plenty of mind numbingly freakishly scary double black terrain. There's RK Heliskiing based here, so you can go drop lots of dough if you want. The view from the top is stellar. The runs are long, and since they upgraded the chairs, it feels like you get in plenty of run for your lift line. Some of the accommodation is pretty nice, and the price is OK, so the value to stay on hill is there. Panorama Springs hot tub complex is huge. It's far enough away from a population base as to never be that busy on weekends.
Sounds great? Well, the downsides are also many. They just don't get that much snow, and so even in epic years like 2007, coverage can be light even as late as February. They make up for it by making ice -- er, "snow" -- all the way to the top, on virtually all the popular runs. This makes it like a gigantic eastern North American ski area -- icy and nasty hard pack most days. The runs don't seem to integrate with the lifts; it seems like you always need to take at least 2 chairs (and sometimes 3) to get back to where you started. They seem to be focused on the double black stuff, with tons of it in Extreme Dream and Taynton Bowl, but just not that much for the other 80% of riders. For some reason, I just never seem to get a lot of vertical in in a day there -- about a third less than I get at Sunshine, and 20% less than Louise. It feels like 3 separate small (tall and narrow mountains), rather than one large one. The village is blah and a half, with very high priced real estate jammed in around the run bases, and the better (but not low) priced stuff down the hill and almost inaccessible (Intrawest has not done a good job here since they took over). The base area itself is poorly laid out, and so is always a mess to get to the one lift. There's only two restaurants and two bars (including the RK base), so not a lot of choice (and neither is really that great). In order to get there from Calgary, I have to pass Banff, Sunshine, Louise, and I could go to Kicking Horse in the same amount of driving time. The road through Kootenay Park is pretty, but the Sinclair Canyon pass is nasty, and homicidal Calgarians treat the drive back on Sunday night like a rule free Formula 1 race.
So I like it and I don't. I make it a habit to go there for the weekend once every year or two, and it's a nice change, just not that often. I can't see skiing there a lot, but it would be an OK place for a vacation. I guess I just know too many other places that are better.

2007-02-21

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