Anticipation

“Winnipeg dug out from beneath 35.8 cm of snow left by a monster 32-hour storm that dumped 30 to 50 cm of the white stuff and created 2 m drifts in Southern Manitoba”

I personally experienced the Blizzard of 86 in Winnipeg. I delivered papers that morning, pulling an old wooden toboggan and digging to mailboxes. That was 22 years ago and I still remember it vividly. I’ve always had a deep fascination with snow. To me, snow is like magic. I revere the mysterious, sudden and utter transformation of a “big dump”. One of the things that brought me to come and live in Terrace was an account I was given of the conditions and 40ft average annual snowfall at Shames mountain resort. It appears by the statistics, the spectacle that I saw during the Blizzard of 86, happens on Shames mountain in even grander proportions.


“NW BC is digging out from a record snowfall. More than 113 centimeters of snow fell in the Terrace-Kitimat area Thursday. Not only is that the heaviest snowfall the region has ever seen, it's just five centimeters short of the Canadian record for the most snow in a single day. That record was set at Lakelse Lake in the same region in 1974 with 118cms. Needless to say, schools and many roads in the region are closed”

In my curiosity I asked some of the locals and they told me about their Shames mountain adventures.

So intrigued, I accepted an invitation to hike the pre-season Shames on October 26th 08. In no time, I was marveling at the amount of early snow, which at the top was chest deep. My friends assured me that this legend inspiring terrain was capable of supernatural phenomenon unlike any I’ve seen. They relayed experiences of rabbit-pelt sized snowflakes falling hypnotically, relentlessly from the sky. There were stories of snow-spray suffocation heel-side turns, straight lined double black diamonds and powder induced superhuman feats of courage and animal grace. I believe their claim that the “gnarly pow” will supply me with epic stories of my own for years to come.

Of course it’s not all adrenaline charged heroism. The tamer hearts are filled with the sublime majesty of the region’s natural beauty. The combination of remoteness and massive snowfall means, if you inadvertently sleep in, your short trip from Terrace to the hill will still yield the most coveted “fresh tracks”. On a blue sky day, a chair lift ride can offer a glimpse of the mighty Skeena River, or be a great place to hear someone jingle out a tale about an infamous run (like Hangover) and how it offers a taste of the backcountry, inbounds. A simple ride on the t-bar feels like a subterranean tunnel, in an alien world, walled high with excess snow, dampening the sound to a peaceful silence only interrupted occasionally with distant, muffled, hoots and woos.

I’m as eager as a Whisky Jack with a French fry on the daylodge deck.