Table of contents for December/January 2021 in Ski Canada

Alpine Canada overhauled its board of directors a year ago, with the stated aim of making Canada’s national alpine ski team one of the top three in the world by 2026. Now ACA has appointed a new president and CEO-and she comes with a winning record. Therese Brisson has won two Olympic medals and no less than six World Championships. Curiously, none was won on the ski hill. The 54-year-old Brisson was a 12year veteran of the highly decorated women’s national hockey team. But for her new role as head suit at Alpine Canada, it’s Brisson’s business and organizational experience that boosters hope will have skiers in the alpine, ski cross and para-alpine disciplines heading for the finish line with more support. Since retiring from hockey, she’s been the director…

You may notice an ever more common exotic species darting around the base areas of ski resorts this season. I’m talking about those slender figures that lope lithely in skinny leggings stretching to contain muscular thighs. But this might just be the year to consider joining their ranks. A tranquil yet invigorating, socially distanced glide through the forest on crosscountry ski gear could become a pillar of your pandemic survival strategy. Alpine skiers already participate with masks, gloves and goggles, so no one is claiming that our sport is a dangerous activity in the Covid era, but count us in the camp that believes any time spent skiing would be a net benefit to our health. Given how much of normal life has been disrupted, maybe it’s time to get…

BANFF’S MAIN DRAG Alberta, we thought we knew you! How wrong can Canadians be about that oftrumoured red-necked, truck-driving, oily slice of the West? Sure, the “Corner Gas” vibe rocks on from the Badlands to the Oil Sands, but there’s a new cultural bright light in Banff. Winter nights out in the jewel of the Rockies are hottin’ up. Queue the divas. First in a furling floor-length, candy-floss-pink gown, then a totally Moldavan tracksuit straight from après beer showers at the Mooserwirt in St. Anton, Karla Marx takes no prisoners. The Edmonton-born Victoria Bucholtz is compere and lead singer in the weekly Brilliance Drag evenings at Banff’s newest live music and dinner theatre The Radiant. Karla’s troupe plays to sold-out audiences who dress up, stand up, drink up and generally…

HANDS: SAVE ‘EM FOR APRÈS Instructors are often asked, “Where should my arms be?” Back in the day, ski instructors could make an entire season out of endlessly and minutely adjusting the arms of their students. Those days are thankfully gone. In today’s more enlightened times, it has finally been recognized that the primary purpose of our hands in skiing is to hold a beer. Because our skis are attached to our feet, we spend a lot of time focusing on the lower body when developing a skier. However, that’s not to say we can just let our arms hang, flail and flap from our shoulders independently. Our arms, and by extension our upper body, still have a role to play in skiing. As in any balance sport, arms pushed…

“Hmm…it looked bigger online,” my buddy Withnail sighed with a look of disappointment. “I guess you hear that from a lot of girls,” I responded deadpan. With no reaction to our conversation, the rental car agent looked at us skeptically when we announced our intention to live out of the van for two weeks on our long-planned road trip across B.C. ski country. Apparently two 40-something men don’t often rent the smallest van in the fleet with the intention of using it as a motorhome, but in the planning stages anyway, it made financial sense to us. By avoiding hotels, we would save money for essentials. Like beer. And if we rented the smallest van, we would save enough for luxuries. Like food. Withnail and I loaded our new home…

The first time I ordered up a Kokanee lager (with the tagline “It’s the beer ’round here”) was at après ski on a Kootenay road trip on what was much later coined by marketing types “the Powder Highway.” I loved the label art—a rugged, glacier-clad mountain against a blue-metal sheen. It was so much cooler than the Blue or Ex or Canadian of my younger days. The product itself was pretty good, and its popularity skyrocketed with the launch of an imaginative advertising campaign featuring a mischievous Sasquatch and an earnest, befuddled park ranger. Around the winter world, the association between beer and skiers is long and strong. And until a few decades ago, beer sales in B.C., as in most Canadian provinces, were dominated by Molson-Coors and InBev’s Labatt…

There may not be caravans of easterners revving their engines quite yet, but the idea of remote working from a ski area might just get you packing. There’s jolly good news brewing for those who are still flush, newly mobile and want to work a few hours a day from the computer and ski for the rest. They’re the new C-19 ski bums, and the mountains of B.C. and Alberta are beckoning. “Online classes for our teens mean we’re not as tied to home this winter,” explained Lori Knowles, long-time ski writer from Bracebridge, Ontario, who together with her husband, Peter, a retired teacher, have big plans for the winter. “If we have to hunker down somewhere to wait out the pandemic, it may as well be in a ski…

The British are quick to claim responsibility for turning skiing from a mode of transport into a respectable pastime. To better enjoy the wintry wackiness, during pre-pandemic times anyway, they also invented the catered-chalet-package holiday. Traceable to an enterprising young Erna Low (full disclosure: Erna was Viennese born), who jerry-rigged the first package ski holiday while studying in London, an all-inclusive week in the Alps included her fellow British students, a quiver of wooden skis, wineskins and slapped-together pasta dinners. It was the early ‘50s, and the “chalet holiday” was born. For those unfamiliar with the concept, Britain’s most popular form of ski vacation means a week in a shared and catered chalet. You book, pay and turn up-et voila: breakfast, afternoon tea, dinner, plus a smattering of bedhead, general…