Pro Guiding Service - Little Areas That Rock: Silver Star

Humans create order from chaos through labels. In this labeling process, we long for absolutes--for the ability to say that an item is either A or B, male or female, bitchen (as in good) or a bitch (as in bad). We long for absolutes so deeply that even shades of gray tend to get stuck with a black or white label.

Take Silver Star Mountain, a regional ski resort near the town of Vernon, British Columbia. Guidebooks, polls conducted by Yuppie ski magazines, and many newspapers have repeatedly called it the best "family" resort in North America. Any serious skier worth his 207s who reads such accolades will pass up the area in this life; he'll condescend to ski Silver Star only when true life ends and that pathetic existence known as life-after-40 begins. Why? Because the "family-resort" label does not allow for the fact that the place could have a dark side with killer terrain. It does not allow for the ambiguity that a mountain like Silver Star could accommodate families AND have a Ted-Bundy mean streak.

Make no mistake, Silver Star DOESs live up to its best-family-resort reputation. Parents can dump their children in top-rated instructional programs and ski unfettered for the day. The base village with only eight hotels, ten eateries, four bars, and a few miscellaneous services is minuscule, which is a great convenience when whining rugrats are in tow. There is planned family entertainment each night, which keeps frazzled parents from battering hyperactive kids in a new form of apres-ski entertainment. And the resort is secluded (it sits at the end of a deadend road 12 miles above a Vernon, a town city dwellers would call a deadend itself), which minimizes the risk of kids getting snatched.

But Silver Star is more than just a place where testosterone tamed by estrogen can bring the ball-and-chain of their union. Skiers in the know have learned this mountain has a split personality and that nearly half of the area's 1450 skiable acres is occupied by named runs, glades, and drops sporting a single or double black diamond. The cognoscenti know that Silver Star has plenty of terrain where testosterone can still run stupid.

This unreported side of Silver Star is, in fact, its hidden side...the side away from the sunny Vance Creek runs where families congregate. The mountain's alter ego had its birth back in 1991 when the area installed what was then the longest high-speed quad in North America in the Putnam Creek drainage.

For starters, Putnam Creek boosted the area's vertical from 1600 to 2500 vertical feet. Equally important, it gave the area 700 new acres of bad-ass terrain. Double-diamond drops like Gowabunga, Free Fall, Headwall, Doognog, and Three Wisemen could make eggnog out of not-so-wise, snow-plowing six-year-olds who strayed off the green and blue cruiser on the front side of the mountain and found themselves out of their league. Here the PG13- and R-rated terrain could send a tyke cartwheeling down a 40-degree incline right into the hospital

Before the rise of the Putnam Creek Chair, Okanagan hardcores disdainfully dubbed Silver Star, "Bambi Bowl." But with the installation of the new quad, skier visits jumped 30% in one year. That jump, in large part, reflected an increase in local skiers who learned that the area was now more than child's play. Suddenly there were open glades off the shoulder of Sunny Ridge that inspired shouts, and tight trees between Three Wisemen and Doognog that constricted the sphincter and left no time for hoots. There were gale-force seas of white bumps down Headwall, Gowabunga, Gong Show, and Sunny Glades. There were steeps like Free Fall that were too sheer to form bumps, as well as steep, cat-winched groomers down Normania, Caliper Ridge, Holy Smokes, and Minerva where aging Baby Boomers with cartilaginous, ligament-free knees could be reminded of what skiing was like in the glory years.

Putnam Creek also provided Okanagan skiers with a powder stash. The region is not a monster snow zone (average annual snowfall at Silver Star is 228 inches) but the Putnam Creek slopes are north-facing and in shadow most of the day. In the cold climate of British Columbia's interior, skiing these inclines is frigid business. That has several benefits: It keeps the snow dry between snowfalls and it encourages tourists, who want to return home with the trophy of a vanity tan, to remain on the Vance Creek side of the mountain. With the crowds beat back, Putnam skiers can mine uncut lines down the slopes all day (and sometimes several days) after a dump...if they work at it.

"If they work at it" is the operative phrase. This drainage is much like a hand with fingers formed by ridges that lead to a bottom station sitting in the palm. The problem? One lift is not enough to service the entire hand. Accessing the steeps of the Back Bowl where Free Fall, Black Pine, and Where's Bob provide exhilarating sport, entails a slow glide on a westbound cat track. You bag your wake-up call but then almost fall asleep on the eastbound trek back to the bottom station. The same fate awaits you if you wanna juice the system out in Uncle Buck's Bowl to the east: long cat-track access, steep drop, long glide back to the lift.

On first analysis this layout is a shortcoming, a handicap, a problem to bitch about. But the truth is this: As soon as management fixes the problem by building more lifts (as the master plan of the area dictates) they'll kill the powder goose. Rather than finding powder fields two days after a dump, you'll be lucky to find fluff two hours after a storm. High-speed access translates into high-speed consumption.

For a few more years, however, life will continue to be sweet back in the Putnam drainage. For the next few years, in fact, life will be sweeter than normal. The reason: The introduction of the Valhalla adventure skiing area. The resort has just thinned an old burn and cut new forested runs in a tract of land adjacent to Putnam Creek. Skiers willing to access this terrain either through sweat equity (hiking or skinning for 30 minutes) or cash outlay (paying $25 to get towed into the area a few times) will have access to 250 new acres of off-piste steeps. A few days following a dump when finding powder in Putnam Creek is tougher than getting President Clinton to tell the truth, those willing to earn their turns will still have uncut lines to carve.

There's a final bonus to skiing this mislabeled mountain: solid bang for the buck. To Americans, the lift tickets ($45 Canadian) sounds steep--until you do the math (about $31 US). Dedicated dirtbags can hole up in Vernon for as little as $30 Cnd for a double room at a motel or for $15 Cnd per person at the hostel (call 250-549-3742 or 888-737-4927). Meanwhile, because the area professes to be family friendly, people other than lawyers and doctors can afford to stay right on the mountain (suites sleeping 2 to 4 skiers start at about $115 Cnd). And a brew a the Vance Creek Saloon, the local's hangout, won't break the wallet in the way whetting the whistle does at, say, Whistler

Of course, Silver Star is anything but a hopping place once darkness descends. Hotels have signs posted about that in the politically correct language of parents tell you to, "Shut the Hell up after 11:00 p.m." If you want to do things you'll regret come morning (especially if it happens to snow overnight), you better roll on down the hill to Vernon. But nightlife aside, the pitch, powder, and price of skiing Putnam proves that it pays to look beyond the lame-terrain stereotype most of us associate with family resorts.

For information about Silver Star, call 250-542-0224.