Pro Guiding Service - Shaking a Curse

History can be daunting to overcome. People get sucked along by the momentum of their pasts. So do places. Countries, cities, and even ski areas have trouble escaping their reputations and establishing new images the world will accept.

I'm thinking about this as a cabal of dilapidated skiers and I duck the boundary rope near the top of Tod Mountain, British Columbia and traverse toward the bowl-and-glade backcountry runs of Gils.

In my company are several powder zealots from around Kamloops, and they are a sad lot to behold. Scott blew out his knee last year and is still in denial that his body has entered the era of rust, Leslie has broken a shin and blown a knee in seasons' past and fortifies her gimpy leg with a mondo brace, and Leonard shattered his femur and knee several seasons back in a car accident. Dave, however, is the undisputed king of cracked bones. Thanks to a high-speed encounter with a snow groomer many years ago, he has more plates and screws in his skeleton than a John Deer tractor.

Interestingly, this troop is the very embodiment of the "Curse of Tod" I've been hearing about as we ride the lifts after each backcountry run. Quite a curse it is.

In the 1960s when this ski hill was young, the lift shack on the Burfield Chair--then the only lift transporting skiers up the 2900-vertical-foot flanks of Tod Mountain--burned. That killed business for a year. Shortly thereafter, Burfield himself, a major investor and principal force in the hill, died in a plane crash while scoping out the area's potential from the air. That put the kibosh on the mountain's momentum for a few more winters. Several seasons later, high winds whipped a few of the Burfield's chairs around its control wires and the resulting knot pulled down two towers. Another ski season bit the dust. In the 1970s a new owner with capital and dreams of grandeur sold out prematurely after a near-fatal auto wreck crippled him. Then in 1988, the top terminal of the newer triple chair burned, shutting down an important lift for much of that season.

Meanwhile, during the first decade of its existence, Tod's steep (and mainly ungroomable) slopes had the reputation of slaughtering anyone but top skiers. Either you hauled ass down Spillway, Chute, Headwalls, Chief, Juniper Ridge, Kukamungas, Roller Coaster, Expo, or Challenger--an exhilarating tangle of black and double-diamond drops--or you got your butt kicked learning the trade. Sometimes worse. On a mountain that originally had little middle ground, when the slopes developed the occasional sheen, they could (and sometimes did) send skiers on death slides.

The Curse of Tod sent the ski hill into receivership four times and played heavily into the decision to rename the resort when Japanese investors rescued it from its last financial crisis. Realizing that 'Tod' meant 'death' in German, Masayoshi Ohkubo, the mountain's current owner as well as the owner of the Nippon Cable Company, decided that to shed the curse they should shed the name. So in 1992, using a name that marketing consultants must have concocted, Death Mountain was reborn as Sun Peaks Resort.

The name, though smacking of saccharin, is appropriate today as the casualties of the old Tod Mountain and I pole through sunlight and powder along the kilometer-long ridge capping Gils. We've been cutting new lines out here for the past day and a half and, though our traverses to and from the powder fields steadily lengthen, the bounty has been knee deep.

This traverse leads us to the steepest pitch we've found. One at a time we glide onto a convex slope that steadily steepens. Soon we're weaving down a 45-degree pitch that sloughs with each cut of the skis. Snow swirls in the air, around our bodies, and under our skis as our emotions swirl between euphoria (over the flight) and fear (about the avalanche potential). The snow sticks and we spill into gentler glades of dwarfed evergreens where the wind streaming off our bodies spews the 4% snow into a fog that lingers behind us.

At the bottom, our group's boisterous scrum gets interrupted by the breaking of branches on the slopes above us. A streak of purple explodes from the trees, flies over a four-foot rock band, and triggers a slough where it lands. The streak instantly surges ahead of the slough and hits 50 miles an hour carving 50-meter turns.

Naturally it's another local and as Glen screams to a stop alongside us, we issue high-marks for his slopeside routine. He's half the age of most of the derelicts assembled here, but is well on his way to fitting in. The thighs of his Gore-Tex pants have been clawed into shards, and a compost of powder and pine needles fills each leg.

"Looks like the trees nailed you," Scott laments.

"Nah, that happened days ago."

We follow a rutted traverse through stands of conifers and glide in bounds at a point where the development from the past several years of Japanese ownership comes into view. It's a view that suggests change is more than name-deep on this mountain.

From here, the new quad up the southeast flanks of Tod, another quad up the southern slopes of Sundance Ridge, and a score of newly cut runs for intermediates (boosting the mountain's in-bound skiing to 1000 acres) are all visible. Down at the base station, new lodges, condos, residences, and hotels have all burst from the soil with the suddenness of adolescent acne. The Stumbock Lodge, built by a German tour company, is a revolving door of European visitors. And Nancy Greene's Lodge has grown from concept to a 200-room leviathan in just two seasons.

Knowing that Nancy Greene, the Canadian skiing sensation of the 1968 Olympics, and Al Raine, Greene's husband and a high-level resort promoter, have switched their allegiances from the coast to the interior of British Columbia is significant. The couple was pivotal in catalyzing the Whistler/Blackcomb explosion and their belief that this resort is the regional up-and-comer suggests the Curse of Tod may, indeed, be history.

All of this receives mixed reviews from my present company. They're exuberant that their mountain has risen from the ashes of bankruptcy...again. And they're not complaining that the new Sunburst quad (used in tandem with the Crystal triple) gets them to their pay dirt without needing to endure the 21-minute ride up the prehistoric Burfield Chair.

But the resurrection has come with a price. Infrastructure, improvements, and marketing muscle have boosted visitations 25% to 30% during each of the past three seasons. Though the place is deserted by U.S. standards, as Leonard looks down the slopes he voices the sentiment of his mates, "Look at all the Gorbies out here today."

They drown their misery with speed. The broken bodies assume a tuck and bee-line through the zigzagging visitors with a 40 mph speed differential.

On the ride back up, I ask about the mountain's future--the new chair that will open the north-facing slopes of Morrisey Mountain; the lift up the Chutes that would open new alpine terrain; the new hotels, restaurants, and amenities slated for the base. I mention the lip service Al Raine and Nancy Greene give to making Sun Peaks the Avis of British Columbia--the resort skiers will visit when they're ready to branch out from Whistler.

Perhaps my companions are too molded by the mountain's sputtering past to believe in the possibility of an explosive future. They see some of this as sales speak. Business, they tell me is not exactly a Field-of-Dreams proposition where you build it and they come. "They'll build a little, see if it flies, then build a little more."

At the top everyone agrees the in-bound steeps will be here tomorrow, but who can ever be sure about powder? We duck the ropes and head out to harvest what we can while we can. It is still a private playground out here, but considering the deep pocket of the Nippon Cable Company and the fact that the first stage of their creation is creating a splash, this playground could become a lot more public. The little area that beat up the skiers around me may, in five years, be the little area that's not.

Detail, Details

Sun Peaks Resort is located 35 miles north of Kamloops, British Columbia and is a 3 1/2-hour drive northeast of Vancouver. Call 250-578-7222 for info.