Banff: powder, peaks & purity

It was a familiar scenario: The run was blue, the sky bluer still, and I was cruising down 8,765-foot Mount Whitehorn in Banff National Park in Canada. Packed powder was flying up from the edges of my snowboard into the just-below-freezing air. I was grinning beneath my ski mask.

Then suddenly I wobbled, lost my balance and juddered to a halt.

No, I'm not some out-of-control punk boarder, nor had I stumbled upon a group of slow-weaving ski-schoolers. I had simply rounded a corner and smacked into what I would come to call The View — a stretch of snowcapped Canadian Rockies so intricately cragged and utterly enormous that every time I rediscovered them, I had to slow down and gawk at their impassive beauty. Only then, reinvigorated by The View, could I charge to the base and hurry single-mindedly back onto the gondola at the Lake Louise ski area.

Strangely for such a massively mountainous place, Banff — a catchall designation for three ski areas and handful of small towns in the park's 2,564 square miles — is defined by what it is not.

It is not Park City, overrun with celebrities. Nor is it luxury-minded Aspen, nor status-conscious St. Moritz, nor hard-partying Whistler. There are no trends in Banff — it is not slick. It has never hosted a Winter Olympics (though it was the venue for some events of Calgary's 1988 Games). Even Banff's mountains are negatives, formed less by the upthrusting of clashing tectonic plates than by 20 million years of erosion.

Like a Hemingway sentence, what remains after all that paring-down is a thing of remarkable purity. At Banff, one can focus on what really matters: deep snow (30 feet per year in some places) and how to traverse it.

Still, before diving into Banff powder, certain matters must first be disposed of — where to sleep, for instance, during those awful hours when one cannot be on a mountain. The town of Banff is the obvious solution. It's the most developed in the park's confines, with supermarkets, restaurants, shops and several dozen hotels, from the grand, castlelike Fairmont Banff Springs, built in 1888 and perched above the rushing Bow River, down to the Blue Mountain Lodge, the 10-room bed-and-breakfast that my wife, Jean, and I checked into for a few days.

The lodge may have been modest, but it had what we needed: a big bed, a powerful heater, a gear shed and fresh-baked croissants every morning. And while its location, two blocks from downtown, may not have been as dramatic as the Fairmont's, we had no end of stunning views, for at the end of every little lane, gargantuan hunks of mountain loomed, dwarfing the town's two- and three-story wood and brick homes.

To Sunshine Village

Our base established, we had only one mild dilemma: Which of the three ski areas — Mount Norquay, Sunshine Village and Lake Louise — to visit first? Norquay, right outside town, seemed like a natural place to warm up, but when we mentioned the plan to Heather Coolidge, the lodge's manager, she looked confused.

"Is there some reason you want to go to Norquay?" she asked.

It was a reaction we would encounter often, accompanied by a look that implied we had no idea why we'd come to Banff. Norquay, we knew, was small, but we hadn't realized it was so small — just five lifts! — that no serious powder hound would consider it unless every other mountain within driving distance were bone-dry. (To be fair, Norquay does host a popular night session on Fridays.)

Instead, we chose Sunshine Village. About 10 miles west of Banff, Sunshine Village sprawls over three mountains and 3,358 acres of terrain, with more than half of its runs labeled intermediate, and has excellent and plentiful snow, long runs, fast lifts and eye-popping scenery.

At least I imagined it was eye-popping. That first day, Sunshine was a misnomer — cloudy, with light flakes falling steadily as we rode the chairlifts to the top of 8,954-foot Lookout Mountain. Occasionally, the sun would break through and illuminate an otherworldly field of moguls above the tree line. Then we'd strap on our boards, glance at Delirium Dive, the certain-death cliff run on the mountain's backside, and go the other way, threading through Douglas firs before catching a hushed two-seater back to the peak. No traffic, no lift lines, just me, Jean and the mountains.

The "village" of Sunshine Village consisted of a day lodge, a saloon and the Sunshine Inn hotel. . That was it. When the day was done, there was no lingering with locals. It was back to Banff.

In the waning hours of the day, the town of Banff is lovely. The sun takes its time sinking into the west, and the deepening indigo of the sky limns the surrounding mountains with startling clarity. The lights come on along Banff Avenue, and after an après-ski nap, tourists wander in little groups, looking for food and amusement. They seem refreshingly normal — no Prada, no furs — and it makes sense that even though Banff does boast a Louis Vuitton shop, it's overshadowed by a two-story Gap next door.

Lake Louise

The next morning, we went to Lake Louise, a 45-minute drive from Banff. With 4,200 skiable acres spread over four peaks (including Mount Whitehorn) and a vertical drop of 3,250 feet, Lake Louise is the classic big-mountain experience. But statistics hardly do it justice. How, for instance, do you quantify The View?

Number of degrees you can turn without losing sight of The View: 360.

Number of clouds in the sky: 0.

Number of peaks visible: Infinite.

Jean and I carved through the powder bowls, watched skiers leap off cliffs in a big-mountain competition, then rode the Ptarmigan lift to around 8,000 feet above sea level and stared at an unending ocean of mountains. Their mass didn't make us feel small; rather, it rendered size irrelevant. This, The View told us, was a universe that could encompass both puny us and the Canadian Rockies.

"Lake Louise is living proof that God is a skier — and he lives here," said Sandy Best, an owner of the tour company SkiCanada, whom we ran into on one of the peaks.