Sept. 1
John Korobanik
This morning I slipped on a black "Ski Big Three" T-shirt -- it was on top of the pile of about 50 T-shirts and I just put on whichever one is on top -- and it got me thinking about skiing. Yes, I know, it's only Sept. 1 and ski season is months away. However, golfing has been mostly a failure this summer, having played only about 6-8 games, so why not look ahead in hopes that skiing will be more successful.
The T-shirt (from Banff-Sunshine-Lake Louise for those not familiar with the slogan) was one of several I still have from the days when I was the ski writer for the Edmonton Journal -- those years when I would work Monday through Friday then dash off to a ski hill for the weekend to gather material for the ski/snow pages.
Sadly, those days are long gone, having retired back in 2010. Just as golf has suffered from lack of playing, so, too has skiing. No longer having the Journal to pay for my ski trips, I have discovered just how costly skiing is .... except at Marmot Basin where, thanks to long-established friendships with Jasper hotel people and Brian Rode and Dave Gibson at Marmot, I can still ski for very little cost.
Still, skiing is a passion and thankfully it is a sport one can pursue as long as one is capable of standing on skis. So this will be the first of my ski blogs, which I plan to develop into a regular offering and, who knows, maybe my contacts at the other resorts will invite me back (no sense hiding one of the reasons for this is there?).
So, with snow still months away, I thought I would begin a weekly writing to get back into the routine and re-discover the art of feature writing that I seem to have lost. Until the snow falls, I’ll write about what's new and old -- combination of a few timely news items about the sport and some of my favourite stories I've written over the years.
Great news from Nancy
First, however, I just have to share this good news I received in an email Thursday from Nancy Greene. For those of you who may not know, Canada’s female athlete of the 20th century, has been undergoing treatment for metastasized thyroid cancer. She had radioactive iodine treatment a while back and this week she got the results of a wedge biopsy of the nodules in her lung that was done about 10 days ago. And it was good news!!
The cells have now been identified as low grade (slow growing) lymphoma, which is very treatable. Now she’s off to see an oncologist specializing in lymphomas to see what the next step will be.
Meanwhile, she said, she’s “eating well and taking some supplements to ensure my own immune system is doing its job. Everyone was worried that the cells in the lungs might have been metastasized thyroid cells that had mutated so as to not absorb iodine which would be problematic. We are very pleased that the cells are not thyroid cells. With the low-grade lymphoma there is a good chance that no treatment will be required, as the nodules have not changed in the past six months.”
You can bet she’ll be among the first skiers to hit the slopes when Sun Peaks open this winter.
Deals still to be found
Since the season is a few months away there are still deals to be found at almost all of the resorts, either by taking advantage of the early bird season ticket sales or purchasing one of the many different ski cards available.
Marmot Basin is again offering the Escape Card, available right now online for $75. So what do you get with it? For starters, half price lift tickets all season long. That’s for one, two or three-day ski passes, every day this season, with no blackouts.
And that’s not all. Among the other perks are discounts on high performance ski and boards rentals, food and non-alcoholic drinks at Marmot, various hotels deals in Jasper and 50 percent off lift tickets at Edmonton area ski hills.
For those who prefer a season ticket, they’re on sale until Sept. 30. The early bird rates range from $2,395 for a family (a savings of $264), to $1,135 for an individual adult (saving $130) to $810 for seniors, students and youths (saving $80).
The season pass includes up to 50 percent off Jasper room rates Sunday-Thursday and 25 percent off on weekends and holidays plus discounts on Marmot rentals, repair shop services, private lessons and logo merchandise.
For the offerings from other resorts, just go to their websites, like the Ski Big Three one to see what’s available from Lake Louise, Sunshine and Norquay. https://www.skibig3.com/
Until next week, I leave you with this story (written in 2014), appropriate I think with the news about Nancy and kids returning to school.
Nancy welcomes families to Sun Peaks
John Korobanik
It's shortly after 8 a.m. Monday at Sun Peaks Resort and there's a steady stream of youngsters heading to school; riding the magic carpet, packs on their backs, skis or snowboards strapped to their feet.
School here for the 70 or so students from kindergarten through Grade 12 is in two small buildings at the top of the lift that services the resort's beginner slopes. The students - children of families who live year-round in the municipality - regularly achieve high marks in their schooling, delivered by three teachers and the Internet. During breaks and after school they dash outside to put on their skis or boards and get in a few runs.
The growth of Sun Peaks into a municipality and its development into a year-round resort has proven the skeptics were so very wrong when, years ago, they said Tod Mountain and its world-class steep terrain could not be converted into a family friendly resort. Even when Nippon Cable Company Ltd. of Japan purchased the resort in 1992, changed the name to Sun Peaks and prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, skiers and boarders - including those in nearby Kamloops - were not convinced.
"That was for a couple of reasons," says Al Raine, one of the early developers and now mayor of Sun Peaks. "One, it had a reputation for being very cold.
"Second, most of the terrain was very, very steep, a lot of black diamond and double black diamond runs.
"A lot of people in Kamloops who were intermediate skiers would go to ski Silver Star (at Vernon) because this was just too tough for them."
Well, 21 years and about $600 million later, Sun Peaks has become a world-class resort that appeals to skiers and boarders of all skill levels.
With a colourful, efficient, European-style village with ski-to-the-lift capability from virtually every building and a variety of non-skiing activities, it is one of Western Canada's most family-friendly resorts.
The resort offers a wide range of non-skiing activities, such as dogsled tours, horse-drawn sleigh rides, tubing, snowmobile tours, snowshoeing and rides in the grooming machine. It has a busy calendar of events ranging from ski and boarding camps to the annual Okanagan wine festival.
The resort also hosts the annual World Cup speed skiing event in February.
But skiing and snowboarding remain the primary draws for visitors, and Sun Peaks has made sure it offers enough variety of terrain to keep every family happy.
"We've done a good job of making sure that off every lift there's novice terrain, there's low-intermediate terrain, there's advanced-intermediate terrain and there's the black runs," says Raine, who coached Canada's national ski team to prominence in the 1960s. The two married in 1969. "So it doesn't matter which lift you went on, a family with all different ski levels could all find a run and meet at the bottom," he says.
In Sun Peaks for the annual Sun Peaks Family Cup, Australian Ian Miles, with wife Alison Chivers and sons Riley, 12, Rob, 14, and daughter Remy, 18, said they first came to Sun Peaks in 2013, and enjoyed it so much they returned for a month this winter.
"I think (the kids) will keep coming as long as we keep paying," Miles says, laughing. "Riley loves the terrain park and the jumps, Robbie likes to ski fast and Remy likes to ski powder. So there's something for everybody and a lot of runs here."
Stay and be pampered
The village is located near the bottom of those trails, in a valley between three mountain faces that have 11 lifts, 125 runs, nearly 4,000 acres of terrain plus 30 kilometres of groomed and track set cross-country trails.
The village has nine hotels, a hostel, day lodge, a sports centre, about 15 shopping outlets and more than 20 eateries, offering everything from upper-end dining to cafes and coffee shops.
"The people who work here make the difference between a good resort and a great resort," Raine says over a latte in the Bolacco Café. "It's people like the owners of this place."
Konrad Glowczynski, who came from Poland via Italy, and his wife Elizabeth run one of the busiest eateries in the resort. They offer a variety of superb coffees, lattes, espressos, incredibly delicious pastries that Elizabeth bakes each morning and plenty of breakfast buns and lunch sandwiches.
On top of the food and drinks, the hospitality and friendliness of the staff are fantastic.
Probably no one at the resort is friendlier than Nancy Greene Raine.
Now a sitting senator and an officer of the Order of Canada, Greene Raine won the overall World Cup titles in 1967 and 1968 and had 13 World Cup victories (the most by any Canadian skier in history, and still a Canadian record) before retiring at age 24. Named Canadian female athlete of the century in 1999, the now 70-year-old is director of skiing at Sun Peaks and rarely a day goes by when she doesn't hit the slopes and spend hours showing visitors the mountain while offering tips to improve their skiing.
Whether in a lift line, enjoying coffee or a lunch or just standing around, Greene Raine is constantly being approached by strangers who still want to shake her hand and meet one of Canada's best known and most successful athletes. Most Sundays she also hosts a welcome reception.
A lot of people in the ski industry raised their eyebrows when the Raines left Whistler after 25 years to move to Sun Peaks in the early 1990s. Just as they were in on the ground floor at Whistler, so too were they at Sun Peaks, where they built the Nancy Greene's Cahilty Lodge, a condo-style hotel.
"To be in Whistler those 25 years when it was just getting started and then moving to Sun Peaks and starting a new one (ski resort development) again, it's really interesting to be part of a pioneer ski resort development," says Greene Raine. "It's different from Whistler in that we're a long way from a major urban city. We have the wonderful city of Kamloops, which is like 80,000 to 100,000 in the trading area. And I'm lucky because the profile I have as an athlete, as an Olympic champion, helps the tourism industry."
Here’s the link to the story in the Edmonton Journal: http://www.edmontonjournal.com/travel/Nancy+Greene+Raine+welcomes+families+snowy+Peaks+Resort/9509033/story.html
