A Family Escape to a Snowy Wonderland Called SilverStar

Skicanada.org is excited to partner with SnowSeekers through January 2018 to bring you stories and inspiration about booking a snow-filled adventure you won’t soon forget. In previous installments we wrote about our favourite ski runs in B.C. and 10 tips for planning your BC ski trip. In this column, we introduce you to SilverStar ski resort, a fun place for a winter family escape.

By SnowSeekers.ca

My husband and I spent a fantastic weekend skiing SilverStar Mountain Resort, way back BC (before children). Now that we have a couple kids of our own, we were excited to revisit this snowy wonderland as a family.

“This is winter,” my son declares as soft snowflakes float down from a cloudy sky. It snows a lot in the Monashee Mountains near Vernon, B.C.— about 23 feet of light powder falls onto SilverStar’s 3,282 acres of terrain covering four distinct mountain faces every season, making it the perfect resort for a winter attitude adjustment.

The kids are immediately smitten with the compact village, located mid-mountain, and its colourful Victorian-style homes and buildings. Everything is within walking (or schussing) distance, including the hotels, and we’re geared up and clicked into our skis in no time.

The Comet Express six-person chairlift zooms us up to the summit. From there, our only task is to decide where to point our skis. Should we warm up our rusty quads on the front side’s intermediate cruisers, test our reflexes weaving between trees in the glades on Attridge Face, or tear into Putnam Creek on the daunting backside, where a tangle of steep, advanced runs funnel down to the Powder Gulch Express?

In the end, we find powder bliss on the lower mountain in Silver Woods. The enchanted forest runs of Robin’s Hood, Sherwood Forest, Silver Meadows and Trinity Trees are the perfect pitch for little legs, and the new snowfall collects in soft puffs between evergreen trees. We have, indeed, found winter.

But SilverStar offers so much more than skiing. And with school-age children leading the charge, we discover more of the resort’s kid-pleasing pastimes as the weekend unfolds.