Best ski resorts in Canada

Revelstoke holds the biggest vertical drop in North America, 1713 metres of skiing from summit to base, served by just seven lifts and famous for the deepest, driest powder in interior British Columbia. Family-owned, slightly raw, with a small old railway town at the bottom of the hill.

Whistler Blackcomb is North America's biggest playground, two giant peaks linked by the Peak 2 Peak Gondola, hosting Olympic memories from 2010 and Pacific powder that falls in feet, not inches. A pedestrian village at the base hums all winter long, ninety minutes from Vancouver.

Sunshine sits high inside Banff National Park, three mountains straddling the Continental Divide where the snow falls naturally from early November to mid-May. No snowmaking, no compromises, just dry Rockies powder, big views and a gondola ride from the parking lot to a snowed-in base village.

Lake Louise opens the men's World Cup downhill calendar every November and then settles into a long winter inside Banff National Park, four mountain faces above the turquoise lake, with the Mt Temple and Victoria Glacier framing every photograph you take from the Whitehorn ridge.

Kicking Horse delivers the steepest in-bounds terrain in Canada, 1,260 vertical metres of bowls, chutes and ridgelines crowned by the Eagle's Eye Gondola at 2,450 metres, home to the country's highest restaurant. The town of Golden sits thirteen kilometres below, right on the Trans-Canada Highway between Banff and Revelstoke.

Big White sits at 1755 metres in the BC Interior, where rime-frosted spruces called snow ghosts stand sentry over a village of 6,500 ski-in/ski-out beds, the most on any Canadian mountain. Champagne powder falls deep and dry, and Kelowna airport is just an hour down the road.

Marmot Basin sits inside Jasper National Park, far quieter than the better-known Banff resorts thanks to its position deep in the Canadian Rockies. The base sits at 1,698 metres, the summit reaches 2,612, and the only sounds at the bottom of a run might be a passing elk or a distant pair of caribou.

Fernie is one of the snowiest resorts in the Canadian Rockies, buried each winter under roughly nine metres of light, dry powder. Five legendary alpine bowls fan out from the jagged Lizard Range, feeding into some of the deepest tree skiing in British Columbia. Add a characterful old coal town at its feet and you have a true powder pilgrimage.

Sun Peaks is the second-largest ski area in Canada after Whistler, spread across three mountains and crowned by a pedestrian village built in Tyrolean-meets-Bavarian style. Seventy-five kilometres north of Kamloops, it runs on what locals call Sun Peaks Time: unhurried, sunny and completely lift-queue-free.

Mont-Sainte-Anne stands forty minutes from Quebec City and just thirty from Jean-Lesage airport, looking out across the St Lawrence River toward Île d'Orléans. Its three faces, day and night, deliver classic Laurentian skiing in a wind-blown, snow-bound landscape that feels older and more French-Canadian than anywhere else on the continent.

Tremblant is the queen of the Laurentides, the biggest ski destination east of the Rockies, two hours north of Montreal. A four-sided mountain wrapped in a pedestrian village of bright French-Canadian facades, where snowmaking and East Coast hardpack meet real freestyle and a vibrant après-ski every night.

Silver Star is one of the few resorts where the village really is the lift base: a car-free cluster of buildings painted in bright Victorian colours, sitting straight on the snow. It pairs the dry, light powder of the BC Interior with one of the largest cross-country networks in North America right alongside the downhill terrain.