Revelstoke is the youngest big mountain in Canada, opened in 2007 and still privately owned. The numbers are striking: 1700 hectares of marked terrain, 260 km of pistes, 13 greens, 27 blues, 14 reds and 21 blacks, all served by seven lifts that each access enormous, gladed, ungroomed pods of the Selkirk Mountains. The Revelation Gondola and the Stoke Chair stack 1713 m of vertical between them, the most in North America, and the snow is almost always cold and dry: the interior BC snowbelt simply piles up. There is genuine beginner ground low on the mountain, but Revelstoke is built for intermediates who want to learn trees and for advanced skiers who came for the steeps in Greely Bowl and North Bowl. Cat-skiing and heli ops add hundreds of square kilometres if the resort feels small. Revelstoke town, population about 8000, sits on the Trans-Canada Highway at the bottom, an old railway and logging hub with a real grocery store, bakeries, microbreweries and zero pretension. Closest airports are Kelowna, two hours west, and Calgary, four hours east.