Ascending to Sapphire Col. Photo by Patricia Hughes

Skiing the backcountry at Roger’s Pass in British Columbia is a lot like gambling: you put yourself out there and hope to come out okay at the end of the day. For four days I explored this ski touring mecca, thrilled by knee-deep powder and infinite terrain, but also feeling a little threatened by the risk of avalanche. I felt like I was tempting fate.

Rogers Pass (elevation 4,534 feet/1382 m) is located in Canada’s Glacier National Park between Revelstoke and Golden in the Selkirk Mountains. Nearly 300 avalanche-related deaths have occurred here in the past century. All the ski runs cross avalanche paths and skiers need to be experienced, fit mountaineers to really enjoy the terrain. On the other hand, when the snow conditions are just right, the area offers some of the most premier ski mountaineering in the world.

Each morning a detailed weather and snow report is posted in the lounge at the Best Western Glacier Park Lodge. The avalanche danger is described in five meticulous levels, increasing from low (green), to moderate (yellow), to considerable (orange), to high (red) to extreme (red with black border.)

Because I’m writing this, I obviously lived to tell the tale. Conditions were generally moderate that week, meaning natural avalanches were unlikely but human-triggered avalanches were possible, especially on south-facing slopes warmed by sun. We enjoyed a consolidated base with several inches of fresh, fluffy snow and consistent temperatures between zero and twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Just to be sure, we wore avalanche beacons and carried shovels, dug snow pits to test the layers and buddied up with other skiers when it was time to descend a new bowl.

In Roger’s Pass, there are always new bowls to descend. The trails up the Connaught and Illicillewaet drainages branch out to infinite possibilities. Gleaming, untracked bowls beckon. Some appear improbably steep from the trail, but once you reach them, they open up to reasonably-pitched slopes that descend for thousands of feet.

I came away from Rogers Pass addicted to the brilliant mornings, plowing up-track through evergreen forests, arriving on cols to enjoy a windless lunch break, and flying down silent, powdery runs, only to turn around and do it again.

"I crossed (the slide paths) quickly, realizing one of them was the site of an avalanche that killed seven teenagers just two years earlier."

The first day my husband Roy and I started from the parking lot behind the lodge and headed up the Connaught drainage toward Balu Pass. We crossed two significant slide paths, one dropping from Grizzly Mountain and the other from Ursus Minor. I crossed them quickly, realizing one of them was the site of an avalanche that killed seven teenagers just two years earlier. I breathed easier when the debris was behind me.

It snowed the whole day, so we stayed in the trees for better visibility. We found a pleasant bowl under Bruins Pass, climbed to 6,800 feet and spent the afternoon yo-yoing the hill with a couple from Whistler. Occasionally the clouds would thin and the view opened to show off the pointy tip of Mt. McDonald to the east.

This was my first ski of the season, no thanks to the 30-year low snowfall in the Washington Cascades where I live, and it felt good to drop into the familiar telemark stance. After six hours we returned to the lodge and I switched off my beacon with a relieved and satisfied sigh. The ski vacation was off to a good start.

There are only two reasonable choices for lodging at the summit. One is the dorm-style Wheeler and Asulkan huts run by the Alpine Club of Canada and accessed by hiking in one or six kilometers, respectively. The cushier choice is the Best Western, the sole hotel for sixty miles in any direction. The hotel has fifty rooms, a dining room, lounge, breakfast café, sauna, hot tub, swimming pool and, if you need them (which we did), jumper cables.

It felt very European, this luxury after a challenging day in the outdoors. In America, the backcountry is relatively inaccessible, for better or for worse, a primitive landscape that demands gritty self-reliance and schlepping a super-heavy pack. Not one single hot tub marks the pass in the North Cascades, for example.

But at the Best Western, the apres ski environment is a cross between family picnic and romantic get-away. Everyone walks around in ski booties and glows rosy from the day’s efforts. It’s a national park lodge, so it has the requisite exposed beams set in high ceilings, humongous stone fireplace and stuffed bison head on the wall. Best of all, the guests are all backcountry buffs, so you immediately like them even though you know nothing about them.

A list of backcountry skiing commandments posted in the lounge set the tone for comaraderie. Rule number one is: "Thy shalt not disparage thy fellow skier. Fixed or free-heeled, one board or two - if you are in the backcountry you are among kindred spirits. This however, does not apply to those that bear false witness to summits by riding helicopters to the top. In this case, disparagement is acceptable."

Nothing brings us together like a common enemy. But we didn’t have to disparage anyone that week, because heli-skiing is not allowed in the national park, nor is snowmobiling or cat skiing.