March 11, 2009 | Tips from Travellers >
Quesnel, Skiing & Snowboarding
View a larger image on flickr.com
Inspired by a North America-wide Burton contest that encouraged growth and participation in women’s snowboarding, seven friends and I embarked on a six-mountain, seven-day snowboarding tour of northern BC in February 2009. The first mountain we hit was Troll Mountain, near Quesnel.
??Rolling in at 9:30 at night, we pulled into the parking lot to meet Troll’s owner, Hilder, who thought we were arriving the next day. Surprise! 24 hours early the lovely Hilder showed us to the hill hostel (which isn’t necessarily used as a hostel at the moment as it’s being renovated), a two-story log cabin with baseboard heating, loads of single mattresses and sleeping bags, plenty of floor space, a flushing toilet and electricity.
Thinking we were in for something SUPER rustic we were all stoked to have a warm roof over our heads and a really gracious hostess who didn’t mind eight women crashing at the hill. ??After we unloaded our gear, Hilder brought us to the hill chalet – an incredible log building that her dad Hans built using logs cut from the property in 1972. Absolutely awesome!
Huge cedar picnic tables with giant cedar rounds for legs have been in the building for years. A big warm fireplace with benches around it warms the building and the restaurant has a shelf of Troll Resort coffee mugs bearing staff members names; they like to recycle here and encourage everyone to use a mug instead of Styrofoam cups.??
Hilder put on a pot of potato bacon soup and sat down to chat with us before making sure we were tucked in comfortably in the cabin. Now that's northern hospitality.?!
The next day we were treated to breakfast and hooked up with JT, Lesley and Erin – our hill ambassadors – who took us on a tour of the mountain. We hit up the terrain park and the ‘secret’ gladed run with loads of nice powder to cruise through. Hilder even had the upper T-bar, which is usually open only on weekends, running, just so that we could get longer runs in.
We worked the cameras and got the ladies to fly through the bits of powder we could find and hit features in the terrain park over and over and over again.
For a bunch of real girls who just love to ride, we felt pretty pampered. Troll Resort totally laid out the red carpet and we’re super grateful! We each even got our own personalized Troll Resort mugs.??