Jeff "fartecho at yahoo dot com" wrote in
:

http://www.canadianmountainproperty....ring_pines.htm
l That place considers themself ski in/out...but i've got a quote from
them - about as much for a week's stay w/ lift tickets as what I was
expecting to pay with that AND airfare (an additional 500 CDN
dollars). ouch.

...
Anyway, I'm basically looking for a cheap way to stay in either
Kicking Horse, or somewhere similar (suggestions?) during mid Feb.
of '05. Hopefully an on mountain condo. but...CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP is
my motto. Email me @ fartecho at yahoo dot com or reply to the post
if you've got help for me.

Jeff

I spent a week at Kicking Horse last March. It was Excellent! It is a
totally different vibe than Whistler, which has some awesome terrain, but
matching crowds and prices IMO.

There were a lot of chalets under construction last year, so I would
imagine they now have a bunch of ski in/out accomodations.

We stayed at Moberly Mountain Lodge - it is a big B&B with about 7
bedrooms, each with their own bathroom, and a games room in the basement.
We were the only ones there that week, so we had the place to ourselves.
We were 3 guys (me, my 15 y/o son, my brother in law) and we rented one
of their little cabins - an upstairs loft bedroom with 2 twin beds, and a
pullout couch on the main. You might want to rent both cabins for your
group, or just take over the lodge - the host/hostess are great. We
didn't have reservations, we called them from Lake Louise while skiing
there for a couple of days.

KH is odd in that most accommodations include a discounted lift ticket,
which was a good deal - I'd do that again.

Golden is a long drive - maybe 15 minutes from the base of the hill.
Moberly is a ways out of Golden (maybe aother 10 minutes), but we figured
if you have to rent a car and pack it full of gear every day, an extra 10
minutes doesn't make much difference. Also, our location was quite
private and out in the woods, great stars at night. The town of Golden
is not a picturesque tourist destination, it is more of a "working" town
- not that there's anything wrong with that...

Night life is a bit thin, we were just as happy to grab a few beers at
the pub in Moberly (it's not a town, it's a location, but there is a
pub).

Another (very) odd thing about KH is the restaurant at the top of the
hill. It is really good, and really expensive. The three of us spent
over $100 on lunch once, but that included some nice wine and local
micro-brews, and a very nice meal. But we kinda got into the whole
thing, and ate lunch there every day. Most lunches would have been
around $25 per person. Yikes. When you finish, you step outside and
have to ski down some 4300 vertical, and the top can be a bit "tricky".
I found the beers helped with the confidence (but not with the
execution). Of course you could BYO and eat at the base lodge.

The week we were there (March 15 - 23) was very uncrowded. It was
getting toward the end of the season, and other resorts were starting to
hurt a bit for snow, but KH had good coverage, and we got a little bit of
powder to keep us smiling. The worst lines we ever experienced were on
the bottom lift in the mornings, where we once waited 3 minutes to get
on. Most of the time the only wait was for the other guys to show up and
get their skis off.

There's only 3 lifts there, but they open up quite a lot of quite good
terrain. KH is the only resort I've been to that I wouldn't ski a marked
trail. A couple of their double-blacks are a bit intimidating. In fact,
so are a couple of their single blacks. I'm not a bad skier, although at
48 I've learned more about fear. When I finished university, I spent 2
winters skiing, so I did learn how to get down most slopes.

Check out their maps - our favourite run was to take the gondola to the
top, take a short steep run down to the "Stairway to Heaven" chair, ride
the chair up and drop into Fuez Bowl. There are a variety of ways to get
into Fuez, you just have to choose one that feels right at the time.
There are no lifts in the bowl, you drop in across a ridge from the lift
area. So it's very quiet and uncrowded. Eventually you come back around
to the main part of the ski area, and do the bottom half of the run on
regular trails. It's a nice combo. Then you can do it all over again!

FWIW my son has been hounding me to go back this year. Yeah, he liked
it...

The URL for the lodge is:
http://www.kickinghorseresort.com/kh.../ldges_mbrlymo
unt.htm

HTH

Dave

ps - another excellent low budget resort is Red Mountain, in Rossland
B.C. Excellent steeps, good snow, fantastic trees. Two not-huge
mountains which are kind of conical. You can ski almost anywhere
inbetween the marked runs. Some of the semi-marked runs have great
trees, ledges, open fields, everything. New ownership this year, don't
know what that will bring. We stayed at "Carolyn's Corners" chalets
which were described as being "ski out". You can't "ski in" from them,
because they're about 80 below the level of the base lifts. But they'd
hired an excellent Aussie guy who spent the mornings on a skidoo with a
waterski rope with 3 handles attached. And he'd drag groups of 3 high
enough up the hill that they could then ski down to the lifts. Unique,
and fun!

dh

pps - sorry this got so long, apparently I need to go skiing. I'm going
to try a new service from my ISP - you may/may not find KH pics he
http://ca.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/dav...bum?.dir=/bb84
&.src=ph&.tok=phN2x6BBD0.GAJOW
Click on slide show - I find it's best to stop the show and advance one
slide at a time, otherwise it goes by too fast. It's not the best way to
share pictures, but it's new and it's free...