Canada - Red Resort

Our flat in Rossland

We had planned to spend a few weeks at Red Mountain as we had heard great things about it from mates who had been there in the past and also mates that were there at present. It was a challenging mountain “steep and cheap” as they say. We knew 6 mates who had bought seasons passes at Red and were renting a flat in Rossland, the town 5mins from Red. We were originally hoping to crash with them but when we realized they were only renting a small 3 bedroom place we could see some logistical nightmares. Luckily one of the guys knew of a lady who wanted a house to be “house sat” whilst her mate was away in Mexico on the beach for two months. The house was fully furnished, had a DVD, video, telephone, internet and most importantly a good central heating system. It also came complete with a cat called Twinkle who was “the most important thing in the world” according to the lady. Twinkle was a good cat apart from being most active at 5am (the rest of the day she’s asleep) and insisting on waking you up. We paid about $15 per night with included all expenses, so sweet deal! Rossland is an old gold mining town and has managed to keep a lot of its old charm. There is not too much to do in Rossland when you are not skiing so we found ourselves planning elaborate meals, reading, grocery shopping and shoveling snow off the path for fun

Building the igloo
What do you do when it’s a Tuesday, you are too sore to go skiing, it’s a nice day and there is 1.5m of snow in the back garden? Build an igloo. It’s the sort of thing I have always thought would be cool to do and it posed some interesting engineering challenges especially with our primitive tools and the dome roof. We had to shovels and a nicely shaped square bucket, construction took about 8 hours. The finished article was a bit over 3m in diameter and about 2m high at the apex, the doorway was 1.2m high which required a good stoop/ all fours to get through.

Getting to the tricky bit, Andy disappearing quickly We had planned to have an Igloo warming party on the Friday night which would have required it to stand for 3 days… It stood Wednesday ok, but Thursday was a bright sunny spring day, we were up skiing. It was hot and we knew this was going to test it. According to a witness, our mate Quag who was in our flat using the internet there was a mighty thud at 12:05pm and he looked outside: no igloo. Luckily twinkles the cat was not in there or else she would have been cryogenically frozen and slightly compressed. For the engineers out there, the factor of safety ranged from 5 at dawn to about 0.5 at midday on a sunny day. When we returned from skiing we conducted an investigation and determined the failure mechanism: The sun caused the southern wall to soften and kick out which in turn brought the roof down.

The finished article

Andy’s Rock drop at the open cast mine pits

My roof drop at the old mine buildings

Andy’s roof drop with a flat landing - ooooch
We had some good times in Rossland with our mates and got to know some of the locals that worked up the mountain. We went out to a few Parties / DJ gigs at the local pubs which were a good laugh

The Kiwi crew, Glen, Quag, Jim, Blackey, Kaylene and Andy

Red is a cool mountain and the more I skied there the more I liked it. It had some great double diamond tree runs which kept good snow when other parts of the mountain got crusty. It also had some cool open cast mine pits/ buildings which made for some nice terrain. We had the best day skiing of the whole trip so far at Red, we had 20cm of the lightest powder. Heaps of the locals were up that day too but because of the size of the mountain we were getting fresh tracks all day- Primo!