About an hour or so after passing through Trail, we came to the access road to get up to Whitewater ski area.  You travel through some beautiful country, and since you are still south of the city of Nelson, you feel like you're in the middle of nowhere.  As near as I can recall, we started out somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 feet in elevation, and then began to climb the access road.  It was much like the access road to Bolton Valley ski resort in Vermont (for those of you who don't know the road, it's long and steep at times), except that it wasn't paved.  As we went higher and higher, the snowbanks on the sides of the trail got larger.  This image from inside Greg's car was taken at approximately 5,000 feet, as we approached the base of the ski area (base elevation of Whitewater = 5,400 feet).  You can see the large snowbank on the right side of the road, and it is essentially the bottom of a mountainside.  The yellow sign you see across the road warns about not stopping due to the possibility of avalanches in certain areas.  We also heard that it is possible to head outside the ski area boundary and ski right down to the access road and hitch a ride back up.  Take a look at the Whitewater trail map (next image) to get a feel for how this is done.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Here's part of the trail map for Whitewater, click on the map and you can see an even bigger version if you want details and trail names.  Take a look and you'll see that the access road comes in from the right side of the picture, and basically dead-ends into a huge bowl.  The far right side of this picture is where you could head out of bounds and ski down to the access road as I mentioned.  The lift setup is simple, because there are basically only two chair lifts.  This picture focuses on the right side of the bowl as you drive in, and the red line you see is the Summit double chair lift.  This chair lift was the steeper of the two, and serviced some incredible 40 degree terrain directly below it.  On the other side of the bowl was the Silver King Chair (red line at the bottom of this picture).  It serviced more moderate terrain with fun glades of blue / black pitch.  I'll have another map below to show the trails on that side.  Both lifts gave you access to the huge open terrain that was just out of bounds (some of that terrain is visible on the left side of this picture). (Image obtained from the Whitewater web site)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Here's the trail map for the other half of the resort, the area served by Silver King chair lift.  To the far right of this picture, outside the boundary, there is access to some big open terrain at the end of the bowl.  One of our favorite areas for skiing off the Silver King Chair was the Concentrator Trees section.  These trees make up the area to the skier's right of the lift line, and offer some nice blue / black tree skiing.  For a nice big picture of the map, click on it and it will bring you to the Whitewater Web Page.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The image you see on the left is looking up at the Summit Chair from the parking lot.  On the right, a bright box shows what part of the trail network you are looking at.  Take a real good look at the slope that you see in the picture I took, it almost looks like the trail drops straight off the mountain!  It looks steep, it feels steep, it IS steep.  It's certainly one of the steepest trails I've ever seen under a lift, my guess is in the 40 degree range.  Take a look to the right (looking up) of the lift in my picture.  You can probably see areas of white in there; steep chutes galore.  You'll get to see more in a few minutes as the Vermont crew heads in for a closer look ;).  Whitewater is not your average little ski area.  :)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Speedy James is ready to hit the slopes of Whitewater while the rest of us are still fartin' around in the lodge.  Let's just say they have good food.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

No, we didn't start off right away on the steep slopes of the Summit lift, we headed over to explore the terrain on Silver King first.  The picture on the left shows the view looking up the lift line of the Silver King chair, and the map on the right shows the location with respect to the trail network.  The trail directly below the lift is called Concentrator, which starts out with a mellow green pitch, then drops away with a moderate black pitch which you can see in the picture.  It was our first run at the resort, but we couldn't help popping in and out of the trees on the sides of the trail.

LET'S HIT THE SNOW...