With the skis slightly on edge, guide them by shifting your weight from side to side."4. Find a rhythm "Use short, regular, serpentine turns to establish a rhythm: don't traverse the fall line too much."5. Press and bounce "Press down on the skis to rebound into the next turn rather than jumping them, which is difficult in deep snow.". Nobody expects a holiday brochure to tell the whole, warts-and-all truth about the destinations it features. But any skier reading what Inghams has to say about Kimberley, in British Columbia, could be excused for thinking that the tour operator had exceeded the bounds of normal brochure hype. Nobody expects a holiday brochure to tell the whole, warts-and-all truth about the destinations it features. But any skier reading what Inghams has to say about Kimberley, in British Columbia, could be excused for thinking that the tour operator had exceeded the bounds of normal brochure hype. Introducing it as "a very friendly, very Canadian and very affordable family resort" is fair enough, even if the two senior resort managers I met there were both very American.
Adding that it "offers an incredible variety of skiing terrain and consistently great snow conditions" goes perhaps a little too far, even for a normal season - and the region's inconsistent snowfall this winter, the worst in 40 years, has meant that up to a third of Kimberley's 63 pistes have had to be closed. But the brochure's boldest, most absurd claim is that there are "no queues for the lifts". How could that be true?The week before last, the claim was entirely accurate. The base of the main North Star Express chairlift, a high-speed four-seater, was eerily quiet; and for someone such as myself, working on new snowboarding "skills", the wide, well-groomed and almost deserted green/blue piste running off the lift offered the perfect environment.Kimberley is so peaceful because it is in transition. The town, with a population of about 6,000, grew up around a zinc, lead and silver mine, which was once the biggest in Canada. Although the mine remains in use - elegant plumes of steam rise out of the mountainside from the shafts on a cold day - it is winding down, and set to close in December 2002. So the local government has for some years been trying to develop tourism as an alternative source of employment.Its first, unwise initiative was to create the Platzl centre in the Seventies.
Imagine if BBC-TV were to produce a sequel to Hi-de-Hi set in a Bavarian-style tourist village - the rough translation "Grüss di', Grüss di' " would make a suitable title - and you will get some idea of the production values of Kimberley's first visitor attraction. The village's half-timbered retail units house not only a schnitzel restaurant but also a Bavarian-style electrical equipment shop and a hardware store that sells shoulder-length rubber gloves for hunters who want to disembowel their victims on site. A wide range of other souvenirs is also available, most of which you wouldn't buy for your worst enemy.Kimberley's second, far better idea was, in 1998, to sell its ski area to one of the country's big skiing conglomerates, Resorts of the Canadian Rockies. Run by a mountainman-turned-mogul called Charlie Locke who made his fortune from investments and oil (hence the name of his holding company: Locke, Stock and Barrel), it embarked on a £200m investment programme at Kimberley, to double the size of the ski area and create a new mountain base. The Triple Creek Lodge - one of those typically generous North American hotels, the wide open spaces of which echo the landscape outside - has already opened alongside the North Star Express lift, and condominiums are springing up around it.At present, Kimberley's business amounts to no more than 130,000 skier-days per season, an average of just over 1,000 people daily. That number is set to grow, along with the resort; and no doubt there will, eventually, be queues for the lifts (although the expansion plans include a further extension of the ski area).
But for the time being Kimberley is a compact, quiet resort, ideal for families, with plenty of intermediate pistes, plus some tougher runs down its heavily wooded slopes.Despite the name of the company that owns it, Kimberley is not a resort of the Canadian Rockies. It actually lies on a range immediately to the west, the Purcells - which means that, on a clear day, you get a far better view of the Rockies than if you were skiing in them. But the mountains make a much more spectacular sight - an endless parade of peaks running along the horizon like an idealised, painted backdrop - from the prairie near the city of Calgary, where Charlie Locke made his fortune in the boom time of the 1970s, working initially for the stockbrokers Merrill Lynch and in banking before starting to buy oil and gas leases.But Locke, now in his early fifties, is also a qualified mountain guide, and in his youth he pioneered more than 40 climbing routes, including the first ascent of the north face of Mount Temple. His twin passions, for deal-making ("I read balance sheets for a hobby," he once said) and the mountains, led him to purchase the resort of Lake Louise in 1981 and, subsequently, the three nearby ski areas at Wintergreen, Fortress and Nakiska - the last costing him, so it is said, a single dollar. He also bought a log cabin from the Banff National Park for C$2,000, re-erecting it as the family home within sight of the Rockies.
Unfortunately he did a poor job of "chinking" the gaps between the logs, allowing the weather to penetrate; but his ski resort investments meant, so one of his staff told me, that this was a household "in which six inches of fresh snow on the bed was a cause for celebration".At the end of the 20th century, Locke's skiing empire grew rapidly: Fernie was bought in 1997, Kimberley in 1998 - and last year the Resorts of the Canadian Rockies stretched 2,000 miles towards the Atlantic, with the purchase of Mont-Sainte-Anne and Stoneham in Quebec. Fernie, set in the Rockies 75 miles east of Kimberley, has already proved a great success, growing from a regional destination with 145,000 skier-days at the time of its purchase to a resort of international renown attracting more than twice as much business.The big ski area, encompassing 106 pistes, announces itself with three dramatic black runs that plunge down a steep, wooded face above the resort base. Beyond them are six bowls that provide a wealth of tough, exhilarating skiing even when - as this season - the annual snowfall has fallen far short of the 29ft-average. Indeed, the sole disappointment at Fernie was that I did not get to meet Charlie Locke.
04/11 - 07/11 Find Jason Aldean Tickets performing in Mullins Center, Riverbend Music Center. Jason Aldean is performing in Amherst, Cincinnati and Mountain View. Jason Aldean tickets
04/11 - 05/11 Buy Akon Tickets staging in Bank Atlantic Center, Boardwalk Hall Arena. Akon is staging in Fort Lauderdale, Atlantic City and Pittsburgh. Akon tickets
04/11 - 07/11 Find Rush Tickets playing in Gorge Amphitheatre, Greensboro Coliseum. Rush is playing in Quincy, Greensboro and Toledo. Rush tickets