Red Mountain Resort: Canada's first and last great ski town

Wake Williams is the only man I ever met with grizzly bear scratch marks on his front door. "I was reading my book," he tells me. "Then, wham, the whole cabin shook. I went out on my porch, and we eye-balled each other; he was only me-to-you away (two metres). There wasn't any menace in him. I thought he'd gone on his way till I heard him scratching again to get in." Williams is more spooked, though, about the cougar that snuck up on him the time he was going about his business. "The pitfalls of an outside toilet in these parts," he says with a chuckle … now. But then, Wake Williams does live all alone in an old log cabin on a ski run, on top of a mountain in Canada. And that's something you sure as hell won't see at Whistler.

Red Mountain Resort is about as far from Whistler as any ski resort in Canada gets. Sure, with its big mountain reputation (it's home to some of North America's best tree runs, and some of its steepest in-bound slopes), you'll see a who's who of pro skiing and snowboarding filming most winters. But at its heart, Red Mountain Resort's just a very steep hill beside a very old mining town. A lot of locals in these parts prefer flannelette over Gore-Tex, and while it has long attracted a loyal legion of Aussie skiers (some who live here permanently), you won't catch them spilling the beans to anyone. Red Mountain Resort offers the largest area per skier in North America. And it's as steep in-bounds as Jackson Hole (Red Mountain was the first Canadian ski resort to host a World Cup competition), and just as big in size, but while skiers across the world flock to Jackson Hole after every snow dump, Red Mountain Resort manages to stay off their radar entirely.

Truth be told, I'm lost just finding Red Mountain Resort. Some choose to fly to Spokane in Washington state, seeing as Red Mountain's on the border with the US. But I'm arriving via Vancouver and Kelowna, ditching GPS for a dog-eared, photo-copied map. Outside a place called Rock Creek, I take the road east just like the girl at Budget said to. It's a heck of a drive: there are deer running beside the road and there are mountains on every side of me, all framed behind a slow moving river. But the road's turning now to dirt; and so I stop and traipse through knee-deep snow to check a sign to see where the hell I am. I haven't seen a single home in 50 kilometres; which is precisely the distance I've gone the wrong way.

Back on Highway Three, I pass through tiny towns peddling jerky and ammo in stores just one step-this-side-of-decrepit. I pass over some of Canada's highest mountain passes; and by the time I make Red Mountain, I'm not sure Canada gets prettier.

It's twilight as I amble through Rossland's main street. This was once one of the biggest towns in Canada in its gold-rush days. There were 42 saloons and 21 brothels here then. These days hard-as-nails thrill seekers have taken over from hard-as-nails miners, though it looks to me like their beards are every bit as bushy. There's grit in this 1890s streetscape – you can almost smell the bar-fights – but there are bars and restaurants here now that look about as retro-hip as those you'll see in Colorado silver-mining hot-spots, Aspen and Telluride.

It snows overnight, star-shaped flakes so dry and weightless they don't fall so much as float through space. And because of this, I rise just past dawn to beat the crowd. It appears, however, that there isn't one. Twenty centimetres of fresh snow and not a single skier waiting in line for the chairlift to open? "There's never … ever a line-up," the bloke making my coffee says. "And it's been a good season, so 20 centimetres is nothing anyone's going to wake up for."

Perhaps that's just as well too, for the chairlifts move slow round these parts, and there's only five of them (though they do provide access to 110 runs). Locals say anything faster might spoil conversation. "Most things in town get said on the 15-minute ride up the Motherlode Chair," local rider Jamie Rizzuto says.