October 31, 2021

Ski Touring and Splitboarding Around Sunshine Village

If you want to know where to ski tour and backcountry splitboard in and around Sunshine Village, this post tells you the kind of terrain you can expect, other considerations, and some top spots.

For the purposes of this description the Sunshine Backcountry is anything accessed from Sunshine Ski Resort, Healy Creek, Mt Bourgeau or Redearth Creek Trailheads (on the Trans Canada Highway).

If you have a season pass at Sunshine there are a bunch of options for day ski tours right off the top of the resort. Most of the descents are short and in the Alpine, you can however drop down towards Healy Creek on some fairly steep terrain on those lower visibility days

The Redearth and Bourgeau drainages offer some long ski touring walk-ins to classic steep and wind scoured rockies riding. There are however some gems if you don’t mind walking a long way and going on a bit of an adventure

SUNSHINE BACKCOUNTRY SKI TOURING CHARACTERISTICS

Snow

Sunshine is in a unique spot, it receives a lot more snow than many of the surrounding areas. It still has very much a thin continental snowpack, but has a pretty high annual snowfall for the region. That being said, if you are accessing the more northern ski touring zones (accessed from Highway 1), these tend to be thinner. This is largely due to lower elevation trailheads, though even as you get higher wind seems to have a pretty huge effect on the snowpack.

Crowds

If you exclude Wawa ridge and the terrain accessed very immediately from Sunshine this area sees little in the way of crowds. The Trans Canada and Healy Creek trails will have loads of traffic, however, this will largely be snowshoers, winter hikers and cross country skiers.