January 2008 — VOLUME 6 ISSUE 1
Hitting the blacks with Greene
Skiing with an Olympic champion on the slopes of Sun Peaks offers more than you bargained for.
Nancy Greene—Olympic gold medalist and Director of Skiing for Sun Peaks Resort Corporation—not only provides a healthy challenge, but can also help you improve on both your knowledge of the mountain and your skiing or snowboarding skills.
I decided to try this for myself—on a perfect snowy day abundant with fresh powder and non-congested line-ups at the ski lifts.
You can meet Greene at the top of the Sunburst Express chairlift daily at 1 p.m. be you a skier or snowboarder, experienced or not. From there, she assesses everyone’s skill levels and off you go!
As there were no teams racing on OSV, we made this our first run of choice. Greene kept in check with everyone, making stops along the way to provide tips and interesting information about the Austrian Ski Team, whom the race-training run is named for.
Greene—who came to Sun Peaks in 1995 when there was nothing but Bento’s Day Lodge—notes when it comes to her personal choice of ski runs at Sun Peaks, she prefers the steep and deep.
“I enjoy the steeps a lot, especially when the snow is good,” she says, adding her favourite spots include the Headwalls, Chute and other runs on the upper half of the mountain.
And even though Greene has been skiing at Sun Peaks for 14 years, she’s still discovering new areas of the mountain, such as Freddy’s Nightmare—a challenging double black diamond run accessed from the Burfield Chairlift—a run she says she tried for the first time only last year with a couple from the U.K. who came to ski with her.
“We had a ball, it was a great time,” she says, adding that Sun Peaks newest ski run, The Other Way, located off of the
5 Mile has come along well. It’s proving popular with locals and visitors alike.
A group of visitors from Ontario joined Greene and I on our tour, including a few young inspiring girls who proved they had what it takes to keep up with an Olympic athlete.
“I wish I could get someone to come with me and take me on all of that stuff,” says Heather Gouinlock referring to Greene’s favourite places on the mountain—apparently Gouinlock’s family wasn’t keen on the more difficult runs.
Greene smiles at Gouinlock and says she could take her—why not? What better ski companion for a young female adrenaline junkie than a guide who has spent her whole life tearing up the slopes.
Later, after we switched lifts to do a few runs off of the Sundance Chairlift, we returned to the Sunburst and tried something I personally never expected of a guided tour at Sun Peaks—the Cahilty Glades, accessed just to the left of OSV. This provided an exciting challenge, and the Ontarian crowd were especially impressed to learn from Greene, who explained as we stopped on a flat spot near a pile of snow-covered logs, that at the very place where we were standing, bears were hibernating for the winter.
All in all, I believe it was an excellent way to spend an afternoon on the slopes—a great way to learn facts about the mountain, improve your form and meet new people. Greene proclaims, “it’s less like work and it’s more like play.”
Site designed and maintained by: PeaksMedia.com