Canadian Mountain Holidays

The mature and naturally well-spaced forests lining the Monashee range are responsible for its reputation among CMH guests as a tree skiers’ paradise. Along with some of the best tree skiing on earth, the Monashees is also admired for its long, consistently steep-pitched runs.

The Monashees offers perhaps the most challenging skiing of any of our areas, and is suitable only for experienced CMH Heli-Skiers who normally ski in the fastest group in other CMH areas.

The Monashees’ reputation has been established because of the ski vision of two of the area’s first guides, Sepp Renner and Rudi Gertsch. Tree skiing has now become the bread and butter of heli-skiing, far from where it began on the high summits and broad glaciers, but this transition was not because of a business decision. Renner and Gertsch started skiing the trees in the Monashees because it was possible in bad weather and accidentally found a whole new world of skiing. Not only was it more frequently stable enough to ski steeper terrain in the trees, but if they kept skiing the same slope during big storms and breaking up the slab development, they could continue skiing the popular slopes in safety even while the rest of the area was avalanching.

The drainage of Soards Creek has become the tree skiers’ holy land, a serpentine mountain valley studded with steep hillsides and covered with trees so ideally spaced for skiing that Monashees addicts get to the point where Soards is the only place on the planet where they are truly happy skiing. Twenty-year Monashees veteran Cliff Milleman said, “I tried heli-skiing other places, but I just found myself missing Soards.”

From Bugaboo Dreams by Topher Donahue