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Telegraph - Revelstoke Mountain: the world’s best skiing?

In what I consider to be the most exciting development in snow business on either side of the Atlantic over the past 20 years, Canada’s new, billion-dollar Revelstoke Mountain Resort - RMR - is poised to become one of the world’s most thrilling destinations. …

Within less than a decade I predict that RMR will earn its place as one of the Top 10 Truly Greats, alongside Aspen, Jackson Hole, Whistler, St Anton, Chamonix, Val d’Isère, Courchevel, Verbier and Zermatt.

Until now, little of note has happened in sleepy, remote Revelstoke in the wilds of British Columbia. Winter is long, summer is brief, and the prize exhibit in the local museum is a left-handed chain-saw.

The 8,500 people who live here, on the banks of the great Columbia River, have been quietly going about their business of mining and lumber since the last spike in the line of the trans-continental Canadian Pacific Railway was hammered home in 1885.

My aunt and uncle and two cousins live there, and my uncle was in charge of economic development for the town!

However, shortly after 9am on the Saturday before Christmas all that changed dramatically. The first of the 2,000 skiers who had queued since before dawn climbed aboard the eight-person Revelation gondola for the first two-mile public ride up tree-lined Mount Mackenzie.

My cousin was there!

They found a giant of a mountain with unlimited potential on a scale that challenges almost every other major ski destination worldwide.

Presently it has only two lifts, but these access 27 marked runs and enough off-piste to keep even the hungriest skier or snowboarder happy for a fortnight.

By the time we got back down to the bottom my companion claimed he’d skied more turns than in the whole of last winter. So long and challenging is the descent that the average visitor at present manages only 1.5 gondola rides a day.

By next year the mountain will have two more lifts and a vertical drop of 1,829metres, making it the longest in North America - and, indeed, one of the longest in the world.

The longest in North America. I’ve been hearing that for years, as this was all getting off the ground.

The drop in Tignes from the Grande Motte to Val Claret, for example, is 1,400metres, while Whistler Peak to Whistler Creek is 1,609metres. Only the thigh-burning descent from the Klein Matterhorn to Cervinia, in Italy, exceeds Revelstoke - by just four metres.

At the moment most of the terrain is strictly for advanced skiers, with some exceptional rugged off-piste that is reminiscent of Alta, in Utah. But next season new lifts will open up plenty of novice and intermediate runs. When completed in 15 years, the resort should boast 21 lifts and 115 runs set in 10,000 acres that can been skied - more than any other North American resort.

Opening weekend, ten people went out of bounds and got lost. One of them died, a “level three” ski instructor from Edmonton. Everyone agreed even a bad-ass ski-nut like that isn’t prepared for all that snow — 12m of it. Really wet, lovely stuff. Apparently the lifts, which are strung fairly high up, obviously, go up through these troughs they’ve dug through the snow in places.