A fleeting glimpse of flakes hovering under the arch of an old stone bridge, then only the darkness of the first snowshed. The light flickers and strobes through the gloom, bursts back into pure bright for a moment, then plunges into black again. It brings a feeling of road trip napping, the long blinks of sleep between snapshots of a world speeding by, a fuzzy reality outside of time. It goes on for a few kilometers, then the last portal is passed and white winter daylight curtains part before heaping snowbanks, framing the length of the Connaught Valley above. The exceptionally long descents from Mounts Rogers and Sifton lean back to the right. Two lanes through the mountains reveal Rogers Pass, like a landscape dreamed into being from the collective memory of a snow culture all its own...

...It is another white November of years past, and some slavering hounds from Golden and Revelstoke already have thirty days of serious pow turns behind them. The wet storms of fall have lashed the lower elevations with rain since Thanksgiving, but, up behind the Rogers Pass Centre, there is two meters of snow. It is on, so on.
Still early in the millenium, the Connaught is not yet an early-season hotspot, nor an infamous scene for the untimely deaths of innocent children. Only the fortunate few are madly gorging themselves, seeking to satiate that particularly unrelenting hunger born of a summer only recently departed.
Day after day, the snow stays unyieldingly deep and stable, and the dialed-in skiers have little recourse but to fiendishly trash their legs. Marquee lines get ticked and ticked again, down from the heights of Cheops, 8812, Video Peak, Bruins Pass, the big and small Ursus siblings, Dispatcher’s Bowl, and any other shots that eyes, imagination, and skins can put people on top of. Tracks are few and far between, while grins remain abundant on increasingly familiar morning parking lot faces.
The early season in Rogers Pass can be so good that, by the time December ski hill opening day rolls around, devotees may have mainlined a full season’s worth of shralping endorphins. For them, thoughts of lift service are yet distant, for the other valleys of Glacier National Park have come into shape. Passing westward under the blinking light at the Summit Compound, there are only broadened smiles and possibilities.
Ahead, the Illecillewaet and Asulkan glaciers rise up in the distance. Immediately to the left, the daunting West Shoulder of Mount MacDonald rears overhead. The winds and snow howl over its upper reaches, whispering in chorus of the terrible wonders they bring to this treeless mountainside...

...It has been snowing hard for days in a great mid-winter storm, and the black ribbon of highway snaking through Rogers Pass, that rampart-conquering greatness of the hand of man, lies empty and trembling beneath the incessant hammering blows of nature’s wrath.
“Ready on target,” a voice says into the truck’s radio mic.
“Let ‘er go,” comes the reply.
“Fire,” says the voice to the army officer seated beside.
“FIRE!” she barks out the window.
For the hundredth time that day, ear mufflers are pulled down. The roaring blast of a Howitzer muzzle, three meters away, rattles through truck and bones.
A sharp smack echoes from the valley walls. Seconds later, a massive white tsunami comes racing down. Flicking, flaring tongues of airborne snow burst from its front, before being swallowed again. It rumbles and hisses, as though enraged. An invisible blast of air squeezes new slides out from slopes below, over which the wave has yet to even break. Old growth timber seems no bigger than toothpicks, as it is hurled out of the top of the powder cloud and buffeted along, bouncing in and out of the blast, like dust motes in a sunbeam.
Sitting transfixed, the avalanche draws closer, growing bigger, now roaring like a rush of blood to the ears. At the lower edge of vision, a hand drops the gearshift into reverse as the truck begins to shake and all fades to white...

...Heading down the sharp corner of Glacier Hill, Mount Sir Donald towers over the valleys where once chugged the steam locomotives of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the fruit of surveyor A.B. Rogers’ labour. Train whistles once blew at the Glacier House hotel to herald the dawn of Canadian mountaineering. The Swiss Guides arrived in 1899, there to aid affluent denizens of eastern lands to immortality, by conquering the spires of the Selkirk Mountains and slapping them with largely un-Canadian name tags. Today, closed by the 1920’s retreat of the railway into tunnels, Glacier House exists only as stone ruins and a footnote sign en route to the vast skiiable terrain of the Asulkan and Illecillewaet valleys.
Devotees of winter’s seasonal rule find far more historical resonance with the modern advent of skiing in Rogers Pass, which shares a deep connection to this defying stretch of tarmac. In the 1950’s, planning of a continuous Canadian highway was hindered by the historically perilous safety record of travel through Rogers Pass. Three clever and passionate skiers, named Fred Schleiss, Noel Gardner, and Peter Schaerer, were involved with planning the most avalanche-smacked major road in the world. Their job involved years of self-powered study on skis, through a pristine mountain wilderness, with countless first descents, in exceptional snow and avalanche conditions. These efforts culminated in a twofold legacy: the completion of the Trans-Canada Highway, and cracking open some of the best ski touring on the planet. There would not be one without the other, and silent thanks is due Fred, Noel, and Peter whenever Rogers’ rewards gag back the words...

...Driving on, the reverie only deepens. There is Loop Brook, with its pillows and trees and moraines, tucked beneath a glaciated cirque backed by Mounts Bonney and Swanzy. Onward to the west end, Mount McGill and the Bostock, past stashes in the trees where one can find the door into the White Room of mid-winter at times wide open, and ever inviting...

...The bright waking dream of Rogers Pass flickers and vanishes into darkness again, a white doorway shrinking behind, as the highway is swallowed by snow sheds once more. A flash, a flicker, a flash, a flicker, then out of the last shed. Here, before the real world intrudes, with the winding corners of the Albert Canyon leading to Revelstoke beyond, is a spot where the snow often turns to rain.