It’s a crisp minus 22. The crystals that yesterday drew a halo around the sun now form a magic carpet on the snow, casting light in all directions. I’m with a group of skiers traversing North America’s largest alpine meadow, a swath suspended like a billowing hammock from a rampart of skyward peaks. The path ahead isn’t really a path; it’s more like a sightline — a promise on the horizon that slowly pulls us upward. Gliding through this landscape on alpine skis with climbing skins, we cross trails made by pine martens, their paw prints revealing sprints from tree to tree. This is the beauty of backcountry ski touring, the feeling of being an extra in a silent film about paradise where the loudest sound may be the squeak of your boots. That is, until you cross tracks, literally, with a group of giddy snowshoers belly-laughing as they race one another down slopes with waist-deep powder.

Yes, snowshoers, because at Purcell Mountain Lodge, everyone — including non-skiers — is welcome in winter. In the Purcell Mountains, an offshoot of the Columbia range, the lodge sits about halfway between Revelstoke and Banff, as the crow flies. To get here, you go as the helicopter flies, 15 minutes from the town of Golden, B.C. A 10-room timber structure (there’s also a library, a boot-drying room, a large dining room and a cosy corner with a fireplace and a killer view), the lodge barely makes a dent in the topography. Inserted into a gentle slope that hovers at an altitude of 2,200 metres, this home away from home is surrounded by peaks, including Mount Sir Donald, the 3,300-metre-tall pyramid that dominates the backdrop.

It’s this combo of rolling meadow right by the lodge and steeper mountainsides accessible via a one-to three-hour ski tour that makes it ideal for outdoorsy types of all striped. Strapping on a pair of snowshoes here lets you alternate between meadow-bathing and cardio-pumping hill running in alpine scenery you’d be hard pressed to find on the average snowshoe trail — minus the avalanche risk that comes with ski touring steeper inclines. Skiers, meanwhile, can choose from among lodge-adjacent mellow slopes that make perfect warm-ups or intros for backcountry newbies and, when pushing a little farther, more challenging black and double-black tree runs as well as open alpine descents. Both activities give you the opportunity to wander and wonder in silence on the flats and ups. On the downhills, though, the only option is to holler with glee — like the group of euphoric snowshoers, including my spouse, Alejandro, breaking the morning’s silence. 

Before Alejandro and I checked in at Purcell Mountain Lodge for our four-night stay, I’d done several backcountry winter trips — solo. That’s because most backcountry lodges cater to hard-core skiers, with limited or zero options for active outdoor pursuits for those who either don’t know how to (or don’t want to) ski alpine terrain. I have friends whose non- skiing better halves have willingly tagged along to backcountry lodges knowing they’d be stuck soaking in a hot tub, reading a novel while sipping marshmallow-topped hot chocolate or drinking wine by a crackling fire while their partners were out making tracks. I personally don’t know why you’d spend a full day doing that when you could soar to sparkly summits and float down fluff for hours on end. Alejandro, being similarly restless, never bothered coming along to those ski-for-me-nothing-for-him places.