active fun in the snow
Banff, Alberta
Nestled inside Canada’s first national park—a vast, 6,600-square-kilometre expanse of mountains, forests and glaciers—Banff is a true winter playground. Most cold-weather visitors come to the area to ski the Big Three (Sunshine Village, Norquay and Lake Louise ski resorts), where hundreds of runs plunge through a combined 8,000 acres of pristine Rocky Mountain powder. All three have daycare programs and the opportunity for families to take lessons together, as well as the boxes, rails and jumps coveted by your budding teen snowboarder. Each resort also offers its own individual features for kids: from the Tiny Tigers Ski and Play program at Sunshine, which combines childcare with two hours of lessons for little ones, to the family-friendly layout of Norquay that allows parents to enjoy a hot toddy in the lodge and keep an eye on their older kids as they glide down the nearby slopes. And Lake Louise is especially attuned to families with varying ski abilities—easy, intermediate and difficult runs descend from the top of each one of the regular lifts, so you can all ride up together and meet at the bottom, but take your own way down.
If skiing isn’t your thing, no problem—you can check out local snowshoeing, take a canyon ice walk, or embark on a dogsledding adventure. For the latter, Snowy Owl Sled Dog Tours (based in nearby Canmore) will let you ride behind or drive a team of eight, and sleds accommodate whole families. It’s a great opportunity to test out some dogsledding lingo (c’mon, you know you want to); yelling “hike up!” and “whoa
