Got home last night from our BC vacation - - a trip that I thought was only going to include a day of riding at Panorama resort (that report
here); but morphed into also giving me a bonus day Saturday at Silver Star outside Vernon, BC.
The mountain reminds me a lot of Sun Peaks, in that it’s semi-arid forest like here at home (only with more fir trees), and it’s not big mountains like over against the Rockies - - so nothing is really above timberline - - but big enough.
Silver Star was everything I’d hoped it to be from what never and his friends told me about it. It’s another one of those “smaller-than-Whistler-but-plenty-big-enough” BC bike parks. It has a half-dozen black runs and at least a couple bona fide double-blacks to keep it interesting and a goodly number of fun blue runs to keep everyone happy and keep excess traffic off the blacks. The trails are hard for me to characterize here - - definitely not the wide-open flow trails like at Whistler but not quite as rough-hewn, old-skool as Panorama - - sort of a blending of the two. Maybe never will chime in and help me out with this.
This time, I didn’t have anyone lined up to ride with; but DHers are a chill bunch so I figured I’d find someone I could tag along with for at least a run or two until they got tired of me. A guy on another 303R from Prince George, BC and I got to talking Yetis down in the village and it turned out he was in a group of about 7 guys who were there for a day. They were winding down a week of riding that started on the Sunshine Coast (Vancouver Island) and worked their way to Whistler and then Silver Star. They were cool with me riding with them. Two of the guys were locals, so they knew which runs to start us on and we went from there. First run was on Rock Star - - a black that fortunately wasn't
too black, so it was a bit more ‘warm-up’ than I was expecting but not so much as to get me in over my head right away.
I learned something here: a lot of the SS jumps are a bit funny: well-formed take-off lips but a lot of short or non-existent landings. It was easy to boost them out beyond to flat. Once you know a trail, you get to expecting this and can suck them up a bit so you don’t flat-land so much; but every now and then, a proper-size set comes up that throws you off. It also had a lot of hips-into-berms on corners - - which was pretty fun once you got used to it because you could throw a little whip off it as you approached the corner, which then pointed your tire down-berm and set up for a clean, fast exit. Lotsa fun when I did it right.
They also had a couple real good steep-and-deeps with gnarly root-drops, steep chutes, big rocks and such, plus at least a couple trails with a lot of cool skinnies and teeters thrown in to mix it up. We finally took a short lunch break a sometime after 2:00 and were back on the mtn by 3 to get in a few more runs to finish the day before the lifts closed at 5. I didn’t keep track of how many we did but it felt like at least as many as I’d done at Pano and definitely made for a full day on the hill. Silver Star is definitely on my “must come back to” list for next year.