Up your thrills with summer activities at Alberta, BC mountain resorts

Summer activities at BC, AB mountain resorts

Sometimes you just need to spike the ol’ heart rate, and these adventures fit the bill. I’ve personally tested many of these and can tell you: good times will be had. 

So add one of these to your travel itinerary, or plan a day outing, this summer.

Aerial Parks: Snow Valley, Kinosoo Ridge

Several new aerial parks have opened in Alberta in recent years. 

Snow Valley, in Edmonton, has an excellent three-story aerial park with tons of high-suspension rope climbing challenges. 

Pro tip: if you enjoy activity and apres, go for their Thirsty Thursday night series, climb for the last two hours and enjoy a beer above the tree canopy, with rotating brewery taps each week.

Kinosoo Ridge opened its aerial park in summer 2022. Pretty awesome place, plus you can camp on site and enjoy brunch at the resort to make a weekend of it.

Via Ferrata

For the hardcore mountain climbers, this is a cakewalk; for the rest of us, it’s a rush and offers high alpine access and experience without having to be a full-on alpinist.

All the fun without the heightened risk exposure. You’ll find courses at Norquay, Kicking Horse and Nordegg, with half and full day trips that will rock your world—100 per cent pun intended.

Mountain Coasters

Launched in summer 2022, the mountain coaster at Canyon Ski Area in Red Deer is a blast. 

Whipping through the trees, dropping down pitch after pitch, I challenge you not to have a gleeful grin pasted on your face top to bottom.

Canyon’s coaster is one of only a few out there, with others in Revelstoke and Kimberley.

Winsport Skyline Luge

This is basically gravity-propelled go-karting and I love it, totally turned me into a kid again. The paved track winds down the hill at Winsport, winding and rolling faster and faster until you hit the bottom—and head back up again!

Alpine hiking

Purists may argue that you need to earn your summit but sometimes you just want to get up into the alpine quickly, and stay up.

Many resorts now offer lift-accessed hiking. You can jump on the chairlifts for summer hiking at most of the bigger Western Canada ski resorts for jawdropping peak views, glimpses of wildlife and that pure alpine air.

A few places to get the alpine goods include Silver Star (read more about its rootsy North Okanagan scene here), Lake Louise, Sunshine Village and our #SkiNorthBC friends at Hudson Bay Mountain Resort, who have opened up new sightseeing chairlift dates from Aug 5 - Sept 2, 2024.

Downhill mountain biking

You down with mtb? Yeah you know we are, and we have a rundown on lift-accessed mountain biking here, which will connect you to the goods for downhill biking at mountain resorts in AB and BC.

If you’re new to downhill riding, don’t let it intimidate you: today’s downhill biking at mountain resorts is graded by degree of difficulty like ski runs, so you can progress gradually from beginner up, same as you would at the ski hill.

If you haven’t explored the sport yet, I personally endorse it, having ridden bike parks from Whistler to Fernie, Sun Peaks, SilverStar and WinSport, to name a few.

Still looking for that skiing fix?

Read up on where you can still ski during the months of June through September…

And get ready, because ski season is just a few months away! Be sure to sign up for our SnowSeekers newsletter to keep up on what's going down (i.e. snow).