New Year's Skiing in Banff Canada

We arrived In Banff on the 31st of December (New Year's Eve) after already spending Christmas in Saskatchewan, Canada with my family.  Once we got to our hotel and and a dip in the outdoor hot tub - very good for sore legs after skiing - we went out for our New Year's Eve dinner. I had already booked our New Year's Eve dinner at the Grizzly House. It was imperative that we booked somewhere for dinner as a lot of people from Calgary go to Banff for New Year's and we did not want to go hungry. The Grizzly House restaurant is a fondue restaurant which has an interesting story behind it. It was a night club in the 70s but the liquor licences changed so that if you wanted to stay open late you had to serve food. Well it worked out well for a while as they put a hole through the wall to their neighbors - a Chinese restaurant. However, the restaurant closed down and in order to remain open the owners decided to bring their own fondue sets. This tradition has stuck. We opted to have the hot rock option instead of the fondue. It was great as you can pick some meat that you would not normally eat - some being Canadian animals. The meal lasted for some time and before we knew it, it was 12 o clock. Once we finished our meal we went outside to join the street party that was taking place.

The next days was straight to the slopes. The great thing about skiing in this area is that your lift pass gets you into three different skiing areas around Banff - Norquay, Sunshine, and Lake Louise. The first day we decided to go to Sunshine. This is a good area to ski with lots of different slopes to keep you entertained. The next day we went to Lake Louise which is also a good area to ski and is a bit more picturesque. We had a four day ski pass and did two days at each resort. We did not ski at Norquay as there are only a couple of runs and felt that it would not be worth wasting a whole day there.

During the evenings there are loads of restaurants and pubs to go to. The food is typically Canadian with large portions and small prices. All in all it was one of the best New Year's I have ever had.