Yes, we’ve got Whistler-Blackcomb, and it’s fabulous year round. We also have that famous ‘champagne powder’ in the BC Interior that everyone should roll in at least once. But what do you do when you need a fix at 9pm after work on a Wednesday?

Vancouver’s three ‘local mountains’ are all within a half-hour drive of the downtown core. They’re wet, they’re icy, they’re nuts on a Saturday, but they’re ours and they’re one major benefit of living in this city.

In Vancouver, you can go skiing just like you’d go to your pilates class or your badminton practice. And when full-season passes start at $269 for 07/08 (GBP130), it doesn’t cost much more either.

From West to East are Cypress Mountain, Grouse Mountain and Mount Seymour, rising 41-4700 feet above Vancouver’s North Shore. Cypress is the highest, has the most vertical drop and will be the only local mountain to feature in the 2010 winter Olympics. With this year’s new lifts it now has a total of 9 and, while my experience is as a beginner taking Cypress’ great group classes, the mountain is best known as one big terrain park for Vancouver’s snowboarders.

The thing I love best about Cypress is the funky, ‘extreme sports’ atmosphere, with skate punk blaring out over the Super Pipe and the clink of pitchers in Growlies pub. The Val D’Isere this is not.

Grouse is the priciest by far, and is the touristic mountain with all the facilities and some heartbreaking sunsets over the city. It's beautiful, and you also get to avoid the nervewracking drive through freezing fog of Cypress and Seymour, parking at the bottom and taking the scenic gondola ride to the peak.

Grouse has a little skating lake, horse-drawn sleigh rides at Christmas (how they get THOSE up in the gondola I never know), and a huge lodge with shops and fine restaurants you’d never eat in wearing your toque (that’s Canadian for ‘beanie hat’).

It has the most lifts of the local mountains and some incredibly scenic black diamonds – apparently. It doesn’t have much to offer my beginner/intermediate level though, and I can’t bear the slalom through parents with toddlers that overcrowding on the green runs creates.

Last and, well, pretty much least, is Seymour.

Seymour’s big selling point is its incredible value, though you have to be prepared for long rides on slow lifts in slush that blows in sideways. That icy climate is really an essential ‘feature’ of skiing the coastal mountains though, so whatever you pay you’re going to get wet here.

Seymour is fabulous for beginners and families, and even without a Nordic (cross-country) area has the most skiable acres of the three peaks. Somehow, it’s just not as cool as Cypress though.

But Seymour has a good forecast to open this weekend, making it the first of the local three.

See you there after work?