Mont-Sainte-Anne

Everyone I met in Quebec City who skied had an opinion about Mont-Sainte-Anne, and the opinion was consistently: go, it’s twenty-five minutes away, why haven’t you already. So one grey Tuesday in February we did, and found a mountain that punches well above what its modest 800-metre summit elevation suggests — 71 trails, a vertical drop of 625 metres, and views from the upper runs out over the frozen St. Lawrence and the Île d’Orléans that I kept stopping to look at rather than actually skiing. Night skiing here is a real thing, not a gimmick tacked onto closing hours — Mont-Sainte-Anne floodlights the largest lit ski terrain in eastern Canada, and we did a session under the lights that felt genuinely different from daytime skiing, the cold sharper, the snow squeaking louder, the crowd thinner and more serious.

What surprised me more was learning that this mountain has an entirely separate identity in summer as one of the places that essentially built modern mountain biking as a spectator sport — Mont-Sainte-Anne hosted UCI World Cup downhill and cross-country events for decades and remains one of the most respected bike parks in North America, with a network of trails using the same gondola infrastructure that carries skiers in winter. We came back in August specifically to ride it, and the downhill trails off the summit gondola were the most technical, root-and-rock terrain I’d ridden anywhere, humbling in a way that made the beer afterward taste particularly earned. Lia, more confident on a bike than I am on skis, rode lines I mostly watched her disappear down and then waited at the bottom for.

The base area keeps a low-key, functional character rather than the manufactured-village feel of Mont-Tremblant — a few hotels, a golf course, and the Camping Mont-Sainte-Anne, one of the largest campgrounds in Quebec, which fills up with mountain bikers all summer. It’s a working mountain rather than a resort performance, and I found that came as a relief after a few too many overly polished ski towns elsewhere.

When to go: December through March for skiing, including night sessions under the lights. June through September for mountain biking via the gondola-served bike park, one of the best-regarded in North America. Either way, easy as a day trip from Quebec City or an overnight at the base.