Snoqualmie Summit

The camera stands on packed snow in the middle of the base area on a clear cold day, with everything a ski area does going on around it at once. On one side a chairlift terminal, its sign reading Pacific Crest, with the cable running away up the hill and a line of chairs on it; a yellow LIFT CLOSED board is propped at the bottom. Ahead the runs go up in broad white sweeps with people scattered down them, small enough to show the scale. Round the other side are the buildings - timber and glass lodges with steep roofs carrying a foot of snow, a RENTALS sign, racks of skis and boards, a blue pop-up marquee and a crowd standing about in gear. Behind them the firs are loaded to the tips. The snow underfoot is scraped and tracked into ridges by the traffic through it.

The Summit at Snoqualmie is the closest real skiing to Seattle - about forty-five minutes east on the interstate, which is the whole reason it exists in the form it does. It sits on Snoqualmie Pass in the middle of the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, spread across four separate base areas and something close to two thousand acres. The pass takes an average of nearly 450 inches of snow a year.

The four areas are run as one. Summit Central has the terrain parks and the tubing; Summit East has the groomed cross-country trails and the fall-line runs; Summit West is where the skate and freestyle parks are; Alpental, over the road, is the steep one. Between them you can ski, board, skate or go cross-country, and there are guided tours out into fifty kilometres of backcountry trail for anyone who wants to leave the lifts behind.

What the numbers do not convey is how ordinary it is, in the best sense. This is a weekday-after-work mountain as much as a destination. The lodge sells chilli, the lift queue is full of school groups, and half the people in this panorama drove up the same afternoon.