Blue Mountain Ski Trip

Blue mountain is about 180 km North of Toronto and offers excellent ski and snowboard adventures. Barrie offers a convenient charging stop, for both the crew and the Leaf. Even with a roof-box or a ski-rack the 2018 Nissan Leaf has enough range to reach the Blue mountains, especially if you slow down a little. A quartet of L2 chargers offer ample charging opportunities at Blue, allowing you to leave fully charged.

We decided to put the ski-rack on, which did reduce our range slightly (with the ski-rack, it was about 5 km/kWh, 5.5 km/kWh for the roof-box vs 6 km/kWh without the rack). A worthwhile tradeoff when you consider the increased space in the back. The range loss with the ski-rack is mostly aerodynamic in nature, so picking a slower route keeps those range losses to a minimum. With that in mind, we took Hwy 404 North out of Toronto then switched to Hwy 4 once we got North of Newmaket.

Another range-saving trick, is to use the pre-heat function of the leaf, which we did. This way the leaf warms itself up before departure using AC power from our charging station in the garage.

In the end, my range saving trickery proved unnecessary as my son really wanted to stop at the Petro-Canada charger in Barrie. As it turned out, that had nothing to do with range-anxiety, the real culprit was the A/W burger place that was adjacent to the Charger. Doing the math afterwards, I figured Id have arrived at Blue Mountain with about 5% charge remaining had we not stopped in Barrie.

Blue mountain offers plenty of runs for the advanced skier, and we had a lot of fun skiing on the hill. To warm up, there is a Beavertails restaurant on-top of the hill by the Southern-Comfort chairlift we stopped at for some fuel. There is also a village with more restaurants and plenty of shopping when taking a break from the ski-hill.

There are four plugs on the two charge-point stations located in the Village overflow parking area (P2a on this map). Its a bit of a hike from the village, so a lot less popular, hence the charging stations parking spots are less likely to be occupied by gas cars. Each station has 6 kW maximum output, which is shared between the two plugs, so its good manners to use an empty station instead of plugging into a station another EV might be using if you have a choice. That way both of you can charge a little faster.

We were staying close to the North lift, which does not offer night skiing. So we drove into the Village for night skiing, charging the leaf at the same time. This worked rather well, and the battery was almost full when it was time to head back to the city, I figured I would just about make it back, especially if I took Hwy 4 again, but alas, burger fever struck my son again so we stopped at the Petro-Canada charger and indulged in some A/W fare.