Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls | Panorama Mountain Resort — The Himalayas, on a Lift Ticket

The film opens with Ace hanging off a cliff face in a snowstorm, lowering himself toward a stranded raccoon while a Tibetan monastery waits somewhere above him. The mountain is real. The Himalayas are not. Those exteriors were shot at Panorama, a ski resort folded into the Purcell Mountains of southeastern British Columbia, about nineteen kilometres up the Toby Creek road from Invermere.

Panorama photographs as somewhere far more remote than it is. The base village sits at 1,150 metres and the top of the lift system reaches 2,450 — a vertical drop of 1,300 metres, one of the largest in North America. That is exactly the quality a production wants when a mountain has to look bottomless inside a single frame. There are 129 runs spread across roughly 2,975 acres of terrain. In summer the same slopes go brown and green, and the Greywolf golf course opens along the creek below.

You do not need to ski to stand where the crew stood. Lifts run through the summer for hikers and downhill riders, and the base village stays open year-round with lodging, a Nordic centre and hot pools. Ride up on a clear morning and look back down the Toby Creek valley toward the Columbia wetlands. The joke of the sequence lands properly from up there: this is a resort with a chairlift and a coffee shop, dressed in 1995 as the roof of the world.

Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.