YOU’RE SNUG in your cabin at the White Point Beach Resort on Nova Scotia’s south shore, watching waves crash and surfers in wetsuits braving the Atlantic Ocean, or maybe you’re across the province, atop Pictou County’s Fitzpatrick Mountain, at Stonehame Chalets, sipping cocoa and staring into a crackling fire, when it hits: happiness is winter in Nova Scotia.

“It’s a feeling of total relaxation you don’t get in summer,” says Lynne Reeder, a frequent guest at White Point. “You can walk on the beach all bundled up. The only thing you hear is nature. You go to sleep with the ocean practically hitting your front walkway.” Some of White Point’s rustic cottages and lodge rooms are 60 metres from the pounding, hypnotic ocean.

If one chooses, however, the getaway 90 minutes south of Halifax can also be a little less serene: it offers theme weekends, live music, nature hikes, beach bonfires, a salt-water pool and, for the intrepid, winter surfing. Come Christmas, special activities abound, including a Christmas tree in each room and elves delivering Christmas Eve cookies. “It’s all there for you,” says Reeder.

On the mountain, visitors just as easily forget the world and its complications. My kids spotted six deer on the winding dirt road through the trees up to Stonehame’s log chalets and lodge rooms, 90 minutes northeast of Halifax. Inside, we were delighted to discover complimentary homemade jam on the kitchen table, a wood-burning stove, homemade quilts and everything needed to hunker down.

Outside, one can snowshoe the extensive network of forest trails, take horse-drawn sleigh rides, play pond hockey or lay back to watch the stars from the outdoor hot tub. “There may not be a more beautiful time of the year,” says general manager Jeff Gunn, “especially after a heavy snow fall when the sun comes out shining through the trees.”

For more information on winter or summer visits, please go to www.stonehamechalets.com or www.whitepoint.com.

— Shelley Cameron-McCarron

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WHEN KARI BODNARCHUK’S mattress didn’t fit into the snow shelter she built in Gros Morne National Park in western Newfoundland, she simply pitched the tent she’d brought. Coyotes howled and wind whipped through the trees, but the 41-year-old visitor from Ferndale, Washington, refused to retreat to a nearby hut for the night, burrowing into her down sleeping bag instead.

“It was cool,” she says. “I had the wilderness experience of sleeping outside.”

Which is exactly why Bodnarchuk came to Canada: after two near-death experiences while travelling in New Zealand and Malaysia, she wanted to brush up on her backcountry skills.

Enter Ed English, a Newfoundlander who every winter leads a women’s winter survival weekend into the 185,000-hectare park’s backcountry. English, whose next course will likely be the third weekend of March, picks people up at the Deer Lake Airport. He reviews initial training before participants shoulder 16-kilogram packs and ski or snowshoe seven kilometres along flat, gentle terrain to Bakers Brook Pond.

“We’re on a big pond at the base of the Long Range Mountains, which are part of the Appalachian chain, at the mouth of the fiord,” says English. “The mountains are more than 600 metres high and all around you. It’s gorgeous.”

Once settled, he teaches a number of skills, including first aid, how to keep fires lit and how to build snow shelters: “tunnel in and up,” Bodnarchuk advises, “and make your sleeping platform higher because you’ll be warmer as heat rises.” Participants can sleep in the shelter they build or in the on-site cabin. “We’re not out to make people miserable,” English says. The next day, they ski the length of the fiord, remaining well away from any avalanche threat.

“We certainly learned a lot,” says Bodnarchuk. “Ed offered tips on how to cook a porcupine if we had to. He went through what he carries in his first-aid kit and why: snare wire, a mini blowtorch, orange flagging tape and Jell-O, which is something the stomach can absorb if you go into hypothermia. We also learned to read the landscape.”

English says the weekend is not meant solely for instruction. “It’s about going to one of Canada’s best national parks and coming out more confident, with more skills. If we were just trying to learn skills, we could do it in the parking lot.”

For more information, please go to www.linkumtours.com.

— Shelley Cameron-McCarron

Click map to enlarge

— Liana B. Baker