BC is no joke in any airplane, short of a CF-18. 
My most memorable real encounter with the weather here was bringing an RV-7 all the way west from Quebec. I departed Medicine Hat at first light, 5:00 am, with a perfectly clear sky ahead of me all the way to Vancouver. I got over Calgary and into the pass in the Rockies over Lake Louise just fine, but when I turned the corner west again towards Golden, something just didn’t feel right. I noticed I had quite a crab angle going through the narrow pass and everything seemed to be happening a lot faster than expected, and then I looked down at my GPS… I was doing 220 knots over the ground! I’d encountered a 70+ knot venturi effect tailwind. Felt like I was being shot out of a blow gun.
When I entered the main valley over Golden I was basically skidding sideways across it like a drift car. Then came the mechanical turbulence on the far side of the pass as the jet spilled out. I expected that at least, and slowed her way way down to reduce stress on the airframe, but still smacked my head against the canopy three or four times.
I needed to land there for fuel, so I gingerly circled down, feeling out the winds, and thankfully it let up significantly by the time I got down to around 1000 agl. Landing was uneventful and very pleasant after that. Pretty rare that I’m happy to be on the ground.
An R44 landed right after me for gas, and the pilot looked a bit pale. I imagine I looked the same.
And all of this was around 6:30am, when there shouldn’t have really been any serious winds at all. I’ve done a fair bit of mountain flying, most of it in BC, and I always try to get through them all by noon at the latest, but that was a bit of a wakeup call. Mountain flying insanity can happen at any time of day.
When I was a kid my friends and I called BC “Beastly”… and it can be. 