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Want the ultimate adventure of skiing virgin trails and blazing your own path? Try backcountry skiing, which combines the best of cross-country with the thrill of downhill |
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L ike a growing number of skiers, John Lehrman generally doesn’t bother with lift tickets. Instead, his concerns run more toward the kinds of survival gear—shovel, avalanche beacon, plenty of food and water—that you need in the backcountry. He’s got nothing against well-groomed ski areas in his Bitterroot Valley, Montana neighborhood—they’re “a great training opportunity,” he says—but Lehrman prefers to ski the backcountry. “At a ski area, there’s this precious resource that disappears very quickly, whereas backcountry, the precious resource only disappears under your and your friends’ feet.”
He’s talking, of course, about snow. And if virgin powder is what you lust after most, there’s no better way to find it than backcountry skiing.
“The best ski slopes are pretty much the best slopes for avalanches. It’s definitely part of the adrenaline rush.”—John Lehrman
“It’s a huge trend,” says Lou Dawson, 53, who runs wildsnow.com, a leading backcountry Web site that gets about a thousand visitors a day. In the last couple years, top ski areas like Telluride, Colorado, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Whistler-Blackcomb in British Columbia have opened hundreds of acres of ungroomed ski terrain to visitors. At Colorado’s Keystone Resort, skiers with the skills can sign up for half-day packages that include survival gear, instruction on avalanche safety from ski patrollers and Sno-Cat rides to the fresh snow.
Dawson, who’s been skiing untamed terrain since 1965, prefers to call such excursions “frontcountry,” rather than the real deal, but he says they’re a “perfect place for people to learn the ski skills and encounter the culture a little bit” before moving on to bigger challenges. “You can get out your wallet and have an excellent and safe experience.”
“It is in-bounds,” says Lisha Burnett, a communications manager for Keystone Resort, “but it’s a real backcountry experience. The vistas you get out there are amazing. It’s definitely something people want to do again.”
For true aficionados, the ride down is only part of the allure. “People ask me, ‘Why spend three hours [hiking] just so you can ski down in fifteen minutes?’” Lehrman says. “But the way I look at it, I like to hike three hours to the top of a mountain in the summertime, and in the summer it’ll take you two hours to hike back down.” He adds, “Maybe the best thing about backcountry skiing is being free to find a place to ski and then go ski it.”
Like a lot of backcountry skiers in the West, Lehrman finds his targets via snowmobile, then straps on his skins and randonnée setup and makes the climb. “For a while, I had an ethic of not using anything but my own locomotion,” he says, but riding a snowmobile “has totally changed the way I look at mountains and the ability to access places you’d otherwise just stare at—it looks good, but I’ll never get up there.” He compares it to big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton, who goes after monster waves on a Jet-Ski: “Laird wants to ride the big waves, and you can’t paddle into ’em.”
As you’d expect for a sport that’s about getting first cut in virgin powder, backcountry skiing involves a degree of avalanche danger. Back in the early 1980s, Dawson barely survived a severe slide in Aspen’s Highland Bowl. Though he recounts the experience in harrowing detail on his Web site, Dawson doesn’t like to talk about it, “because a couple of the guys who rescued me were killed in an avalanche later on.” When he skis, Lehrman, who’s also seen several avalanches, says he’ll “spend half an hour digging pits and analyzing the snow, just thinking about it” before heading down a slope. After fifteen years of backcountry skiing, at 35 he only recently started to feel “comfortable making decisions that take your and your friends’ lives into your hands.”
In the end, Lehrman says, you just have to deal with the fact that “the best ski slopes are pretty much the best slopes for avalanches. It’s definitely part of the adrenaline rush.” And what’s the other part? “The freedom to choose where I go, when I go. I don’t have to wait in any lines and basically just march to the beat of my own drum.”
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