Skiing without Boundries

"Skiing without Boundries" a Article in the New York Times about Backcounrty skiing .<br>your comments?<br><br>Skiing Without Boundaries <br>By CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON <br><br> December 10, 2004 <br><br><br>N January, the Telluride Ski and Golf Resort in Colorado will open up a coveted new type of real estate. This territory isn't slopeside; it's the slopes themselves &#8212; new ones to conquer, and without the usual competition. <br><br>For an additional $100, a strong skier who has taken a half-day private ski lesson can don an avalanche-safety beacon and a shovel and then hike with a guide for 30 minutes to the high point of Prospect Ridge, leaving behind the skiers and snowboarders jockeying for powder. There, with 13,320-foot Palmyra Peak glaring over their shoulders, they will snap into their bindings and plunge down a ski run that is off limits to others. Wild country, deep snow, a shiver of sweat and excitement down the spine &#8212; this is as close as many skiers will ever get to backcountry skiing. <br><br>Call it Backcountry Lite. Traditional ski resorts around the West are cashing in on the cachet of an escape from the well-groomed and well-used slopes. They are offering more hike-to terrain, more excursions with guides along their ski areas' perimeters, more rides in tank-treaded Sno-Cats that carry skiers to ridgelines just beyond the chairlifts. <br><br>"You really feel like you're doing something special that other people are missing out on," said Hannah Swett, 35, a Manhattanite who takes guided ski excursions to the backcountry at Jackson Hole, in Wyoming, where she owns a home. She found her opportunity to join the trend when she discovered a guide program two winters ago at Jackson Hole; $495 buys a guide for a day to accompany up to five skiers. <br><br>Equipped with avalanche beacons and shovels, Backcountry Lite skiers at Jackson Hole jump on an early tram to the mountaintop and duck through the gates into its famous beyond-the-ropes stashes like Rock Springs Bowl. "You see people heading out these gates," Ms. Swett said, "and you think, `I just have to go.' " Once beyond the prepared ski runs, she added, "You don't see anyone." <br><br>When the groups in the guide program return to the lifts, that $495 also gets them line-cutting privileges. The program has grown so popular that the United States Forest Service recently granted approval for Jackson Hole, which is largely on public land, to triple the number of guided visitors in the backcountry to 900. <br><br>"This is definitely a trend, and an increasing trend," said Nolan Rosall, president of RRC Associates, a Boulder, Colo., company that does market research, planning and consulting for the ski industry. Terrain is opening up that "wasn't available before, or wasn't utilized as much, or marketed as much," he said. "It's adding diversity to the sport that really didn't exist to anywhere near the same degree 10 or 15 years ago." <br><br>Back then, backcountry skiing was the domain of scruffy, large-lunged guys who chafed at lift tickets and the tyranny of boundary ropes. Today out-of-bounds is hot. Ski films by companies like Teton Gravity Research long ago stopped using the soporific slopes of the world; today's sequences show ski stars swinging big turns in places like Greenland. And at specialty ski stores, sales of telemark gear, which is frequently used in the backcountry because its free-heel bindings allow easy movement, increased more than 74 percent last season from the season before, according to Snowsports Industries America, which tracks industry trends. At the same time, sales of alpine skis and snowboards were flat. <br><br>The resorts' Lite version demands a fraction of the sweat of true backcountry skiing (whose unofficial credo is "earn your turns"). Skiers usually don't have to buy any specialized gear or take training, and avalanche-prone slopes are dynamited into submission. It's a chance to try something exotic that doesn't require big lungs, a big investment or acceptance of big risk. <br><br>The sea change in mainstream alpine ski equipment adds to the number of skiers who can join in. Today's skis are shorter and fatter and buoy skiers in powder snow. They're also easy to steer through uneven conditions. "Viagra skis," some call them, because they've made skiing fun again, especially for older thighs. <br><br>Backcountry Lite also fulfills "the experiential requirements of baby boomers," said Ted Beeler, president of SE Group, a ski resort consultant. "They've bought a lot of things," he said. "Now they want to experience things. They want to have an adventure into an unknown territory that they can talk to their friends about over a beer or a glass of wine." <br><br>Skiers "want to ski with no one around," said Michael Berry, president of the National Ski Areas Association. At the same time, few are ready to sacrifice ski-area amenities. "At the end of the day," Mr. Berry said, "they want to slide in between Egyptian cotton sheets that are 600-count." <br><br>SKI resorts have eagerly made room for backcountry programs in activity lists already crowded with dogsled rides, tubing hills and dubious bets like "ski-bike" rentals. Something in the mix is working: three of the last four winters have been records or nearrecords for skier visits in the United States, the National Ski Areas Association says. <br><br>Margy Dudley of Durango, Colo., was hooked on off-piste skiing away from the hard-packed slopes after she tried Silverton Mountain, a ski area in southwest Colorado that is modeled on New Zealand's club hills. Aside from a bare-bones chairlift, avalanche control and a guide requirement, the experience is as raw as sushi. <br><br>"Once I took the first few turns I was just in heaven &#8212; the best turns of my life, and incredibly steep," said Ms. Dudley, a ski instructor who moved with her husband and four boys from Westchester County, N.Y., to Durango five years ago. <br><br>Some resorts provide backcountry simply by opening new terrain and leaving it ungroomed: this winter Jackson Hole opens the Crags, 200 acres of steep skiing and cliff-drops, and Whistler-Blackcomb, in British Columbia, North America's largest ski area, opens Flute Bowl, with about 700 acres of avalanche-controlled but ungroomed bowls and subalpine glades. <br><br>Others add Sno-Cats, vehicles usually used for ski-slope grooming, which can be used as mobile tramways to carry cabs of people up snowy slopes. At Aspen Highlands in Colorado, a Sno-Cat offers free shuttles up one-third of the ridgeline to the Highland Bowl, a huge high-alpine amphitheater. From there skiers must throw skis over shoulders and boot up the rest of the way. The mountain rewards the fit with a nearly 1,500-foot powder run with a pitch of 40 degrees or more. Since the terrain's opening, skier visits to Aspen Highlands have increased 30 percent, said Jeff Hanle, communications manager for the Aspen Skiing Company. "On a good day it's like a line of ants walking up the ridgeline." <br><br>Others ski resorts bump up the Sno-Cat experience another notch. Last winter, the Keystone Resort in Colorado added a half-day excursion to the $5 Sno-Cat rides it already offered to its North and South Bowls. For $71, the trip goes to the eastern edge of the resort's boundary and the slopes of either moderately angled Bergman Bowl or more challenging Erickson Bowl. Ski patrollers give guests a quick primer on backcountry safety, including instructions for evaluating the snow's stability and using avalanche transceivers. <br><br>High in Bergman or Erickson Bowl, with spectacular views of the Tenmile Range, it's easy to feel transported to a wilder place. But terra incognita this isn't. The slopes are avalanche-controlled before skiers are allowed on them. Ski patrollers sweep the area, looking for the injured or disoriented. And those who jump into Bergman Bowl for a ski can still reach the Alpenglow Stube, where slippers and a lunch of hardwood-grilled caribou chops await. <br><br>The thrills aren't always cheap. Telluride's hike-to experience, for example, costs $100 but must be done in conjunction with a half-day ski lesson that costs $300 to $430. But devotees are happy to pay. <br><br>Tod Francis, a venture capitalist from Menlo Park, Calif., said that the extra cost of the backcountry programs at Kirkwood in California, where he and his wife, Bonnie, own a home, was "a great value." <br><br>He spelled out a contrast. <br><br>"When you're skiing fresh powder at a resort, no matter how remote the resort is, you're to some degree racing," he said &#8212; competing for the good snow. "In the backcountry the great powder is still there. What's missing is the hurry. You get to just take it in at a completely different pace." <br><br>Off the Well-Groomed Trail <br><br>

For the skiers, I suppose it is a start. 30 minutes of boot packing for an out-of-shape intermediate skier is not too far past the BC gate. Could be an impetus for them to move west, train like a maniac, and start climbing . . .<br><br>For the guides, it could be either your dream job or your worst nightmare, depending on the clients.

Really sounds like the ski areas are realizing another way to make some bucks, so they are exploiting the opportunity. In making the BC more "accessible" to people with big wallets, they are diluting the essence of back country skiing. A lot of people go into the backcountry to experience skiing before the advent of lifts, where everyone had to hike to get their turns in. There is something special about lifting yourself up to the top of a ridge and then having to pause to rest and take in the panorama of the mountains around you, before taking the plunge back to whence you came. It's like an inbreath and an ourbreath, up and down. And while I enjoy the convenience of lifts, I know that it is not the same experience that lights up my soul when I ski the backcountry. The admission that we pay to backcountry ski is the work that we put into climbing there, not the big bucks that comes from working in Manhattan. In that way it is truly earning your turns, which is the way that I prefer to go. I guess if it encourages New Yorkers to get out of there and find themselves in the West, then it will do some good. (I grew up in and around NY.)<br><br>Peter

It's the exclusive golf course for the new century!<br><br><br>

Ski patrollers give guests a quick primer on backcountry safety, including instructions for evaluating the snow's stability and using avalanche transceivers.

<br>Regardless of my less flattering thoughts on the topic, what is justifiably concerning about this movement is statements like this one.  The influx of people to the backcountry who have little-to-no knowledge of assessing snow or beacon use is disturbing enough here, much less in areas with a continental snowpack.  <br><br>This not to say people don't have a right to be there, but it's certainly exposing people to risks they may not even realize.<br><br><br><br>

Backcountry Lite skiers at Jackson Hole ...duck through the gates into its famous beyond-the-ropes stashes like Rock Springs Bowl."<br>

<br>That's funnier if you've been in Rock Springs Bowl; Panarama Point sees less traffic.

Sounds like a commercial extension to me ;D

I don't have strong feelings one way or the other about the "frontcountry" skiing trend. I wouldn't pay big money for this, but I don't begrudge others doing so.<br><br>Folks like Craig Dostie at Couloir magazine have been trying to open a gateway from lift skiing to backcountry skiing for years. The idea is to grow the backcountry skiing market by attracting lift skiers. <br><br>I think the lift skiing gateway has become much more prevalent than when I started backcountry skiing in the late 1970s. At that time, many backcountry skiers got into the sport either through cross-country skiing or mountaineering. (I was always a lift skier, but I got into backcountry skiing through mountaineering.) The sport was much smaller and the performance expectations were much lower.<br><br>The open-boundary trend is a very conscious effort to grow the sport--which means growing the amount of money to be made. It fits hand-in-glove with the trend toward higher downhill performance in backcountry skiing gear.<br> <br>----<br><br>p.s. - I remember suggesting something like this guided, open-boundary concept at a PSIA-NW symposium about twenty years ago. But that was during the liability panic and the idea didn't go anywhere. A little while after that I quit ski instructing.

<br>Ride a chairlift to the top, ski past a sign, and suddenly you are in the backcountry.

<br><br>I have nothing against this; I do it often when the snow is good and the crowds are thin. There is nothing like a bunch of lift-served vertical to hone skills or dial in new equipment.<br><br>The ski areas are simply responding to a perceived need - I'm not familiar with the terrain in question, but for all I know it's not too dissimilar to Blackcomb's Spanky's Ladder bowls, which are open to anyone willing to make the 10 minute hike. Canada, of course, has a different take on the liability issue. <br><br>I still maintain that the average person willing to throw down $100 to hike for half an hour (after investing in a half-day lesson) with no prior touring experience and no touring equipment is not going to get far into the "backcountry." For the rare skier in this group who finds inspiration in the experience it may change their perspective on the sport forever; for the rest it makes for good conversation in the bar . . .<br><br>(Whistler has in fact been doing something like this for several years with the "Extremely Canadian" program. I've freeskied with some of the instructors, who, after finding that their clients for the day were unable or unwilling to handle the terrain or conditions, are taking the rest of the day off - the conditions at the time were two feet of not-too-heavy fresh and fog).