Resorts Take Skiing to the Extremes
By Larry Olmsted, Guest Columnist
February 2007
I hate to admit it, but a few winters ago, I got bored with skiing. After twenty years of winters spent visiting resorts around the world, a sense of “sameness,” began creeping into my life, as in same thing, different place. This phenomenon drove many of my hardcore ski buddies to take up snowboarding, tele-skiing or backcountry touring just for the sake of something new. For all of us, alpine skiing was our first love, but the marriage had grown stale, and these other pursuits were like having an affair, when what we really needed were some new toys and techniques to spice up the relationship. The real answer came from the most unlikely source: the ski resorts themselves. At risk of losing skiers like us, they did a 180 faster than the Flying Tomato in the half-pipe and broke the rules of in-bounds skiing, adding all kinds of extreme opportunities to the resort experience. It was like skiing Viagra, and it combined the best of both worlds: new ski experiences that you used to have trek into the wilderness or to remote backcountry lodges for, but with the same five-star accommodations, après ski happy hours and readily available chicken wings I had grown to love.
How did ski areas take it to extremes? Let me count the ways. Back in 1999, Wyoming’s Jackson Hole, already known as the premier expert skier mountain in the nation, entered into a revolutionary agreement with the National Forest Service, which owns all the land around the resort. They installed gates in the boundary fence, and began doing avalanche control and ski patrol in the adjacent backcountry. Jackson also offers trained guides for novices which are a must for most visitors. I wouldn’t go without one. The fee includes a safety lesson, loaner avalanche transceivers and probes, and how to use them. This gear and instruction is standard with every guided backcountry ski trip, be it on foot or by helicopter. When Jackson opened its backcountry, but with lift access to the top, it meant easy to reach out of bounds skiing with minimal hiking, and a beer and warm fire waiting at the bottom. This breakthrough snowballed, so to speak, and guided, controlled, backcountry skiing started popping up at resorts all over the place, from Telluride to Aspen Highlands. Just last week I skied an incredible resort in Alberta called Sunshine Village that has three different transceiver-required extreme skiing zones within one resort, in addition to more than 100 regular trails.
But out of bounds was just the start. Resorts expanded their in-bounds extreme offerings like never before. In Colorado, Breckenridge and Aspen Highlands built new lifts to reach their highest, steepest terrain, opening chutes, glades and bowls that once required lengthy hikes. Breck’s new chair is the highest lift in North America and goes to places I used to hike forty minutes to reach, huffing and puffing with my skis on my shoulders so I could ski those chutes, maybe once a day at best. Now I can go wild run after run. Snowmass and even Beaver Creek, which has a bit of a prissy rep, just opened new cliff areas with steep chutes. Colorado’s Silverton resort opened in 2000 as a mountain exclusively built for extremes: there is only one lift, which takes you to a hiker’s ridge with endless lines through steep chutes, and every single skier at Silverton is required to wear transceivers and carry avalanche gear. In fact, until this winter you couldn’t even ski there without a guide, and you should still use one. It is truly the only resort of its kind.
Then there are the big boy toys, sno-cats and helicopters. I remember cat-skiing and heli-skiing as a lodge based activity, where you would pay an arm and a leg to sign on to a trip to a bare bones lodge in the wilderness of British Columbia for five or more days of nothing but powder. There is nothing wrong with this, and for many people it is a dream vacation, but I like to mix my skiing with the spa, the bar, a variety of great food and the whole ski town vibe that to me is an integral part of the ski vacation. After all, there are about 16 non-skiing hours in the day. Also, truth is it hurts to fork over seven grand for a heli-week.
That’s why it was awesome when ski resorts started rolling out the cool machines. In Colorado, Keystone and Copper both started using cats like lifts. Keystone sells one-ride sno-cat shuttles to its high-altitude North and South bowls for just $5 a pop. What better way to see if you even like cat skiing than this bargain basement deal? For advanced skiers, they have equally reasonable full-day sno-cat tours to untracked, in-bounds backcountry-style skiing in Bergman and Erickson bowls. Just down the road, Copper goes one better with free cat skiing. You heard right: gratis cat shuttles to the top of Tucker Mountain, with over 1200 vertical feet of the resort’s most challenging terrain.
There has also been a surge in the number of full-day traditional sno-cat tour operators working outside the resorts in vast wilderness areas, but with tours starting and ending at the resort, keeping the extreme experience under one easy roof. You can find these at Steamboat, Vail and Durango Mountain Resort in Colorado; Grand Targhee and Jackson, Wyoming and throughout Utah. Ditto for helicopters, which are beginning to pop up at more and more resorts. Currently there are five traditional ski resorts in North America offering onsite heli-skiing: Whistler/Blackcomb, BC; Telluride, CO; Sun Valley, ID, Jackson, WY and Snowbird, UT. Instead of laying out a wad of cash for a week in the woods, try a day from the front lawn of your hotel. Telluride Helitrax literally leaves from the posh ski-in/ski-out Inn at Lost Creek, and is also the first operator to follow suit of the sno-cats and offer single ride trips, the easiest taste of heli-skiing you will find anywhere.
Nothing sums up the resort extreme trend like Jackson’s Grand Slam where you can spend four nights and do a day each of conventional resort skiing, guided backcountry skiing through the gates, cat-skiing and heli-skiing, a sampler more delicious than the best pupu platter. The trend is here to stay and I for one have jumped on the bandwagon. My malaise is long gone, I’m more passionate about skiing than ever, and a couple of weeks ago I skipped a day on the slopes of my fave Jackson Hole for a one-day heli trip into the Snake River Range. I still can’t get the endless runs of fresh powder out of my mind. Forget skiing Viagra, that is skiing crack.
Don't just take it from me, go explore these new extremes for yourself.
For more travel tips and advice, check out Amy Ziff's blog: The Window Seat, at http://windowseat.com@travelocity.com. To suggest a topic for a future column or to tell about a travel experience of your own, please email Amy Ziff at ask.amy@travelocity.com.
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