Easy tours, uphill routes
Guidebook offers accessible ways to backcountry ski
For three decades, Carbondale’s Lou Dawson has been the foremost authority on backcountry skiing and ski mountaineering in Colorado. In 1991 he became the first man to ski all of the state’s 14,000-foot peaks, and his guidebooks influenced a generation of Colorado backcountry enthusiasts since the publication of his first offering, “Colorado High Routes,” in 1985. His “Wild Snow: 54 Classic Ski and Snowboard Descents of North America” is more than a collection of ski routes — it is the definitive history of ski mountaineering in America. He was inducted into the Colorado Snowsports Hall of Fame in 2005.
This season he has a new guidebook, “Uphill Skiing and Light Tours of Colorado,” a convenient, wire-bound atlas of relatively easy backcountry tours, along with information on some of the state’s ski resorts that allow uphill skiing — an activity which is becoming increasingly popular with the development of lightweight alpine touring gear.
The Denver Post sat down with Dawson this week to talk
about the new book. doing something different. Even that first “High Routes” book back in the ’80s, it was the first modern ski mountaineering guidebook for Colorado. Then the fourteener ski guides were very different, because nobody had ever done a guide book for skiing on the fourteeners — that was pretty hilarious, really.
I actually thought I would never do another printed guidebook, because it’s a lot of work and it’s not the best way to make a living as a writer. Then I’d had this fantasy for a while of doing a book that was contrarian. All of these guidebooks people are doing, most of the routes are these really steep, spectacular peak descents — which I love doing, and have done thousands of them — but nobody seemed to be addressing this whole population of people who aren’t interested in those routes. They would prefer to tour to a hut or go out for the day and do something almost entirely avalanche-safe that just gets them out in the woods and allows them to get some exercise.
About half the routes in the book are backcountry routes, and about half are uphills at resorts. a unique policy. We try to have some guidelines in the book — a list of how to behave yourself at a resort when you’re uphilling — but the resorts that allow it have very different policies. Eldora charges money ($25 per day); Buttermilk in Aspen does not. Some of them you can uphill after hours, some you can uphill during operating hours but not after-hours. It gets a little confusing, so we tried to detail those things in the book. The problem is, they change pretty rapidly. Every time we talk about a resort in the book, we always say, “Before you go, it’s mandatory to contact the resort.” (Loveland ski area, for example, has changed its policy this year and is restricting uphilling to before and after operating hours). think that was the case, but when a ski area has a special-use permit, they become the de facto land owner and can dictate what is done on that parcel. That’s just the way the law is. So you can’t just walk up Eldora in the middle of the day without paying. They have the right with the ski patrol to grab you, and the sheriff could actually arrest you for trespassing. like Ute Mountaineering in Aspen and Cripple Creek Backcountry in Carbondale — a big part of their business is uphilling gear.
A: The kind of gear that defines the genre is the AT gear using the Dynafittype binding, but a lighterweight ski. Not the big fat skis, but rather something pleasurably light that you can have fun tromping up the resort and not feel like you have these big weights on your feet. And (AT gear) is appropriate for the resort. The resort doesn’t want people up there who are having trouble skiing back down, making big traverses because they’re on Nordic gear they’re unfamiliar with.
That’s one reason the sport has exploded, the uphilling at the resorts, because the AT gear has gotten so light. You can have a really lightweight setup for going up, and then you can have equally as much fun going down. tricky to figure out, because the overarching criteria is not have much avalanche danger. That requires a route that is fairly low-angle, in the 30-degree range, but not so low in angle that you’re doing a hike (on the descent). past middle age knows you’ve usually got some kind of joint problems. You start orienting your sports toward things people like to call low-impact, and uphilling on skis is certainly low impact. Those of us who are progressing through the years, that’s what you find — you’re still going to enjoy it, but you change in terms of what you do enjoy.