Glamping meets mountaineering

Colorado’s newest overnight backcountry experience offers the pleasures that come with backcountry hut skiing in a spectacular setting, but without the burden of hauling a 40-pound pack crammed with food and a sleeping bag.

Located in the spectacular San Juan Range, the Bridal Veil Backcountry Ski Camp began operations last weekend.

The guided trip takes skiers from a backcountry access gate at the Telluride ski area to a camp with heated tents at 12,500 feet in the Upper Bridal Veil Basin. Sleeping bags, down jackets, insulated boots and hot meals await skiers who only need to carry lightweight packs with their incidentals.

A national travel and leisure website described it as “luxe winter camping,” and some might see it as glamping, but co-owner Bill Allen views it as falling in the middle of a spectrum with glamping at one extreme and hard-core mountaineering at the other.

“Some magazines want to target a different audience, so they play up one side of it or the other,” Allen said. “We’re not trying to make it a glamping experience where it’s this super-luxury thing. It’s not like hard-core mountaineering, but we’re trying to steer away from ‘glamping trip.’ I think the target audience is the hut skiers, people who ski the 10th Mountain Huts and that sort of thing.”

Getting there involves about four miles of skiing with 1,200 feet of climbing, Allen said.

From the backcountry gate on Telluride’s Gold Hill near the upper terminal of Chair 14 at 12,000 feet, skiers descend into the Bear Creek Basin, climb over a 13,000-foot pass and descend into Upper Bridal Veil Basin.

“The touring to get there from the ski area is not extreme,” Allen said. “It’s pretty reasonable in terms of the distance, the elevation gain and the terrain we go through. On a nice day, it’s super mellow, a nice easy tour. You ski down very low-angle moderate terrain to get to the camp.”