Email
PrintSteep and Deep: Land of Plentiful Powder
Going guided in the Big One’s backyard.
Just try not to smile when you’re busting backcountry powder like this outside the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort’s boundaries.
Hugging the limits of the ski resort, we slip along the orange ropes and boundary markers in the blinding white-on-white of a cloudy day on a snow-covered mountain. “Are you ready for this?” asks our guide, Sarah Carpenter, with a sly smile. She stops in front of a backcountry gate at the top of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, pushes the gate open, and holds it there for our party like a gracious hostess welcoming us for dinner.
Once we’re in, Carpenter whooshes past. “Woohoo!” she exclaims, the blue ball on top of her ski hat wagging like the tail of a happy puppy.
I share her excitement. I’ve been through these gates only twice before in the three years I’ve lived in Jackson Hole, and never felt quite like I knew what I was doing. This trip will be different. I have a guide—that secret weapon every skier occasionally needs to find the really good skiing in a massive expanse of unknown territory.
Carpenter had agreed to take me and three friends on a private tour at the end of March last year. Bode Miller I’m not. I own only one pair of skis, and they are not particularly fat. I don’t get up early and wait in line for the first tram on powder days. I didn’t even manage to use all twenty days on my pass last year. I started ticking the “advanced” box instead of the “intermediate” one just last winter, and I still feel as if I might be sitting uninvited at the cool-kids lunch table.
In other words, I’m not the hardcore skier you might think of as the type to hire a guide. Nevertheless, going out with a guide seemed like a wise thing to do. When on my own, I can never seem to cover enough new territory to find what I know is hiding in the backcountry of my backyard resort.
I love fluffy white deep powder. Slipping through it on skis feels like swimming through a cloud; like flying. And, as much as we all laud the powder here in Jackson Hole, I’ve wondered how many skiers have experienced the true bliss. As for me, I’d floated down only a handful of slopes covered in light fluff deep enough to bury my legs up to the knees and spray me in the face with each effortless turn. And I’ve never found it inbounds.
A big storm hit four days before our date with Carpenter. It hadn’t snowed again since, though the temperature had remained cold enough to preserve the powder. Still, four days? I expected our guide would manage to lead us to some less tracked-out runs, but I certainly wasn’t counting on turns in virgin snow.
I underestimated the powder-finding powers of Carpenter, one of just two women on the resort’s team of twenty guides. The guiding program has existed as long as the resort has, marketing manager Anna Olson told me. Formerly, though, guides showed guests around the mountain inbounds, and wandered into the backcountry only occasionally in the spring, after the avalanche danger had diminished. Not until ten years ago, when the resort opened its boundary gates, did a guided trip develop into a “must-do” for those visitors who want to experience the entire realm of what Jackson Hole Mountain Resort has to offer—offerings that grew exponentially when the out-of-bounds gates opened.
“Because of the nature of the terrain through the gates,” Olson said, “a guide became something people really needed.”
Carpenter said she takes many types of skiers into the backcountry, including first-timer intermediates. (She offers them a crash course in avalanche safety beforehand, and teaches them how to operate their avalanche beacons and search for buried skiers.) She has also guided groups training for heli-skiing in Alaska and for major mountain descents in the Himalayas.
Another option, Olson noted, are semi-private trips for singles or couples wanting to team up with others for a more economical guided ski experience. No more than five skiers per group are permitted.
Carpenter can almost always find good snow, she said. If the conditions are just plain bad and/or her clients’ skills aren’t up to the tougher terrain, she’ll turn the trip into a touring adventure, guiding skiers to some of the most scenic vistas in the backcountry.
“There are people who have been coming out and skiing with us here for ten years,” she said. “They’ve become really phenomenal skiers.”
It never gets old for those who come again and again. “We’re always finding new terrain,” Carpenter said.
“What do ski guides do in their free time?” she asked, in response to my asking. “They ski. A group of us went up Rendezvous Peak and skied a couloir last week that none of us had ever skied before.” In other words, the terrain outside the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort’s boundaries is almost endless, with mountain after mountain to explore.
“The line we’re going to ski is one of my all-time favorites,” Carpenter says, as we hike up a ridge with skis strapped to our backs. “For some reason, no one ever seems to ski it. They all ski past it.”
When we reach the top, Carpenter walks us to a cliff edge and shows us where we will go. The bowl most people hit in this area is tracked, but the ridge we’re about to ski looks like it hasn’t been touched. Carpenter points to some trees, saying she’ll meet us there after we’ve skied the ridge, one by one.
I slide onto the slope, following Carpenter’s enthusiastic lead. “Whohoo!” My skis disappear beneath the deep snow. Gliding through the fluff, the snow from my own wake hits me in the face. I know my smile must look ridiculous, and that the staff photographer will no doubt capture that goofy grin. But I can’t wipe it off.
Skiing through powder like this is a dream; amazingly fun—and short. I lose my balance on a bump and roll through the white stuff like it’s a feather bed. And this is just the beginning of our adventure. We have several powder-laden slopes still ahead in our half-day outing.
Hours later, back at the mountain base, some friends of Carpenter’s ask how it went. We tell them we were amazed by the fresh powder we managed to ski four days after the most recent storm.
“Yeah,” one of them says. “We like Sarah. But we don’t like her showing you guys where to go out there.”
There’s plenty for everyone, however, as I discovered on that day. You and your guide just need to know where to look.
