Industrial Skiing vs. Backcountry Skiing
February 16th, 2009Posted in Skiing Everywhere
Lou Dawson posted a little rant recently(midway in a longer post), “Industrial skiing is indeed a blemish on the face of public land and snowsports in general. Expensive, resource intensive junkshow, for the most part — though ANY skiing has its upside and we do ride the cable on occasion.”
Lou’s has an admitted bias of promoting backcountry skiing because it makes his website profitable. More and more skiers in the backcountry is good for him and his advertisers.
I’m no fan of the American version mega resorts in the mountains and hoards of skiers, but I think I might prefer having hundred’s of thousands of skiers concentrated in a few dozen compact, fixed locations each weekend (resorts) rather than having those kinds of numbers of skiers invading the more fragile backcountry each weekend. We’ve seen this before when backpacking became popular, and kayaking. It doesn’t take too long before heavy use and crowding change the esthetic and the spirit of a wilderness activity. Unlike backpacking and kayaking, where hiking an empty ridge or running a deserted river retains the impression of pioneering, no matter how many people previously passed through there, even if just a minute or two before you arrived, with backcountry skiing, the trails in the snow left by other skiers are a constant reminder that someone else got to the goods first.
The result? Anyone driving across Teton Pass can see how far backcountry skiers must go to find the pristine snow we seek now that the sport has grown to number in the thousands in the Jackson area. Just like Lou has, a growing number of backcountry skiers around here now routinely hook up a trailer to an SUV or pickup to a tow a snowmobile to a trailhead. They then use it to transport them ever further into the backcountry to find unmarked slopes. Can our winter mountain environment and the hard pressed wildlife- and local search and rescue crews- withstand a future of hundreds of thousands of skiers on skins and snowmachines penetrating further into the mountains each winter weekend to escape not just the confined skiing at resorts, but the crowded skiing on the mountains surrounding resorts and towns across the wintery mountain regions?
If I were as hard corps a backcounty skier as Lou is, I might create a new website, backcounrtyskiingsucks.com, and be happy to see full lifts across the valley.
Seriously, being humans, we’re just too good at spoiling any good thing. I haven’t a clue what will prevent backcountry skiing from becoming a victum of its own success.
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