I WATCH as Dustin Dyer swipes his pole along the base of a small knoll beside our track. Before he finishes the motion, a thick layer of snow deposited by the ongoing storm slides down to harmlessly cover his snowboard boots. But that mini-avalanche is a sign of possible danger to come. It’s February, and Dyer, co-owner of Kent Mountain Adventure Center, a ski and rock climbing guide service and education outfit based in Estes Park, is taking me on a tour of Rocky Mountain National Park. He has chosen this small rise for his snow check for a reason: It has nearly the same steepness and faces the same direction as Dream Shots, the steep chutes we’re planning to ski back down to iced-over Dream Lake. That small slide is an indicator that, if we ski that line, there’s a chance we could trigger an avalanche that wouldn’t be described as mini.
“I don’t know where you’re at,” Dyer says, “but after seeing that, I’d rather not take the risk.” Me neither. We’d just glimpsed what’s known as a storm slab, where a layer of fresh snow hasn’t had time to bond with the existing layers below it, making it ripe for an avalanche. Instead, we ski the route we just hoofed up because that terrain is too shallow to slide.
Despite not schussing our intended run—in fact, because we didn’t ski it—this was a textbook backcountry day. There are few other sports that require such a high level of risk assessment, decision-making, and willingness to turn back as ski touring. But despite this barrier to entry, backcountry skiing is an activity that, according to market research firm the NPD Group, has been exploding in popularity since the pandemic temporarily shut down ski resorts and sent us all in search of socially distant ways to get our winter fixes. Although gear sales have cooled somewhat since that first pandemic winter, Dyer doesn’t see the sport’s growth slowing significantly any time soon. “As ski quality continues to go down at the resorts,” he says, “I think more and more people are going to realize they can come out here and ski pretty consistently amazing conditions.”
There’s more to it than good snow, though. Skinning, so called for the removable fabric strips that stick to the bottoms of your planks and grip the snow so you can ski uphill (and don’t slide downhill), is by far the most efficient form of human-powered
