Map of Antarctica

Antarctica

Jabet Peak summit

Binning and Hagen on the summit of Jabet Peak

Sphinx, Antarctica

Earn your turns: An expedition team moving up an ice cliff on a steep face they named the Sphinx

Chris Davenport Davenport

Davenport

Australis, Drake Passage

The Australis in the Drake Passage

Antarctic Expedition

Davenport, Workman, and the author

Chris Davenport, Antarctica

Davenport skiing an iceberg

TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND TONS of freshwater go into making your bigger Antarctic icebergs. They’re formed when ice calves off a glacier or an ancient frozen shelf. Splashing into the salt water of damned-cold seas, icebergs drift off on their own, sometimes covering ten miles a day. Less dense than salt water but not by much bergs float like pear-shaped tubbies at the Jersey Shore, with 10 to 15 percent poking above the surface and a great rumpy mass below.

At the moment, a medium-huge berg roughly the size of a large yacht is minding its own business in Waddington Bay, a body of water off the north side of the Antarctic Peninsula, that spindly geographic thumb that points toward South America. Suddenly, an intruder starts hacking into its blue-white mass with a pair of ice axes. The blades belong to 39-year-old American Chris Davenport, a former World Extreme Skiing champion who’s now a multi-sponsored, globally known ski mountaineer. Davenport swings his ax points into the ice. He kicks his way up it wearing ski boots. Hauling a pack with skis, he spiders up a wall that angles steeply into the bay.

Before long, he reaches the berg’s 100-foot “summit,” detaches his skis, lays them down carefully, and clicks into his bindings, knowing that it’s not necessarily smart to ski an iceberg. Davenport’s body weight and gear are putting 200 new pounds on top of its unstable apex. He and his fellow ski adventurers Australian Andrea Binning, 33, and Norwegian Stian Hagen, 35 have watched from afar as a few top-heavy bergs actually flipped over, with a thunderous splash. Sometimes the bergs simply implode and sink. The sounds of disintegrating chunks are echoing freely throughout the bay, and Davenport will tell me later that when he skied this berg, which he did twice, he could hear it groan.

So why is he doing it? The answer isn’t much more enlightening than the old dog-licks-self truism: because he can. One skis icebergs in Antarctica precisely because you can’t ski them in Verbier or the Khumbu. But the stunt is really just garnish to this trip’s main event: skiing several of the dramatic, snow-covered spires that erupt out of the hyper-clear waters around here.

“The Antarctic Peninsula is the last great ski location on earth,” says Davenport, who ought to know. In 2007, the Aspen-based athlete became the first person to ski all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks in a year. Along with Hagen who cut his teeth on the icy couloirs of Chamonix Davenport has also knocked off Europe’s most intimidating ski descents, including the Eiger, the east face of the Matterhorn, and Mont Blanc.

The basic plan this time: float in from Ushuaia, Argentina, on a 75-foot sailboat called the Australis, ride inflatable, outboard-powered Zodiacs to rocky beaches, climb peaks, and then relish descents that have probably never seen skis, moving cautiously because of the scary absence of paramedics and rescue helicopters.

“People have scoured the globe for the next Valdez,” Davenport says, but almost no place can match Alaska’s combination of huge peaks, maritime snowfalls, and opportunities for untouched lines. Antarctica just might. “The Antarctic Peninsula is like the Southern Hemisphere’s answer to AK,” he adds, “even though it’s a lot harder to get to.”

SOUNDS GREAT, DOESN’T IT? Wouldn’t you love to be with us, seeing these uncharted playgrounds for yourself? Not to worry: A major part of our mission just as important, really, as bagging first descents is to make you feel like you’re here.

A modern adventure has many moving parts, and they come in two basic categories: the gear the athletes use to perform their feats of derring-do, and the gear they use to tell the world all about it. It adds up to a lot of stuff. Our crew contained less than a dozen people, but between us we had enough equipment, clothing, and communications hardware to bury ten luggage carts back at the Buenos Aires airport, prompting a hysterical Argentinian woman to light into Davenport for being a cart hog.

But what could he say? Expedition and film crews travel heavy Davenport paid $1,800 in excess baggage fees for all the duffels, ski bags, and Pelican cases we’d brought and the footage guys, who are indispensable, have their own hefty loads. Onboard with the three pro skiers are Ben Wallis, the rugged Australian skipper of the Australis; Skye Marr-Whelan, our first mate (and Ben’s girlfriend); mountain guide Doug Workman; a magazine writer (yo!); and three professional image makers: still shooter Greg “GVD” Von Doersten and two videographers, Jim Surette and Scott Simper, who are filming a documentary called Australis: An Antarctic Ski Odyssey. GVD, for his part, is hauling four cameras, two water housings, and 100 gigs’ worth of CompactFlash cards to earth’s most remote continent.

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In the modern era, trips like Davenport’s happen only because a group of sponsors decide it’s worth their while to send talented jocks off to do something difficult, and they want plenty of images for their money. The marketing payoffs are impossible to calibrate do accountants look for a revenue surge when the team is hunkered down in a homicidal blizzard? but people in the outdoor biz seem to agree that these investments are a good idea. According to Jon Atencio, athlete manager for the Amazon.com of the crampon set, based in Park City, Utah underwritten expeditions make everybody happy.

“We sponsor athletes because they’re doing things that the average Joe in his cubicle only dreams of,” he says. “We have massive subscribed e-mail lists, and it’s nice to alert people to a big adventure, instead of just saying, ‘Scarpa boots on sale!’…Goodwill is part of it. It’s not like we see a sales spike for mountaineering in Antarctica. We don’t get a sales spike even if one of our athletes does something amazing on CNN. The value of sponsorship to us iscredibility. We can say, ‘We’re a core company supporting core athletes on core adventures.’ “That doesn’t mean the companies throw money at any old expedition, especially during arecession. To cobble together the roughly $90,000 cost of this trip, Davenport started beseeching sponsors back in early 2009, armed with a four-page, full-color proposal called “Australis: An Antarctic Ski ¹ú²ú³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ.” It read, in part, “The objective of this expedition is to climb and ski first descents in one of the world’s last great unexplored ranges, the Antarctic Peninsula. Our professional film crew will capture HD Video…to produce a feature-length ski documentary…. Only a handful of ski groups have explored the range, and very little documentation of skiing has been accomplished there. We would be the first team to bring the beauty and majesty of the Antarctic Peninsula to the modern ski-film viewer.”

Davenport sent Helly Hansen the main clothing sponsor for both him and Hagen a request for $30,000. In a pitch target=ed to Backcountry.com, he stressed the particular benefits of the film he hoped to make. “I would like to offer Backcountry.com a multi-faceted sponsorship opportunity for this film project,” he wrote. “What I need…is an additional budget of $15,000 to be spent on the post-production…including editing, transfer, music, color-correction, and DVD printing. Backcoun­try.com would get opening sponsor credits with logo in the film, as well as more subtle product placement (stickers and coffee mugs come to mind). I would provide Web dispatches and photos from the expedition to Backcountry.com. I would also offer that Backcountry.com would be able to stock, sell, and promote the DVD when it becomes available in late summer 2010.”

The company which has been resoundingly successful, even in a bad economy went for it. So now on Backcountry.com, you can link directly to Davenport’s blog. (Davenport is listed, along with 32 other Backcountry.com athletes, under the heading “Pro Team.”) Once you arrive at , you’re shown the Antarctic dispatches, then tempted by a boomerang link: “Check Out Chris’ Gear: backcountry.com.”

Throw in Hagen’s and Binning’s sponsors (Roxy, Black Diamond, Adidas, Völkl, Marker, and others) and you’ve got capital-A ¹ú²ú³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ in the 21st century: a mission in which photogenic, gender-balanced, multinational teams do their thing in undiscovered glory holes. Nailing big and/or weird objectives is a particularly favored niche, producing oodles of imagery that will thrill the core audience watching various magic-glow boxes back home.

WE LEAVE USHUAIA on November 22, sailing through the Beagle Channel as we begin a four-day voyage from the southernmost city in the world to Antarctica via the Drake Passage, 600 miles of stomach-churning pitches and yaws. As the warm evening sun glints off the Australis‘s wake, we glide through the channel, below snowcapped, arrowhead-shaped peaks. But the fun stops once the protected channel opens into the wide-open Drake. Even with the aid of seasickness patches, people go green and puke. I’m queasy myself, unless I stay flat and motionless in bed which itself is not without hazard. After one especially violent wave, Workman launches from his upper bunk, rolls across the hall, and bangs into a metal ladder on the other side. This wakes him up.On Thanksgiving Day, we anchor safely in the Melchior Islands a rocky archipelago near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, which has been called “the Venice of Antarctica” because of its endless channels and natural canals. The next morning, we get down to business, bagging a line on 1,788-foot Jabet Peak, on Wiencke Island. It feels carnal to move legs on land again after five days at sea.

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We change our ascent route after spotting a hidden, 1,000-foot couloir rising almost to the summit. Near the top of a long, hard climb, Davenport asks, “Do we chance a really steep descent on the south face?” We do, because it’s in the sun, and because the visuals will pop. “Really steep” turns out to mean 52 degrees as thoroughly modern adventurers, Davenport and Hagen have inclinometer apps on their iPhones. Committing to a ski turn on a pitch that steep takes a leap of faith. Once moving, though, we experience perfect backcountry conditions: smooth and predictable.

It was a triumph except for one glitch: We left all our sunscreen on the boat, thinking our base tans would be enough. Wrong. We came back looking like we’d been for a stroll on the surface of Mercury.

There are other little headaches. Davenport has borrowed an Inmarsat BGAN satellite terminal to provide us with wireless Internet access. The idea is to send dispatches to Backbone Media, a Colorado-based PR firm, which will then file posts for Davenport’s personal blog, as well as updates for the Web sites of sponsors Black Diamond, Red Bull, Backcountry.com, Kästle skis, and Smith Optics. But the BGAN is fickle. Mountains (and even icebergs) disrupt its signal. Scrambled software forces Davenport to speak to an IT dude for 15 minutes on a dollar-per-minute sat phone. The last few days in Antarctica, the BGAN refuses to work at all. Internet communication dwindles to sketchy, early-nineties levels like we’re all still on CompuServe.

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It’s a big blow. Sponsors pay for adventures because they can’t entrust all their salesmanship to the pimply teens at your local ski shop. From a trip like this, they crave tweet and blog attention, but our tweet total wheezes to a halt at around 35.

Davenport is a veteran at coping with problems, which can dog an expedition leader every step of the way. Before the trip, a benefactor (whom Davenport can’t name) pulled out after promising him $100,000. Helly Hansen had to pull out, too; late last year, it greatly reduced the size of its sponsored-athlete program. The twin losses caused out-of-pocket boat costs to skyrocket to more than $9,000 for each passenger.

But Davenport and Hagen landed on their feet. Days before leaving for Ushuaia, they cut new deals with a Helly competitor, Spyder. Known for its ski-racing skin suits, Spyder wants to launch a big-mountain collection, and Davenport and Hagen happen to be two of ski mountaineering’s marquee names. During our time on the Australis, between viewings of violent DVDs like Pulp Fiction and The Punisher, Davenport and Hagen sat at a table, sketching new designs for Spyder. “We’ll name them after Duseberg Buttress, Demaria, and other first descents down here,” Hagen said.

The two are actively involved in the collection, and their deal is structured like the relationship between Burton and the late snowboarder Craig Kelly. The big-mountain line AK, which sponsored him, sold like crazy, earning Kelly considerable profits before his death by avalanche in 2003. Hagen and Davenport believe they can do well, too. As they look at existing product, they’re vocal about skiwear design. Hagen rips Helly for a jacket’s counterintuitive cuff closure. Don’t get him started on pockets and zippers.

ON THE SUNDAY after Thanksgiving, a few of us take a Zodiac to 65° 15′ south, 64° 16′ west, the coordinates of Vernadsky Station, a science outpost that specializes in measuring ozone depletion.

The oldest operational station on the peninsula, Vernadsky was founded by the British on Galindez Island in 1947 and handed over to Ukraine in 1996. Today it hosts five scientists, four mechanic/electricians, a doctor, a cook, and a custodian. All are male, and all seem pleased that Skye, not her boyfriend, escorts us on our visit. She is exceptionally pretty for a first mate, with long raven hair, doe eyes, and a pierced tongue. The scientists fawn, though their rough English makes for especially small small talk.

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Almost all of the Ukrainians sport mullets, tight jeans, and cigarette breath. They take us on a tour of Vernadsky. Rooms appear mostly spotless. The ozone-measuring device, an underwhelming assemblage of white metal tubes, sits in a dark attic. Skye enters the gym and quickly walks back out its walls sag with centerfolds of nude women. When not perving, the Ukrainians play snooker and Ping-Pong.

Vernadsky also hosts the southernmost souvenir shop on earth, selling $20 bottles of “low ozone air.” We don’t buy any. Instead we eat overcooked beef kebab and drink homemade vodka, a blend of “water, Antarctic ice, yeast, and magic!” according to a Ukrainian who’s wearing a piece of six-millimeter rope as a headband.

In the bar, the main focal point of a Vernadsky visit, I pound five vodka shots and talk with meteorologist Eugene Lomakin, who bemoans the nearby penguins. “They leave very bad smells,” he says. “Ugh! They’re very funny, but we hate them.” The penguins are currently tending to eggs, which makes them aggressive. “When I go to check meteorological equipment, they bite my calves,” he frowns.

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As we all know, things were a little rougher around Antarctica in the old days. (See, for example, Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance, 1915 16.) Shackleton got iced in about 250 miles from here, and one of the peninsula’s most imposing peaks is named Mount Shackleton in his honor. It stands at 4,805 feet, with an abrupt, 3,000-foot ridge littered with crevasses and seracs. Sickly steep couloirs spill down from the summit, and, not surprisingly, Mount Shackleton has no recorded descent. It’s a geologic monster. Scoping it with binoculars from the Australis deck on the night of December 4, Hagen says, “If we do Shack, we’ll be really happy. We’ll go home having accomplished something as ski mountaineers.”

Shackleton is far from the shore, so we can’t approach it as a day trip. We’ll need to haul tents, stoves, and sleeping bags, and to overnight on a glacier. Says Davenport, “I’ve sold my soul to Mother Nature several times, so I hope she’s nice.”

While Workman and Simper stay on the boat, six of us set off the next morning under ominous conditions. Gray skies glare at choppy seas. As we boat to the approach, icy water splashes over the bow, soaking gloves and soft shells. Shivering, we strap crampons to our alpine-touring boots and kick our way up an unstable face, skis riding our heavy packs. When the pitch flattens, we put climbing skins on our skis and stride. We climb roped together in three-person teams, in case a crevasse opens up.

After five hours, we quit skinning and establish a base camp, stomping platforms for two Black Diamond Bombshelter expedition tents. With shovels, we dig out shelves for cooking, then fire up MSR stoves. We melt snow, brew tea, and cook freeze-dried meals that Hagen bought in Norway. (Try the Turmat Storfegryte beef stew you can thank me later.)

We wake to four inches of new snow, with crappy visibility. We make a pre-arranged 11 a.m. radio call to Workman on one of our seven Motorola Talkabouts. He confirms the worst: The forecast shows no clearing till the next morning.

Slight, sporadic patches of blue “sucker holes,” in skier parlance convince us to wait in the tents for a miracle. But at 2 p.m., we finally admit the obvious: We can’t risk Shackleton in these conditions. “There’s no room for error here,” says Binning. “You’re such a long way from help. In that respect, Antarctica is a more dangerous place to ski than anywhere else. You can’t fuck up.”

“Yeah,” says Davenport, “even in the Himalaya there are helicopters. This is the only place where rescue is not an option.”

OUR DAILY ROUTINE becomes familiar: We hand skis down from the deck to the Zodiac each morning, then bounce in ourselves. To avoid puncturing the inflatable pontoons, we stick axes, Whippets and self-arrest poles, and crampons in a plastic bucket.

On December 8, midway through a sunny afternoon, we set off for a 45-degree, diamond-shaped face spilling off the Arctowsky Peninsula. The athletes call it the Sphinx, after a similar steep in Alaska’s Chugach Range.

Though it’s softening to the point of spring snow conditions, the Sphinx should be safe to climb. Which it is. For about 20 minutes. Then the sun becomes more direct. In the invisible distance, great chunks of ice are crashing into the sea. We begin to remember that today is the austral equivalent of June 8. Small rocks begin whizzing down, released by the sun from the Sphinx’s icy grip. Sporadic at first, rocks are unleashed every minute or two. The athletes, two-thirds of the way up the 1,700-vertical-foot pitch, announce they’re skiing down now.Afterwards, on the deck of the Australis, Hagen says, “Those rocks could come down at 100 miles per hour and take your head clean off.”

“The rocks were small at the beginning,” Davenport says. “Then all of a sudden they were softball-size. They’d kill you so fast. The mountain can’t talk any more clearly. It said, ‘Get the hell off!’ “

“We should have retreated earlier,” Binning says, “but we could smell the summit.”

Three days later, we head back to the Arctowsky. This time, we start moving up a chute to skier’s left of the Sphinx, climbing with crampons and ice axes. The pitch is steeper than anything this side of vertical ice. It’s best to look up at all times, to see what’s above and where to sink the next sharp. Yet we can’t help but look to the side every now and then. That’s when you feel like a badass: when the mountain looks damn near perpendicular to the horizon. Not that you notice the horizon much, what with the unfiltered-by-ozone sun sparkling up the clear water, icebergs disintegrating into “bergie seltzer,” and breaching whales exhaling happily through their blowholes.

Shaded by its walls, the chute releases no stones. We snap photos of each other sticking to pitches that only tree frogs should adhere to.

From a distance, GVD and Simper capture pan­oramic shots. Through their viewfinders and binocs, they see us summit the Sphinx. They spot Surette filming a mountaintop interview with the athletes before they drop the face. With Davenport leading off, the pros etch huge, bold lines on a 52-degree slope, which Davenport calls “the coolest line of the trip.” Yet Surette, Workman, and I can hear that the snow on the Sphinx has yet to soften their turns sound like knives on Styrofoam.

We decide to ski the much narrower but not-quite-as-steep only 45 degrees ascent couloir. We know the snow is much softer. Besides, dropping the ascent means we’ll snag a first that the athletes can’t claim.

It’s our last day on skis; 36 hours later, we’ll head back across the Drake. Back on the boat, euphoric, we attempt to dent the seemingly infinite supply of Quilmes cervezas. (We brought 26 cases.) The sun refracts off ten pairs of high-tech sunglasses. “That’s 12 sunny days,” Davenport points out, “which is absolutely not normal for the Antarctic Peninsula.” It’s his understanding that the place usually enjoys only 60 clear days per year.

As the Australis knifes between bergie bits through blue water, a humpback whale flirts with us. It’s like SeaWorld minus the biologists in short shorts. The playful cetacean swims fore, aft, alongside, and underneath the boat. It fires its 35 tons in and out of the sea splashing huge, flashing its prehistoric flukes. Davenport runs to the deck to watch, saying, “It’s amazing we’ve been here 18 days and we’re still freaking out!”

GVD, the pro photographer, is the only one to really capture the diving humpback. But that doesn’t stop the rest of us, armed with our point-and-shoots, from snapping approximately 87 shots as well.

Everyone, everywhere, thinks they can shoot good photos. GVD’s territory has definitely been infringed on. But so has mine: Judging by the blogosphere, everyone thinks they can write. And on our trip, the pros ski steeps that pucker even their experienced sphincters, but still we media types think we can keep up. Everyone can do everything.

These days, adventure seems less inspirational than aspirational. One would hope that Antarctica still represents a barrier of some kind. But I know what you’re thinking: “If I had ten grand for the boat and a month to play, I could do that.” Maybe. Thing is, you haven’t. Davenport has. He traveled through seven airports, shared a balky boat toilet with nine people for a month, and rang up four possible first descents. Five if you count the iceberg.

The post You Wish You Were Here appeared first on ¹ú²ú³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Online.

“Feel that?” Lance frowns, wild-eyed behind his ski goggles, his ponytail whipping in the wind.

Backcountry Skiing the French Alps

Brewer hits the down button on Bellecôte

Backcountry Skiing the French Alps

Brewer on l'Aiguille de Peclet, hungry for more

Map

Backcountry Skiing the French Alps

The author having a little rabbit at Les Deux Alpes

“What?” I reply, aware of little but my own labored breathing here thousands of feet above the Alps’ highest ski area, Val Thorens.

“Static electricity!” Lance shouts, motioning at the skis A-framed above my backpack. “It’s moving between your skis. Listen and you can hear it buzz.” Already the April sky has blackened and started hurling lightning bolts at surrounding peaks. We’re clinging to boulders just below the summit of the 11,683-foot Aiguille de Peclet, hoping to clamber up the knife-edge ridge and drop the glacier on the other side. But not if it means playing moth to the hypercharged atmosphere’s bug zapper. The humming sounds like bacon frying.

Our partners, Lee and Beej, climb up to our perch. They’re followed by two Belgian snowboarders. After skinning for an hour, then booting up a face for 15 minutes, no one wants to do the prudent thing and turn back. One of the Belgians pulls a joint out of his parka and sparks it. “Care to schmoke?” he offers.

A pregnant pause elapses. The alpinists who normally haunt Peclet rigorously trained professionals from the International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations (IFMGA) and their clients wouldn’t dream of toking. Protocol must be considered here. That, and I need a few seconds to free my fingers from my glove. You know what they say: Quand les choses deviennent bizarres, les bizarres deviennent professionnels.

That’s the motto of our trip, a 15-day, 200-mile, three-nation (but mostly French), frequently off-piste, do-it-yourself ski trek across the highest reaches of the Alps. Carrying only skis and whatever fits into 55-liter backpacks, we’re crossing the original duchy of Savoy, one of France’s most mountainous regions (now chopped into two »åé±è²¹°ù³Ù±ð³¾±ð²Ô³Ù²õ, Savoie and Haute-Savoie). Having taken a train to Grenoble, in southeast France, and crossed into Savoie from the apex of Les Deux Alpes resort, we’re headed gradually north, before we detour into Italy, then past Mont Blanc, to a finish line where Haute-Savoie meets Switzerland. Although short car rides will connect some dots, the trek will unspool mostly on snow.

And we’re not in Keystone anymore. Up high, we’ll encounter an unholy congress of ice and rock, with zero trees to aid navigation in frequent fogs. The 360-degree aspects found at most Euro resorts will mean sun-affected, often unstable snowpacks. (During 2005-06, avalanches killed 57 people in the French Alps alone.) This is why IFMGA pros who know the difference between hoarfrost and its psycho-killer cousin, windslab, not to mention wilderness-first-aid training and a few dialects are the only people legally qualified to guide on Europe’s glaciers.

But professional guides have flaws. Like charging a fee. And nagging. And not, uh, cherishing the moment. Better to spend resources on France’s Institut Géographique National maps, which don’t mooch for tips. The only mountain expert we’re looking to is Aspen’s late Hunter S. Thompson, who gave us our motto, Quand les choses Or, as he put it, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

“TIME TO TAKE THE PIG for a walk,” Lance grunts, shouldering his porcine backpack. Our packs are so overstuffed, weighing 40 to 45 pounds each, that we had to ride in the baggage compartment on the train from Geneva to Grenoble. It’s day one, in Les Deux Alpes, our jumping-off point. L2A boasts all the bona fides of a French mega­resort: thigh-meltingly big vertical (6,350 feet), stunningly tan and pretty brunettes, and cafeteria meat that looks like chicken yet is in fact rabbit. We hike 20 minutes over the Savoie border and into La Grave or, as the paranoid North Americans who felt they discovered the place in the early nineties once called it, Vallée X, home to Europe’s steepest, scariest slopes. With no village, disco, or ski patrol, it remains a cow-dung-scented burg with 7,000 vertical feet of mostly ungroomed, no-beginners terrain. Unfortunately, shade reaches La Grave hours before we do. Forgiving spring slush has flash-frozen into brittle coral. Skiing it turns our teeth into castanets.

But we’re accustomed to mountaineering’s drags. I’ve done all kinds of expeditions with my old friend Lee Cohen, our 50-year-old photographer, who’s been blitzing the steeps at Alta, Utah, for 30 years. Utah native B.J. “Beej” Brewer, 30, won the 2001 national telemark championship and is sponsored by Rossignol; he and I skied the Swiss Alps two years ago, and he’ll prove to be Lee’s favorite subject. And Lance McDonald, 45, works a nine-to-five job for the town government of Telluride, Colorado (where I live), but still nails big peaks aplenty, including a pioneeringdescent on Alaska’s University Peak in 2001.

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What snow La Grave does have ends well short of the valley floor, and the last 90 minutes finds us sliding down a muddy service road. One slip sends me Rickey Hendersoning 30 feet down tractionless chocolate milkshake.

The next day we catch a pre-dawn ride with our chalet keeper to Valfroide, a summer shepherd village that’s bereft of life. No lifts rise from Valfroide, only the Alps. Climbing skins and crampons will propel us across a vast, rarely skied expanse and up, up, up to the 10,620-foot Aiguille d’Argentière.

Since the monstrosity of the peaks shields the rising sun, we move quickly at first over icy, nearly frictionless hardpack. After a lunch of baguette and chocolate, though, things get scary. We’re alone, preparing to climb hairy-steep boilerplate. We snap ski crampons onto our bindings for extra bite, but it’s extremely dicey. In some spots the surface is uneven; should the metal teeth of the crampon mistakenly bite air, there follows a sickening jerk downward.

After nine hours and 4,470 beastly feet of climbing, we finally reach the summit, wiggle into harnesses, and don helmets. The couloir splitting Argentière’s northeast face begins with a near-vertical chunk of mixed rock and snow; we’ll need to rappel in.

Hanging on the rope like a worm on a fishhook, I realize eight years have passed since I last did this. I’m the least experienced mountaineer on the trip. Which is kind of a good thing, like being the lousiest house in an upscale neighborhood: The others’ property values lift mine. With the capable Beej, Lance, and Lee around, I never want for a guide.

A porter, on the other hand, wouldn’t suck. Argentière is coated with perfect, fluffy snow, the kind backcountry addicts like us crave. But as we ski down, our behemoth packs blaspheme the glory of the powder, pushing our heads into recurring faceplants.

LATER THAT NIGHT, we push our faces into gooey raclettes. Kilograms of cheese still clog our intestines as we check in to the swank, four-star Hotel Fitz Roy, in Val Thorens. Compared with the spoiled brats of British families and the preening French trophy wives, we’re sadly underdressed. But the Fitz Roy treats us to pre-dinner champagne and cantaloupe wrapped in prosciutto. This gives us a nice, luxurious feeling that compels me to buy a $180 bottle of wine that ¹ú²ú³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ will later refuse to cover.

Val Thorens is part of the megaresort called Les Trois Vallées, one of the biggest linked ski areas on the planet. Along with nearly 400 miles of groomed pistes, there are 184 cable cars, gondolas, and chairlifts. Stringing lifts up every conceivable ridge is France’s version of Manifest Destiny. Without this, ambitious inter­connects like ours would be impossible.It takes us two days to cross the vast Trois Vallées: one with the Belgian snowboarders on the electric descent down Peclet, another through Méribel and Courchevel, where we see topless girls sunbathing on midslope rocks. At the bottom of Courchevel, the 184 lifts finally stop. This is an outrage. We’re forced to call a cab, which wants airfare money ($135!) to drive us 30 minutes to Champagny-en-Vanoise, where a tram connects to La Plagne ski area.”La Plagne,” explains a Frenchwoman with an impossibly alluring accent, “means The Place Where the Cows Go in the Summer.'” La Plagne is gigantic, spanning 24,700 acres and holding 50,000 beds. It’s two days after Easter, and the place is mobbed. The French hardly require something as momentous as Jesus’ resurrection to head to the hills. They’ll vacation if an earthworm grows its head back.

A disturbing number of them are sporting très passé purple-and-pink one-pieces, and three time travelers from 1992 board a quad lift with me. As is the habit of Euro skiers, they pull down the restraining bar without consulting me. The bar comes only halfway down, stopped by my pack. They fruitlessly yank it again. And again. “Je regrette,” I apologize, insincerely. They glare back and accept the situation only when they see how pointy my ice ax and crampons are.

The Place Where the Cows Go in the Summer is where the ski mountaineers go in spring. From La Plagne’s high point, we head toward a legendary 11,211-foot monster called Bellecôte. A series of uninterrupted 5,000-plus-foot descents spill down it, with incredible coffin-width couloirs and concave pitches. We spend 45 minutes skinning up the back side, then downclimb 200 feet of snow-coated rock poised above a void. Descending is an agonizing, one-limb-at-a-time ordeal: With crampons attached, we put an ice ax in one hand and a self-arrest pole in the other. Punch ice ax into wall, stretch leg down, kick till crampon bites, punch arrest pole, kick other leg. Try to keep the skis on your back from knocking an overhang. Try to trust the half-buried, UV-cooked fixed rope, the only thing keeping you from painting the rocks below with internal organs.The skiing should be the easy part. But first come fangs of rock and 600 feet of 45-degree steeps. Scratchy little hesitations what skiers call survival turns deliver us to a sun-softened apron. We let off the brakes and rip ginormous corn turns, floating our fat skis through water molecules, surfing as much as skiing.

ON DAY EIGHT, it becomes obvious that long underwear can be turned inside out only so many times before laundering becomes necessary. So we stop in Les Arcs, which connects to La Plagne via the Vanoise Express a behemoth $20 million, double-decker tram that moves 2,000 people per hour. Laundry for me means one SmartWool T-shirt, two long-sleeves, two pairs of long johns, a couple boxers, one pair of lightweight polyester pants, and two pairs of ski socks. If you’re going to spend a fortnight in the same socks, Europe’s the place: You can always blame the stench on the local cheeses.

The next day, we hitch a ride ten miles across the Isère River valley to La Rosière. Dark clouds hover overhead. The föhn, a notorious down­­slope Alpine wind, shoves chairs at lift towers. When I try to read a trail map, the föhn slaps it at my face. The föhn not only lifts temperatures and melts precious snow; Euros also blame it for illnesses ranging from migraines to psychosis.

The föhn blows.

But not in Italy. Once we cross the border, the wind backs off, as if it lacks jurisdiction. Trail signs and groomed tracks also stop abruptly. We’re suddenly in a gloomy outback, not quite sure where to go, headed for a lonely shelter.

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Lee and I lag behind, basset hounds to Beej and Lance’s border collies. A friend in Montana says one way to cope in the mountains is to express the exact opposite of what you feel. So I tell Lee, “If we’re lucky, there’ll be more scary avalanche debris piles to cross. Plus a dozen more little creeks bisecting the trail.”

“Yeah,” he says, “it’s super-efficient to stop every tenth of a mile, take off our skis, and walk over them.”

“And let’s hope this trail stays a sidehill and never levels!” I add. “I like pushing constantly off one edge of my downhill ski. Gives me a nice Brian Boitano feeling.”

The sarcasm works for only so long. The route, through the Vallone di Chavannes, runs straight up to a high ridge. It never swerves, so the perspective never changes; it’s like jogging in Dallas.

Not till 8:30 do we reach the stone Rifugio Elisabetta. Built in the 1930s for summer climbers, it keeps a winter room open year-round. A “winter room” means camping, with a roof over your head. The only light comes from our headlamps beams crisscross and bounce off the walls, like strobes in the Una­bomber’s private disco. A disco without music. More significantly, a disco without women. What a lame fucking disco this is.

ESTEEMED COLORADO alpinist Lou Dawson calls mountaineering “a social voyage thatcements friendships or reduces us to the raw basics of negotiation, leadership, and conflict.” Given our four competitive personalities, which find their full expression every night in vicious billiards games, friction is bound to happen, and it rears its head shortly after four o’clock on day 11, in a tiny Italian hamlet with the flatulent name of Purtud.

Lance and Beej, as is their hypercompetitive-skinny-guy wont, reach the bar first, and Lance orders two beers. When Lee and I arrive, expressing shock that Lance didn’t buy a round, he says, “I didn’t know you wanted one.”

“I didn’t know the sun rises in the east,” I say.

And what’s Beej’s deal? I know Lee wants him to “pop” on film, but all those greens and yellows? He looks fruity, like Sprite’s mythical “lymon.” As for Lee, who sports a writhing lip caterpillar, I refrain from telling him that Magnum, P.I. went off the air 20 years ago.

We’re headed back to France, approaching Western Europe’s highest peak, 15,771-foot Mont Blanc. Also, back to cheese that arrives in tartiflette, rather than a calzone the size of a cat. We manage to squish into the three-stage Funivie cable car without impaling an infant on an ice ax. At the apex, we get out and push through a beaten metal door painted with green, white, and red rectangles on one side, and blue, white, and red on the other: the flags of Italy and France, respectively.

With giant needles hovering all around us, we engage the world’s longest, most famous run: the Vallée Blanche, a glacier that courses between cliffs and seracs for 13.7 miles. To ski the Vallée Blanche is to swerve forever around crevasses and fallen novices, who flock here en masse despite their talent level. But, says Beej, “this is the best snow of the trip! This is sweet. Sweet cream.”

Most Vallée Blanche descents stop at Montenvers, where a train waits to trundle skiers the final 20 minutes to Chamonix. Between the glacier and the train, though, is a 280-step staircase, which is a fun place to watch scores of Euros simultaneously reconsider their pack-a-day cigarette habits.

The next day, we take a high-speed quad up Flégère, one of six ski hills around Chamonix, and then sweat our way up a frighteningly steep slope. From the ridge, skiers and snowboarders sporadically drop down, going right or left, but we charge straight ahead, milking elevation, skiing across more than down, till halted by a creek. Then a chug of water, re­attachment of skins, and more of the chunka-ssss-chunka-ssss of our bindings hinging and skins greasing up across the snow. We soon reach a snowfield 200 feet below our objective: a humpy cornice atop another long ridge. Problem is, it’s hot, and we worry that tendrils of bonded snow will melt and drop a ten-ton chunk of cornice on our heads. Should we turn back? We should go for it.

We stretch out, 8,043 feet above sea level, with glorious views of Mont Blanc, Les Grandes Jorasses, and l’Aiguille Verte. In the distance, the shore of blue Lake Geneva sparkles. We snarf dark chocolate and snap photos. No wind blows. We plop our heads down and doze. “This is the most perfect place of all time,” Lee raves before conking out.

Later, we ski silky hero snow meandering to the right. For a moment we seem lost, but we gain a rollover and spot a cluster of barn buildings: Chalets d’Anterne, a popular summer stop for hikers. In April, it’s empty. After 13 days among the Alps’ teeming masses, we suddenly have an entire beautiful European valley to ourselves. Mon dieu.

OUR FINAL DAY finds us in Avoriaz, a collection of apartment blocks perched on the edge of a cliff. We grab an espresso and fries at an outdoor café as we switch out of well-used trail runners and into even riper ski boots. We’re now within Portes du Soleil, the globe’s largest international ski area, which straddles the Switzerland-France border not far from Geneva.

The border is our finish line, and our route to it is all in-bounds groomers. The last chairlift reminds me of all the others in France: skimpy. I never lose the sensation that my large New World ass is about to topple off. Crossing the 7,469-foot Pointe de Mossette, we hoot halfheartedly and raise our poles in triumph. We’ve crossed Savoy. There are no ticker-tape parades, no kisses from swell gals just the satisfaction of finishing a quest that involved 59 trams, gondolas, chairs, and drag-lifts and thousands upon thousands of vertical feet.

The beer in Champéry, our final stop, is cold and big and worthy. As I hoist one, my mind goes back to Peclet, with the static electricity and the Belgian snowboarders and the joint which, like most in Europe, contained mostly tobacco and did nothing but induce a cough.

With the sky short-circuiting all around us, our hair standing utterly on end, what exactly would a guide have done? One might hope that, at $400 a day, he’d have raised his ice ax high and acted as a lighting rod. But more likely he’d have anticipated the quickly closing storm and refused to attempt Peclet in the first place.

That would have been a bummer. Peclet’s west face is a 3,000-vertical-foot test piece guarded by seracs and riddled with crevasses. Authorities recommend crampons, a 30-meter rope, and to “avoid falling at all costs.” We inched around rock and onto a sketchy 45-degree face. Jammed our ice axes into the snowpack till steady. Anchored backpacks by looping straps over the ax heads. Hoped to hell our toeholds, on rime-crusted schist, were secure as we gingerly extracted our skis and lay them across the exposed fall line. Stabbed, with dental precision, boots into bindings. Slowly sheathed the ax and shouldered the pack, sensing how badly gravity wanted to suck gear and flesh down its maw. Exhaled nervously. Contemplated the dreary, foggy light below.

A pang of vertigo struck, then weirdness. The Belgian snowboarders, on a ridge above us, were trying to coax the sun out by singing. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine ” Between us, Lee, Beej, Lance and I carried avalanche transceivers, cell phones, binoculars, ice screws, belay devices, headlamps, climbing skins, knives, and, if I’m not mistaken, some equine painkillers. We were ready for most anything. Except Belgian stoners atop a French peak crooning Louisiana’s Depression-era state song.

We were happy just to be traversing Savoy on our own power. Doing so removed our amateur status. When the going got weird, the weird turned pro.

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Camp

Camp at Big Bay

Jamie Sterling

Jamie Sterling at Papatowai

A ridgetop

A ridgetop in the Southern Alps

Athletes

Clockwise from top-left: Jamie Sterling, Dana Flahr, Gary Elkerton, Johan Olofsson, Eric Themel, and Sage Cattabriga-Alosa

Newzealand Map

Even by the lofty beauty standards of New Zealand’s South Island, the scene at Big Bay is out of hand. A notch in the island’s sparsely populated southwest coast, north of Queenstown and the Southern Lakes, Big Bay is a UNESCO World Heritage park that remains roadless and pristine. A beach of smooth sand gives way to rolling dunes and a forest of podocarp trees, which in turn march sharply upward to a million snowcapped peaks, including the stunning 9,931-foot Mount Aspiring. From the mountains, creeks tumble down to the Tasman Sea and rocks covered with mussels. It appears the healthiest of ecosystems until a non-native species suddenly invades in the form of a heavily tattooed, six-foot-two Austrian. Jumping off an eight-foot sand dune and onto a huge yucca plant is 31-year-old snowboarder Eric Themel, winner of freeride competitions in several countries and the 2007 Red Bull Tribal Quest ski-and-snowboard photo contest.

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Hucking off the dunes alongside Themel is 26-year-old Canadian freeskier Dana Flahr, a winner of the International Free Skiers Association North American Tour, as well as its Sick Bird Award, given to the ballsiest skier. From his feet, he launches a misty late 180 into the forgiving sand as his new Oakley shades rocket off his head.

Hungry to record the spontaneous moment on film in the slanting light of late afternoon, Australian cameraman Dwayne Fetch scurries about till his ski pants fall inexorably south, but he remains focused on the action. Which comes to include bottle-blond 43-year-old Australian surfer Gary Elkerton, winner of two Masters Championships and the 1983 Australian Amateur Championship, who’s crawling around the sand on all fours. He balances a deer skull on his head while emitting a bleating, mammalian sound.

The man behind today’s madness is Jose Cuervo and, to a greater extent, Tony Harrington, who’s running around to various photogenic scenes with camera in hand, as he will most of the ensuing week. With more than 120 magazine covers to his credit, Harrington, a 42-year-old Australian, is a legendary surf-and-snow-sports shooter. While he’s hardly the only action photographer to frame hairball adventure, Harrington is the rare one to create the hairball himself. He puts together groups of top athletes, gets backing from their corporate sponsors, then chases big swells and snowstorms around the globe and shoots the athletes in action. He recently landed a Ski Channel series: 13 episodes starring Harrington as Storm Hunter, in which he’ll “hoon around with my mates” looking for powder.

For the Big Bay trip, Harrington put together a cross-cultural stew of renowned skiers, boarders, and surfers. The initial plan: Camp on the beach in the middle of the park for a week or so, “sessioning” its “epic” surf break; when conditions allow, summon a helicopter to land on the shore, pick up the athletes, airlift them to the skiable steeps of Mount Aspiring National Park, and shralp accordingly. Harrington hopes on occasion the snow guys might surf and the surf guys might try out the snow, taking some athletes far out of their comfort zones. Harrington will shoot for this magazine, and the film guys will capture streaming video for Web sites and possible commercials. Harrington convinced The North Face (sponsor of all the snow dudes) that bringing this cluster of international strangers to Big Bay is good business that You, the End Consumer, will find the resulting images compelling. This is Harrington’s expertise: the Economics of Extreme.

AND SO SEVEN INSANELY accomplished athletes inhabit a New Zealand beach usually visited only by driftwood. There’s 28-year-old American freeskier Sage Cattabriga-Alosa, the gap-jump honcho and ski-film star (winner of Best Male Performance at the Powder Magazine Video Awards). A college art major before his ski career took off, Cattabriga-Alosa is busy drawing landscapes and still lifes of beach detritus in a sketchbook. With the surf flat (and very, very cold) and the heli-skiing currently impossible (more on that later), he is bored. Soon he joins in the dune-hucking, pulling a series of inhumanly athletic inverted aerials.

Swedish snowboarder Johan Olofsson, 31, who made the Guinness Book of World Records after ripping a raw, 40-degree-plus, 3,000-vertical-foot Alaskan mountainside in just 35 seconds, is poking at a smoldering bonfire with a stick. Hawaiian Jamie Sterling, 26, tow-in-surfing prodigy and winner of Billabong XXL’s Surfline Performance Award, throws various burnables on top confirming that, at heart, all men are pyros. Neither the crackle of the fire nor the yelps of the aerialists manage to roust Queenslander Mark Visser, 26, a stud with 6 percent body fat who surfed one of the biggest waves ever in Australia (a 55-foot monster born of a freak swell). He almost never leaves his tent, because of a debilitating case of the stomach flu.Presiding tirelessly over it all is Harrington. He’s known to friends and family as Harro. It’s a puppies-and-kittens world Down Under, and most names get tagged with cutesy suffixes: either an -eee sound (sunglasses are “sunnies”) or an -o (thus “Harro”). His blog is even .

Harro was born on Australia’s Central Coast and grew up skiing Thredbo Mountain, a major commercial ski resort. Though predominantly a surfer (he was sponsored by local surf shops as a teenager), Harro became a good-enough skier to finish in the top three in a few New Zealand extreme contests. He also worked as a resort photographer at Thredbo, smiling at tourists as they skied off a lift and asking, “Hi, I’m Tony, can I take your photo?” In 1995, at age 29, when few international freeskiers knew who he was or had any familiarity with Down Under skiing, Harro brought them to New Zealand for the World Heli Challenge, a one-of-a-kind ski contest he organized in which choppers whisked competitors up the unmanaged, chairlift-deprived Southern Alps.

Though he stands six feet tall, with the powerful torso of a linebacker (or someone who’s spent his life paddling into big waves), Harro comes across as a gentle soul. He never raises his voice not even during the herding-cats frustration of moving a ten-person cluster of healthy egos and a thousand pounds of gear. A big scar traces across his right cheek, but it’s from a childhood accident, not a bar fight.

Harro has spent his recent months chasing storms. He resurrected the Heli Challenge after several years off, got married in October, and two days later “took off to Tahiti and shot some epic images” of surfers at Teahupoo. This past December, he followed one swell from his part-time home in Oahu (where his Jet Ski stalled when a 25-foot wave broke right in front of him) to Southern California to the west coast of Mexico (where six months earlier he was pulled over and searched by militia at gunpoint). Ever cheerful, Harro regards the trip as “the biggest adventure of my life.”

Here in Big Bay, plans also derail. Though Harro was told otherwise before the trip, we find out at camp that we won’t be able to heli-ski from the beach, because the fuel tab to reach the peaks is prohibitive and the snow conditions are too sketchy up high. Meanwhile, only two of the snow jocks possess the will or the 4.3-millimeter-thick wetsuits to venture into the gray, ice-cold water: Johan Olofsson, who’s Swedish after all, and Dana Flahr, who goes out only briefly. “Just paddling and getting smoked by waves,” Flahr shivers. “Stood up a couple of times but just on the whitewash. My muscles were so cold I didn’t have the energy to really ride.”

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Still, Harro gets his wave-riding shots. Surfers Jamie Sterling and Gary Elkerton head into the water, pointing their boards directly into rocky coves, dancing on the curl, and milking languorous 15-second rides out of six-foot chop. Harro, with a waterproof housing on his camera and booties on his feet, wades far into the surf and burns a few million pixels. Later, as wetsuits dry on tents and bushes, Harro sounds content. “It’s funny with these adventure trips,” he says. “How much can you truly plan? All you can do, really, is bring lots of food and toilet paper and let the trip happen.”

OUR FIRST NIGHT IN BIG BAY, Harro apologizes: “One thing you haven’t heard about New Zealand are the midgies. I bought you all head nets.” New Zealand sand flies, known as “midgies,” are why the orcs from the Lord of the Rings films seem so pissed off. There are billions of them black, pin-size, elusive, ruthless biters. They inject their foulness into Gary Elkerton’s neck until, by day two, it becomes a reptilian horror of nasty welts.

We planned to work Big Bay’s surf and sand for a week, but after two days of itchy and scratchy and no skiing, Harro does what all good storm chasers do: changes direction. He retrieves the satellite phone and summons the planes, which pick us up right on the beach, at low tide. By noon we’re in the groovy, lakeside resort town of Wanaka, brunching alongside college-age snowboard chicks.

The next day, a rented RV and beaten minivan trundle us 35 minutes west of Wanaka to Treble Cone, a First World ski area reached via a Third World access road, with slippery switchbacks and 5.8 exposure. Harro herds us up to the base area, then disappears inside to cajole ten lift tickets out of the marketing department. Freeskier Sage Cattabriga-Alosa pounds a Red Bull past his scratchy beard. Boarder Eric Themel who served as a snowboard instructor after avoiding mandatory service in the Austrian army by claiming he was clinically shy and afraid of the dark shares boarding tips with surfer Jamie Sterling, who’s snowboarded exactly two days in his life. Surfer Mark Visser is still suffering from the flu, retching and invisible. Meanwhile surfer Gary Elkerton raves about his first boarding in France. “I was going so fucking fast, like it’s Waimea, and I hit ten French people,” he says. “There was blood all over the snow. Surfers are always trying to generate more speed by working waves. But with gravity ” His eyebrows rise conspiratorially.

Once the lift tickets materialize, the group splinters. Elkerton beelines for a natural halfpipe, touching his right hand to the snow like he touched the gray surf of Big Bay. Flahr and Cattabriga-Alosa start hunting trannies and takeoffs, hauling fast down the steeps and effortlessly hurling into the air, making new-school grabs. When they find a ridge-and-knob-studded stash beneath a chairlift, they pull tricks that induce the lift riders to whoop and cheer.

It’s a brilliantly sunny day, and Harro strives to make it YouTube-worthy. With sponsors, magazines, newspapers, blogs, and newsletters to satisfy, he needs content, dammit. He sets up a tripod on the snow and coaxes video interviews from the athletes. Elkerton makes a point of us all being “blessed to be heah.” Sterling says some nice words about his new friends being “creative, active athletes. I’ve never hung with skiers and snowboarders before.” But Johan Olofsson, who shows spunk and a wry sense of humor in conversation, becomes downright bland once the camera goes on. Harro tries to egg him on but gets only Bill Belichick like responses. “All right, mate,” Harro sighs, “go eat some pies and drink some beer.”

SNOW RIDERS AND SURFERS want to love each other. Really they do. You should’ve heard them the first night we met up in New Zealand.

Jamie Sterling, massaging a weather report out of his iPhone, put forth the question always asked of heli-skiers: “So you guys jump right out of helicopters?”

No, Cattabriga-Alosa kindly answered, the pom-pom on his retro green Smith beanie bouncing agreeably: “The helicopters land on the snow, then we get out.”

The surfers talked about waiting for waves; skier Dana Flahr blond and boyish noted, “Sometimes we look at digital photos for two days memorizing safe points and landmarks before dropping in.”

Surfer Mark Visser, longhaired and tan (before his flu): “That’s like us a bit. You need to know where to get out. When you go under the wave, you see air pockets and swim toward them. The key is to always stay calm.”

Snowboarder Johan Olofsson: “That’s the way I feel, too.”

Despite making nice, we eventually choose our own tribes in Wanaka. The saltwater types stay at one rented house, and the frozen-water ones stay at another, in a different neighborhood. One day, the watermen abandon the snow boys. Harro has noted a massive swell aiming for Papatowai, a point on the rugged southeast coast separated from Antarctica by masses of angry water. “I’m a firm believer that you make your own luck,” says Harro. And luck is a freak swell. So he pulls another bootlegger turn on the schedule.

Several hours’ drive from Wanaka, the Papatowai trip takes all the surfers and camera ops away for a day and a half. “The surfer duuuudes they don’t hang out with us We’re not rad enough,” one skier jokes. In truth, the snowphiles would be scared shitless at Pap. The waves roll in 30 feet high, with 40-foot faces. “I can shoot small-wave, high-performance, and snow park,” Harro says, “but give me the biggest swell or the biggest mountain, where you can use your brain to develop a strategy to survive, and that’s where I get my own fix of adrenaline. That’s what I live for.”

Pap breaks so huge that the surfers decide to tow in with a Jet Ski. And the water is so cold, Sterling will later report, “it was hard to hold on to the towrope.” Mark Visser, still sick, surfs three waves until the cold wrecks him and he has to stop.Meanwhile, back in Wanaka, the snow guys hire a plane at the airfield for a reconnaissance mission, scouting jumps and runouts. To scope their powder lines, they pay the pilots about $750. As for me, utterly bereft of sponsorship in this adventure-mad nation, I decide to rent a cheap mountain bike for $20, helmet and pump included.

A COUPLA DAYS LATER, skiers, boarders, and surfers reunite, and we’re in the Wanaka offices of Harris Mountains Heli-Ski the map room, to be specific preparing to lift into the pristine alpine above 7,000 feet. Harro asks snowboarders Eric Themel and Johan Olofsson to coach surfer Jamie Sterling, who’s taking a helicopter to the backcountry on just his third day of riding. “The bastard surfs 70-foot waves, and says he’s never been more scared in his life,” Harro says. Sterling ends up freaking a bit on the steeper pitches, yet he harnesses athletic ability, like no other three-day snowboarder in history, to rail most slopes.

We head west to the peaks, and there they are: the sheep. New Zealand is nutty for the lambies. You’ll hear sheep-population estimates anywhere between 40 million and 70 million, which are invariably accompanied by the ratio to human New Zealanders. These are overwhelming numbers 12:1 or 25:1 or what ever and would be terrifying to Kiwis in the unlikely event that sheep develop opposable thumbs or any semblance of brains. “Stop!” yells an assistant cameraman as we drive past a 400-strong flock. “I think one winked at me.”

The helipad is a sheep pasture. Dragging our boards and packs over to the pickup zone, we keep eyes peeled for mutton bombs. The spring conditions are pleasant, but the runs are measured in hundreds of vertical feet, not thousands. The terrain’s not quite big enough to blow the mind of You, the End Consumer, so Harro decides we’ve got to move, that we’ll wake before dawn tomorrow, travel a good chunk of the South Island, and hook up again with Harris Mountains Heli-Ski on the flanks of the Ben Ohau Range. “Not to say I don’t get frustrated,” Harro says, smiling, “but nothing’s a problem unless you make it one.”

A short night and untold roadside lambies later, we arrive at another heli-pad. Higher up, the riding is superb. Olofsson and Themel rip bold, nearly straight lines down 40-degree pitches. Flahr and Cattabriga-Alosa pack loose snow on top of their boots while awaiting their cues: When they air a cliff or cornice, the snow boils off a trick to create more spray for the camera.Perfect corn runs stretch three, maybe four thousand vertical feet. Surfer Gary Elkerton puts his extensive experience in the original, older Alps to use, powering hard on his back leg, almost popping a wheelie. “Woo-hoo!” he yells. “Can we do anuthuh? That was un-fucking-believable! This is like Jaws and that stuff yesterday was shore break.”

That night, we skip dinner and party like rock stars at the skiers’ rented house. Cattabriga-Alosa and I hide our gear in a bedroom, as the rest of the house seems a potential puke zone. The Hobbit-like Sterling, all of five-eight and baby-faced, can’t keep up with the Famous Grouse shots. His eyes roll independently of each other and his head lolls.

The athletes, at least, consider the cross-pollinated, surf-and-snow excursion a mega-success. “An awesome array of sportsmen in the most extreme place in the world,” beams Elkerton. In the end, though, it really doesn’t matter what the athletes think. They’re not the market here. They’re more new-school wildebeests in Harro’s grand photo safari. The whole point is the imagery. The stills on these pages, the streaming video and slide shows popping up on dozens of Web sites. Whether it works is for You, the End Consumer, to judge. What do You think?

Access + Resources
NEW ZEALAND

GETTING THERE: Air New Zealand () flies to Auckland from L.A. (nonstop, about US$1,100) and from New York (one stop, US$1,700). WHEN TO GO: New Zealand’s summer December through February is high season. Prime surf season is October to June; ski season, June through October.

WHAT TO DO & WHERE TO STAY:

Skiing
MOUNT RUAPEHU () – The North Island’s only two commercial areas, Turoa and Whakapapa, are on this active volcano. Stay a night in an igloo near Whakapapa (doubles, US$385; ). Or check out the Powderhorn Chateau, the closest accommodation to Turoa (US$165; ). CRAIGIEBURN VALLEY SKI AREA () – This steep and deep South Island terrain offers prime off-piste skiing. Crash at Flock Hill Lodge, just five minutes from Craigieburn’s access road (doubles, US$92; ). SNOW PARK NZ () – A playground for boarders and freestyle skiers, with two superpipes, a quarterpipe, and more than 30 rails and boxes. Stay at Bluewater Lodge, a luxury bed-and-breakfast on Lake Wanaka’s shore (US$270 US$450; ). HARRIS MOUNTAINS HELI-SKI – This company operates from Queenstown and Wanaka, with excursions to the Harris Mountains and Mount Cook. From US$610 for three runs ().

Surfing
RAGLAN – Manu Bay has one of the world’s longest left breaks. Stay at the eco-friendly Solscape and sleep in a converted train car (doubles from US$45; ). GISBORNE – “Gizzy” offers waves year-round. Check out Wainui Beach and the Stock Route. Stay at Knapdale Eco-Lodge, which serves gourmet local-food meals (US$215 US$255; ). DUNEDIN – This surfer’s haven has more than 40 breaks within an hour’s drive. For a memorable visit, stay at Larnach Castle (from $195; ). JACKSON BAY – A little-known surf area with waves left, right, and center. Craypot,a locally famous fish-burger trailer, is a must-try. Relax in the tranquillity of Collyer House Bed and Breakfast (US$195 US$240; ). BIG BAY – This remote area can be accessed only via boat, small plane, or a four-day walk through Fiordland National Park. For more information, check out .

GETTING AROUND: One of the best ways to experience New Zealand is in an RV. Kea Campers offers campers and motor homes for US$60 US$275 per day ().

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ONE APRÈS-SKI GOLDEN HOUR LAST MARCH, Daron Rahlves, three-time Olympian and retired U.S. Ski Team star, was standing in the middle of Squaw Valley’s Le Chamois bar in his underwear. Another fallen sports hero? It’s as good a guess as any. But Rahlves, it should be noted, was sober, and he had stripped only as a favor for a camera crew from ABC Sports, which needed footage to promote his latest high-speed, adrenaline-fueled pursuit, skiercross. An X Games favorite heavily influenced by motocross, skiercross sends four to six skiers at a time down a swerving, jump-studded, wildly ramped Alice’s rabbit hole of a course. Elbows fly, and if you cut off your enemy and send him careering off the course—hey, bonus.

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Rahlves between careers at Sugar Bowl

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Rahlves working his big-mountain mojo in the Sierra Nevada

This was not what Rahlves expected when he retired from World Cup racing following the 2006 season. With 28 podium finishes, 12 wins, three world championship medals, and a reputation as America’s best downhiller, Rahlves, 34, planned to leave racing behind and try big-mountain freeskiing—those helicopter adventures to the steeps of Alaska that supply each year’s new crop of ski porn. “It’s nice not dealing so much with edges,” he explains of the switch from racecourses to powder. “Nice not having to try to hang on to the ice all the time.”

It’s a transition no major racer has nailed, though. Sure, other U.S. Ski Team members have morphed into great freeskiers. Big-mountain heroes Jeremy Nobis and Wendy Fisher each raced at one time for the Stars and Stripes. But they all found their new mojo early. None enjoyed Rahlves’s success or longevity on the World Cup circuit.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the chopper: The International Olympic Committee, to everyone’s surprise, added skiercross to the 2010 Winter Games as a full medal sport. Then came the 2007 launch of the Honda Ski Tour—a well-funded, heavily promoted four-event series billed as “the Loudest Show on Snow.” The Ski Tour combines skiercross with terrain-park competitions, surrounds it all with fashion shows and rock concerts, and multi-platforms the bejesus out of its imagery. Rahlves hasn’t abandoned his big-mountain plans. Now, though, between waiting for weather windows in Alaska, he’s found another way to stay in the spotlight and on sponsors’ payrolls. “Skiing doesn’t pay nearly as well as during my World Cup career,” says Rahlves. “But the only sponsors I lost after leaving the U.S. Ski Team are 24 Hour Fitness and Oroweat bread. My Austrian sponsors, Red Bull and Atomic Skis, especially love the new exposure I give them.”

This explains his lack of pants. Squaw Valley was hosting the final stop of the 2007 Ski Tour, and Rahlves was enduring a made-for-TV costume change. After first modeling his old skintight World Cup downhill wear, he stripped and put on skiercross apparel: same helmet and goggles but with softer boots, back and knee pads, baggy black pants, and a lime-green miracle-fabric windbreaker with RAHLVES embroidered on the back. The purpose of all this haberdashery, the racer deadpans, was “showing schoolkids how to get dressed.”

The purpose might also have been to lift his Q rating higher than ever. While Rahlves hopes to shoot this winter with Matchstick Productions—the biggest seller of freeskiing DVDs—the Ski Tour, which has since acquired the Jeep King of the Mountain tour, will expand in 2008 under a new name, 48Straight, and will try to ride the buildup toward 2010, when America will renew its quadrennial love for winter sports, and skiers will become media “gets.” If Rahlves can polish his ‘cross skills a bit more—that is, if he can stop crashing in the finals—his could be the face you see on late-night TV. The reinvented stud whose post-skiing career … is a skiing career.

“MY HIP IS CLICKING,” Rahlves observes on a chairlift at Sugar Bowl, a resort near Squaw Valley. “It shouldn’t be.”

It’s Thursday, three days before the Ski Tour’s ‘cross finals at Squaw, and Rahlves is testing his pelvis. It hasn’t felt right since February, when, at the third stop on the Ski Tour, in Aspen/Snowmass, he caught an edge during a training run and shot 20 feet in the air before splashing down so hard he left three-inch divots in the hardpack. He looks solid enough to me, though, slashing his Atomic giant-slalom boards against a frozen steep named Rahlves’ Run. Huge chunks of terrain get swallowed with each turn. If he’s down to one hip, that hip is excelling. Rahlves appears, as only racers can, to accelerate out of his turns. Nominally, those are braking moves. Yet I can’t keep up with him, despite beelining straight down on a healthy hip. Must be a wax thing.

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But all of this—the athletic grace, the fun-at-any-cost mind-set, the multi-pronged unretirement—is perfectly in character for Rahlves. If this guy wants to star in ski films and a new Olympic discipline, expect to see him on DVDs every winter and in sit-downs with Bob Costas in 2010.

The son of a champion water-skier, Rahlves was always primed for athletic success. He and his younger sister were raised active and outdoorsy in the Bay Area and on the California side of Lake Tahoe. He recently took up skateboarding and already excels at snowboarding, mountain biking, wakeboarding, surfing, jet skiing, and motocross. Excels on a world-class level. He claimed the 1993 World Jet Ski Championship in the expert division, completed the Baja 1000 motocross relay in 2006, and won his class at the prestigious Glen Helen Outdoor National motocross race, in September. Though he spends most of his days at his family’s longtime Truckee compound—with his wife, Michelle, and their six-month-old twins, Dreyson (a boy) and Miley (a girl)—Rahlves just bought a second home in Southern California to be closer to moto-friendly desert and good surf.

“I was there in January and February surfing—the first time in my life I wasn’t in a wintry place in those months!” Rahlves beams.

He says the world jet-ski championship in ’93 marked a turning point: whether to train for the highest echelon of that sport or for ski racing. He chose the latter “because it was more of a challenge” and was racing on the World Cup circuit a year later. Good choice.

At five foot nine and 175 pounds, Rahlves gave up at least 20 pounds to Bode Miller, Tommy Moe, and the other hosses he raced against, and he lacks the Buick-size trunk found on gold medalists like Picabo Street and Hermann Maier. “A bigger guy can go faster on a straightaway than a small guy like me,” Rahlves tells me at Sugar Bowl. “So I learned to really stick my turns in just the right place and at just the right time.”

Among his 12 World Cup wins was a victory in the 2003 Hahnenkamm, the most hallowed downhill in the world. The slope, already steeper than Stephen King’s forehead, is fiendishly watered down to make it icier. Rahlves is the only American to have won it in the World Cup era, and the performance made him a legend in Europe, where Hahnenkamm wins mean more than Olympic medals.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Rahlves had a tendency to disappear into back bowls whenever races were canceled because of excess snow. “Eighty percent of World Cup racers wouldn’t touch powder skis or hit jumps,” he marvels. “They said powder would ruin the feeling of a course!” Raised on the Pacific-fattened dumps of Tahoe—Bode Miller grew up on the ice sheets of the Northeast—Rahlves always craved the stuff.

In the past few winters, though, weather cancellations started happening more because of drought or unseasonable murk. “I had gotten spoiled,” Rahlves says of his last year on the World Cup. “If it wasn’t perfect weather, if the conditions sucked, I’d lose interest. All the years of traveling, training, and committing to one sport began to wear on me. It was the right time to walk away.”

Rahlves made his competitive skiercross debut at the X Games last January, easily winning the individual qualifying run and every heat through the semifinals. But in the finals he got squeezed off his line and knocked off balance. His left ski ripped away from his boot, his arms flailed, and he landed on his can as his opponents sped away. “Shit happens so much quicker in ‘cross,” he says. “You’re not skiing the run; you’re skiing the guy in front of you.”

He also biffed at the first Ski Tour ‘cross, in Sun Valley in January, and then again at Breckenridge in February. Then there was the February crash at Snowmass that injured his right hip. Despite all this, he headed into the finale at Squaw in seventh place in the series standings.

“Daron gets impatient sometimes,” says Casey Puckett, another American World Cup and Olympic veteran who’s become the world’s top skiercross racer. “You want to pick your places to pass. Most of the time you see crashes is when a guy tries to make a pass where it’s impossible.”

For his part, Rahlves admits he still has a lot to learn. “Ski racing, it’s just me versus the mountain,” he says. “Here, it’s me versus the mountain plus three other guys.”

IN THE END, RAHLVES’S HIP keeps him out of the race at Squaw. “Pro athletes need to know the right thing to do with their bodies,” he tells me as we watch the race at the finish line. “You get to know anatomy through being injured.” A few feet away, Puckett is prone on the snow, grimacing at a torn medial collateral ligament suffered in the finals.

An hour later, we take off in Rahlves’s truck, a big black Chevy Duramax with a leather interior and a sticker on the back windshield that shows Rahlves cartooned as Captain America. He drives like he skis—fast and true—and we quickly cover the dozen miles between Squaw and his five-acre spread northeast of Truckee.

Rahlves doesn’t just have a garage—he has seven. The Chevy occupies one. The others bulge with toys and trophies—a photo of his dad making a U.S.-record water-ski jump of 158 feet in 1964; the plaque from his first World Cup victory, in Kvitfjell, Norway, in 2000; the top-end snowmobile that Red Bull gave him. Three snowboards hang on the walls, along with 22 pairs of skis, including decade-old race skis, new Atomic prototypes, fat planks for Alaskan powder, and giant-slalom boards for skiercross. “I need all seven of these garages,” he says. “I couldn’t move if I wanted to.”

Three weeks later, Rahlves goes to Alaska and bags a freeskiing DVD segment in Rage Films’ Enjoy, which is out now. “It was the best heli-skiing I’ve ever had,” he tells me when we catch up in October. “Well, it was a little unstable, a little sketchy. But that makes for good filming, because a lot of snow was moving down around me as I skied my lines.”

Matchstick owner Murray Wais hopes to shoot with Rahlves this season but says the difficulty is finding time. “Freeskiing’s in Daron’s blood,” he says. “He just hasn’t had the time or opportunity to change and commit to it.”

Which brings up another new hitch for Rahlves: teamwork. Shooting video segments requires that he coordinate his performances with the ski guides, a cameraman on the ground, another in a helicopter, the pilot, and, sometimes, other skiers. “It may be selfish, but I’m not much of a supporter,” he declares. “I couldn’t fully feel the joy if I was on a basketball team and my teammate sunk the winning basket.”

That might be why Rahlves says most of his energy will go toward skiercross this winter. “I just built a start mount at my house,” he says. “As soon as it snows, I’ll have my own practice area. Last year, the start was the worst part for me. I feel I can out-ski everyone else, but I crashed at every event last year because I wasn’t out front. I’ll try to get that dialed up.”

The U.S. Ski Team, meanwhile, has just appointed a new skiercross coach, a former racer named Tyler Shepherd, in preparation for the Olympics. Rahlves knows Shepherd well and likes him but says he’s still not sure about 2010. “A lot has to do with qualifying,” he explains. “I’d like to see it done like U.S. snowboarding does—with a series of American grand prix races. If it requires lots of European World Cups, over several months, I’m a longshot to try.”

There’s just too much keeping him in America these days. He’s getting involved with his family’s commercial real estate business; trying to nurture young skiers for the next wave of U.S. World Cup stars; working with Atomic on new ski prototypes; and wining and dining with sponsor VIPs—including a group of European bankers who are flying to Aspen in February just for the chance to ski with him.

Rahlves also got pulled into a committee attempting to bring the Winter Olympics to Reno–Tahoe for 2018. By then, he’ll be 44 and no longer competing. Unless, you know, something happens and…

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THOUGH THEY MET ONLY YESTERDAY, Micah Black and Dominique Perret are touching noses on top of Whistler Mountain, the world-famous snow-clogged ski resort nestled in southwestern British Columbia’s Coast Range. This is both unusual and normal. Unusual because Black and Perret, arguably the two best freeskiers in the world, don’t often go to the summits of alpine peaks to stand around snout to snout like golden retrievers. Normal because freeskiing remains a primarily visual phenomenon, and Black and Perret make a good living performing absurd acts for photographers, like the one popping his shutter at them right now, some ten feet away.

“Don’t try to kees me,” says Perret.

“Don’t kiss me, Tinkerbell,” Black neighs back.

We’ve come to Whistler Blackcomb Ski Resort in early May to stage Black vs. Perret—a competition that’s as close to a freeskiing heavyweight championship as you’re ever likely to get—and the photographer figures the nose-touching pose will evoke head-to-head combat, like in an old Hagler-Hearns boxing poster. Sure, Black and Perret are choking back laughter, but they’ll have their game faces on soon enough. Not only will the contest—conceived and made possible by this magazine and Whistler Blackcomb as a spicy alternative to the more regimented vibe of World Cup and Olympic racing—anoint an overall king of the mountain, but it will also help settle a longstanding debate.

Which is: Does the “total skier” come from the Alps, with its legacy of great alpinists making technical and precise turns down deadly faces? Or have the Americans, who co-opted “extreme skiing” and rechristened it “freeskiing” in the nineties to denote their showy high-speed, high-flying big-mountain style, earned the ultimate bragging rights?

During the next three days, it’ll be New World (in this corner, from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the lanky, longhaired Black!) against Old (from Verbier, Switzerland, the clean-shaven, barrel-chested Perret!) in a joust to reveal the best all-around performer. The contenders will ski hard, certainly. But because freeskiing involves a broad array of skills, they’ll also be required to demonstrate their party-dude abilities (during an all-night barhopping tour of Whistler Village) and dirtbag affinities (by washing dishes at a Whistler restaurant). So it is that Perret, the Icon of the Alps, and Black, the Bro Brah of the Northern Rockies, have agreed to meet at Whistler, with its world-class terrain of glaciers, cliffs, and chutes, its frenzied late-night discos, and its platoons of overeducated lifties and steam-addled line cooks.

In this rarefied atmosphere, who will emerge as the ultimate badass? Gentlemen, click into your bindings.

The Players

Micah Black & Dominique Perret

THE NEXT DAY: Perret (in blue) and Black arrive atop Whistler to begin the ultimate showdown.

THE YANK: MICAH BLACK
Black, 36, is an all-star jock by any measure. In 1995, he became the first American to snowboard the north face of Chamonix’s infamous 12,605-foot Aiguille du Midi. On skis, where he’s even more adept, Black has notched first descents in France, Alaska, Wyoming, Norway, Bulgaria, and New Zealand. In 2003, Powder readers named him one of the top three freeskiers in the world. A heartthrob and chat-room darling, he inspires swooning threads on sites like : “He has a dope name”; “Micah is drop-dead gorgeous”; “I mean, I’d let him jib my rail anytime.”

Now a bona fide “skilebrity,” Black has humble roots. He was born in Whitefish, Montana, and grew up in Spokane, Washington—an only child whose parents, Jim and Joyce, put him on skis at age two. In time, he distinguished himself from the pack by contorting his six-two frame into tricks and spins normally performed only by monkey-size jibbers. While ski-porn purveyors Warren Miller Entertainment and Matchstick Productions have filmed him, Black is best known as the carcass-hurling star of Teton Gravity Research, lighting up recent films like The Tangerine Dream and Soul Purpose. His talents earned him a gig starring in a 2000 commercial for the Nissan Xterra in which he threw a front flip over an SUV parked on a snowy mountain road.

Off the snow, Black rolls loose. He wears a tangle of dirty-blond hair, held back with a wide headband, à la Kid Rock. When he’s not making ski films (14 so far), he parties with Lars Ulrich from Metallica and Tommy Lee from Möey Crü In 2002, Cosmopolitan named him Wyoming’s representative in its Hottest Hunks in the U.S. issue, which got him an invite to Live with Regis and Kelly. Ski-movie headliners are often themselves called rock stars, but Black likes to point out that he’s actually cooler than that. “Real rock stars don’t scare themselves like we do,” he says. “They don’t live with the massive anxiety of a big-mountain descent.”

THE EURO: DOMINIQUE PERRET
In stark contrast, Perret, 43, is a clean-cut, thunder-thighed, six-foot native of La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, a very healthy ego, and starchy opinions about his freeskiing brethren.

“Freeriding shouldn’t be about a strange haircut or a bad attitude,” he says. Rather, it should be about strength and skill, both of which he has in abundance.

Perret’s high-altitude skiing is nearly peerless. In 1996, he attempted the first ski descent of Everest’s entire North Face. Climbing without oxygen, he made three summit attempts but was repeatedly turned back by minus-140 temperatures and 125-mile-per-hour winds. After 76 days in Tibet, many spent above 18,000 feet, he bailed—but not before skiing the North Face from 27,887 feet.

An athletically gifted youth from a ski-racing family—his father, Louis-Charles, was a Swiss Olympian—Perret grew up negotiating the trees and cliffs of La Chaux-de-Fonds, where he learned to ski very well and very, very fast. In 1991, he ripped down a speed-skiing track in Portillo, Chile, reaching 131 miles per hour (at the time, the seventh-fastest run on skis; the current record is 155). The year before, at Champéry, Switzerland, Perret nonchalantly threw a 120-foot cliff jump—a world record at the time—for kicks during a long downhill run. And in 1998, he set a world record for skiing endurance, sliding 353,600 vertical feet during 75 runs in just over 14 hours.

Well known throughout Europe from his tenure as a ski model, Perret has become an industry unto himself, grossing more than a million dollars a year. He’s published two books on “the Dominique Perret experience” and has produced and/or starred in 23 films. Natural Born Skier, Speed Is My Friend, Soul Pilot, and others have aired on TV in 100 countries and won 60 awards. And Perret’s fans love him: In 2000, European sports journalists and fans named him the 20th century’s best freeride skier.

Part 1: By the Rules

Dominique Perret

Perret pins his first run

OBJECTIVE:
To gauge the skiers’ technical prowess on a difficult course.

BLACK AND PERRET groan at the thought of going mano a mano in front of a scorekeeper; competitive freeskiing is normally the domain of lower-on-the-totem-pole athletes. These guys ski for cameras and cash, not judges. They make solo descents on rarely attempted peaks, and usually wait for clear weather. Sunshine improves visibility and makes segments pop onscreen.

Today the weather sucks—an overcast soup envelops Whistler Mountain’s Glacier Bowl, where they’re about to ski. No trees grow up here, so perspective is limited and vertigo is likely.

The duo duck under a rope with WARNING! CLIFF AREA signs, shoulder their skis, and trudge up the back of a ridge. They lock in and take their positions above unmarked runs that locals have named Exhilaration (which Perret will ski) and Excitation (Black’s route). The skiers gaze down at the dodgy conditions: old, unpredictable spring snow and sharp, protruding rocks. The runs are so steep that they can look between their ski tips, now jutting over the edge of the ridgetop, and see the respective bottoms.

Hundreds of feet below, Joe Lammers, a 35-year-old Whistler patroller who often judges IFSA contests, will grade them on five categories: line, aggression, fluidity, technique, and control. The skiers will make two runs each; the average score from both determines the winner.

Black goes first, whipsawing his boards perpendicular to the fall line for three turns. Then he releases his edges, lets his skis go with gravity, and sails over a rock band. He lands the air cleanly and rockets down the apron.

Perret waves a pole to announce his start. He makes two disciplined, braking turns as he approaches some sharp volcanic rocks—”cheese graters” in freeskier parlance—then he makes a halting, chicken-scratch move to line himself up safely for his mandatory ten-foot air.

Lammers deducts one fluidity point. Perret sticks his landing, though, and slashes the firm snow below with such force that the whoosh of his turns reverberates through Glacier Bowl. Lammers looks up from his score sheets. “Micah floats through microterrain features and seems to use his feet and ankles more,” he tells me, “while Dom just gets low and plows through anything and everything.” Lammers awards Black the first heat by a slim margin: 29.5 to 28.5.

The skiers choose similar lines for their second runs. Perret shows his remarkable consistency by putting up a mirror image of his first run. Black, who arrived at Whistler Blackcomb in a bolo tie and a Stetson, cowboys up for his second run down Excitation. He goes faster, takes 15 feet of air, and nails every move. Lammers gives him the highest possible marks for aggression, fluidity, technique, and control. Black wins this heat, too, 33 to 29, though Lammers is quick to point out that “both guys pinned it.”

Part 2: Keepin’ It Real

Micah Black & Dominique Perret

Meanwhile, Black rocks the suds

THE CHALLENGE:
Wash dishes at Garibaldi Lift Company, a bustling slopeside bar/restaurant.

OBJECTIVE:
To regain an appreciation for the little people in the ski universe.

BLACK LOOKS AT HOME in front of the GLC’s industrial Hobart dishwasher. He should; he’s a bona fide ski bum, and he’s washed dishes “professionally” before, in Jackson Hole. He wears his apron snug and straight over a gray T-shirt, and he moves beer steins from busboy trays to the Hobart with nary a wasted motion—as firm and no-nonsense as a mother cat moving kittens by the scruffs of their necks. As Black will proudly tell you, he never sought higher education. “Skiing is my college degree,” he beams. “That’s what I have. And I’ve made that into something.”

Perret, on the other hand, seems out of sorts as a sudsman. For one thing, he’s dressed all wrong, wearing a nice, suffocating sweater under his apron and a fancy Swiss watch from Hublot, yet another of his high-dollar sponsors. Perret wipes his hands too often, only to get them wet and slimy again moments later. He actually holds glasses up to the light to gauge their cleanliness, which is much too orderly and far too Swiss to fly in a chaotic Whistler kitchen.

One enduring urban legend of ski resorts is the dishwasher with the Ph.D. Though in reality there may be more bachelor’s and master’s degrees found around ski towns, it takes little prompting to get Black and Perret to philosophize about the reasons why so many people are willing to slave away for lift tickets and powder days. Between them, they have skied a cumulative 75 years, and they’re each on snow more than 80 days a year, but neither sounds the least bit jaded.

“Skis are like transmission lines,” Perret says. “They put energy into you. It physically comes in—”

“That’s the addiction of it,” interjects Black. They are standing in the GLC’s kitchen, beneath a poster for Kokanee beer and another of Canadian downhiller Erik Guay. “My favorite sensation is coming over a rollover weightless. Weightlessness is a wonderful thing. Everybody should feel it. That’s all I need. Hide the liquor and let’s get mashed.”

“In the middle of the turn, it’s grace,” Perret replies. “It’s a gift. Skiing before that moment is hard, and it will be hard again later. But it’s a beautiful moment.”

When the final dishes are counted, Black wins this event, but give the Swiss swabbie a few extra points for eloquence!

Part 3: Throwing a Shoe

OBJECTIVE:
To see who has the most coordination and wherewithal in a compromised situation.

LOSING A SKI (“THROWING A SHOE”) symbolizes the varied disasters that befall out-of-bounds skiers. The unpredictable snowpack of the backcountry—especially breakable crust—routinely yanks skis off. Avalanches can strip a victim’s board, boot, sock, and even pants, so getting out alive can come down to one-ski maneuvering.

We, the unfilmed and unsponsored, biff immediately after throwing a ski. We lack the pro’s catlike agility and superhuman quadriceps strength. For a normal person, it’s a considerable challenge to ski on one plank down a groomed run, let alone through a steep black diamond with egg-carton bumps—like the run we’ve chosen for today, on the skier’s-left side of Whistler Bowl.

I expect Black and Perret will ski a fair length, and they do. As the bumps soften in the spring sun, Black wiggles downhill on a 185-centimeter B4 from Rossignol, his longtime ski sponsor. He stands tall and attempts to ward off wayward deflections with quick flicks of his poles. He’d normally bend his knee more, but it’s encased in the plastic brace he’s worn since he tore up his ACL in 1996 in an accident he suffered while guiding in Alaska. Black dances down the slope until an impudent hump tosses him on his caboose about 70 yards from the start.

Perret clips into a 201cm Stormrider DP, a ski that DP designed for the Swiss manufacturer Stöckli. Skiers testify that it’s the stiffest ski on the planet, but Perret has no trouble bending it to his whims. He sinks his 198 pounds into the ski and fires downhill. With his poles spread wide for balance, he absorbs shocks with his thick, coil-sprung leg. All told, Perret travels some 30 yards farther than Black before he topples sideways, the winner.

Part 4: Clubbing!

OBJECTIVE:
To determine who has real bonhomie and people skills.

SUSHI VILLAGE, arguably the toughest dinner reservation in town, is packed to its uncooked gills on this Saturday night. Over spider rolls and edamame, we discuss the rules of tonight’s contest: Since “going big” applies to partying as much as freeriding, the skiers will tour Whistler’s wildest clubs, drinking, dancing, and flirting with the ladies. (The flirting is for simulation purposes only: Black has a serious girlfriend, so he would be competing illegally, so to speak.) Whoever folds first loses.

The journey begins at Tommy Africa’s, a legendary Whistler hangout. Perret swooshes in wearing a silky red Chinese-flavored shirt from his lone American sponsor, Oakley. Black wears a Dickies workin’-man shirt with a logo from Spyder, his main clothing sponsor; a tie adorned with a skier doing a back-scratcher; and a poofy white pimp cap, given to him by a woman at a Mötley Crüe concert in exchange for a camouflage trucker hat and a T-shirt claiming I PARTIED ALL NIGHT WITH TOMMY LEE.

Perret cuts through a fog machine’s effluvium and onto the dance floor. Below an elevated go-go dancer, he boogies to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back,” displaying impressive rhythm for a Swiss engineer.

We roll on to Garfinkel’s, another jammed club with vibrating walls. Black enters with panache. “Here I am,” he announces to a Hindi girl who’s too hot not to have a portfolio or her own Web site. She ignores him, but few others do. Two guys in hoodies, clearly TGR fans, yell “That was Micah Black!” after he passes. Black chats up a beautiful Polish blonde, who gushes, “I’m drunk right now, but you inspire me because you love what you do, and I want to ski because of you.”

The night rolls on. And on. The skiers’ endurance is most impressive. Girls come and go, including Colleen, an ex-girlfriend of Black’s who lives in Whistler. But it’s Perret who wins her over with some whispered French. Nevertheless, after a while Colleen leaves alone.

Whistler—a no-holds-barred tourist magnet that’s as close as British Columbia ever comes to Vegas—energizes both Black and Perret. And it bonds them, too. The two skiers end up watching the sunrise from the same place, a hot tub on a balcony of the Sundial Boutique Hotel. Though they’ve both pulled the all-nighter, Perret gets the edge thanks to his Swiss charm and lack of inhibition on the dance floor.

Tie game!

Part 5: Straightlining

Micah Black

Back at Whistler, Black attacks the hill

Micah Black

With help from the chopper

OBJECTIVE:
To further separate our heroes from park monkeys and in-bounds aces.

STRAIGHTLINING—A.K.A. “pointing ’em”—means going straight down a steep pitch for a long stretch at an extremely high speed. It’s one of the more demanding parts of cinematic freeskiing, and it’s also the “technique” freeskiers use to outrun sloughs and slides.

We wait a good part of the day for flyable weather. It’s well after lunchtime when we head to the hangar of our heli-skiing guides, Blackcomb Helicopters. On the drive over, Black and Perrett drift again into philosophic repartee, wrongly assuming we’re still awarding points for that.

“To turn is to admit defeat,” Perret grins. “Going straight on long skis is like sixth gear in a sports car, going faster but with lower RPMs. I like putting it into the sixth. If you want to be passionate, let it be from the hairs to the toes.”

“I totally agree with your theory of the ski,” Black says, echoing Perret’s Swiss-English diction. “I, too, wish to put it into the sixth. Too often American ski movies are about taking jibbers into the backcountry. All they want to do is build a cheese-wedge kicker and pull grabs. They’re one-trick ponies.”

Not these horses. Everything about them radiates bigness: Black’s height, Perret’s fireplug build. Even their sunglasses are oversize. Perret cloaks most of his skull in Oakley Monster Dogs. Black does the same in Smith Bajas.

Their lines, naturally, are huge.

We fly to the Spearhead Glacier in the late afternoon’s golden glow. A test run reveals that the soft-looking snowpack is, in many places, hard cauliflower—the type of snow that sends advanced skiers on prolonged, rag-dolling cartwheels but that pros like Perret and Black easily eviscerate. They get out of the helicopter atop an 1,800-foot face and buckle their boots.

Black, who in the mid-nineties guided “engineers from Illinois and strippers from New York” on ski trips in Alaska, drops in on a Chugach-like spine. His turns are artful, a perfectly balanced, nuanced descent from flank to flank of the snowbound dihedral. He exhibits his mastery of what freeskiers call “spineology.”

Perret plunges down the less fluted face, carving bigger, longer, more powerful turns. Both of their runs reduce the peaks to whimpering mounds of rock. But neither pulls a long, straight line on the first go.

During his second run, however, Black nails down his victory in this event. From high on the face he points ’em straight and rockets fast and fluid all the way to the glacier’s basin. “I love ripping fast,” Black says. “I love the freedom.”

Perret’s second attempt is also inconceivably strong and speedy, but he makes ten more turns than Black. Granted, they’re huge, thigh-melting turns at Mach 5 that only .0001 percent of skiers could make. The speed—50 to 60 miles per hour down a steep mountainside—causes him no discernible fear.

“The most scared I’ve ever been was in Mexico City during earthquakes,” Perret says later. “There was no control. In the mountains, you always have a choice.”

Final Score

BLACK WON THREE challenges (steep skiing, dishwashing, and straight-lining) to Perret’s two (throwing a shoe and partying). So, technically, Black is our winner.

But let’s pause a moment before declaring him Absolutely, Without Peer, the Finest Freeskier in the Solar System. Perret, after all, has withstood vicious jet lag and the brain-frying stress of speaking in a foreign language for six days.

Also, during another photo shoot atop Whistler Mountain, he pulled the competition’s best trick. We were milling about aimlessly when Perret opened his backpack and produced a bottle of wine. He then removed several wineglasses and announced that the vino was a Viognier pressed from grapes grown in his own backyard. He’d skied off cornices all day with fragile glass in his pack. Had the contest taken place in Chamonix or Verbier instead of electrolyte-swilling North America, the move might have secured Perret victory right there. In Europe, freeskiing honors the whole ski lifestyle and its ancient sophisticated attributes. On this side of the Atlantic, freeskiing is more a rebellion against the tight-ass conventions of the sport; it’s more likely to flash tattoos than corkscrews.

As Black happily tippled Perret’s wine, it was clear the week had become less a clash of the titans than a chance for some intercontinental bro-brah bonding. Whatever testosterone-fueled competitiveness they harbored, it was crowded out by their shared passion for their sport and a united effort to combat their true common enemy: summer.

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Buon Appetito

HIGH POINT: Turin's iconic Mole Antonelliana

In the mountain village of Pragelato, enter through a half-moon-adorned wooden door in a 17th-century former stable to find La Greppia, a rustic-chic restaurant with sloping stone ceilings and muted lighting. Thinly sliced meats, accompanied by vegetables and cheeses, are served at the table for diners to cook, pierrade style, on heated stone slabs. Via del Beth 9, 011-39-0122-78-409

Ski the Galaxy
Log 30,000 or more vertical feet by skiing the Via Lattea (“Milky Way”) from end to end. The cluster of six resorts straddles the Italy-France border, with 5,000 vertical feet each, 88 lifts, and 240 total trail miles. Best of the bunch is Sestriere, home of the Olympic men's downhill. Via Lattea lift ticket, $37;

Grape Escape
After a day on the slopes, duck down through the stone doorway of Crot 'd Ciulin, in the mountain town of Bardonecchia, and get chummy with mustached ski instructors. Simple wood tables, wine casks, and sepia-tone photographs offer the perfect setting for sampling Barbera d'Alba or Dolcetto di Dogliani, popular Piedmont reds, and filling up on toma, a local cheese. 20 Via Des Geneys; 011-39-0122-96161

Nordic Nonpareil
Millions have been poured into the cross-country ski center in Pragelato. How do you spend that kind of cash on nordic skiing? On snowmaking, lights, new buildings (for warming up, chowing down, and changing clothes), and an 18.6-mile trail network meticulously groomed and graded for Olympic competitions. $7 per day; 011-39-0122-74-1107,

Crash with Class
Le Meridien Turin Art & Tech, formerly a Fiat factory, has been refashioned by architect Renzo Piano into a hip hotel about a ten-minute walk from the heart of downtown Turin. Polished steel, floor-to-ceiling windows, and angular furniture designed by Philippe Starck are reasons Architectural Digest praised it as “a showcase of modern design.” Rev your engine with a morning run on the rooftop track, formerly used for test-driving prototypes. Doubles, $150–$410; 800-543-4300,

Get a Choco-buzz
At Turin café;s, try a cup of bicerin—a sublime concoction of coffee, chocolate, and milk (or, even better, vanilla cream). Or forget the drink and go straight for the hard stuff: Turin is famed for its chocolate. Recommended confection: cioccolato gianduja, a hazelnut blend produced by Venchi and available at downtown chocolatiers.

Take it Reel Easy
The Museo Nazionale del Cinema, in the restored Mole Antonelliana (a 115-year-old former synagogue), houses more than 7,000 film titles, including Italian, French, and American classics, with frequent screenings; 200,000 original posters; and interactive displays on filmmaking. Admission, $6; 011-39-011-81-25-658,

Royalty-Spotting: Town and Crown

MAJESTIC, 360 DAYS A YEAR: St. Moritz

Lech, Austria
At the end of a high valley, opposite the ürhub of St. Anton, in the Arlberg Pass, Lech is geographically fortified against prying paparazzi. Helicopters have buzzed in the likes of Princess Caroline of Monaco and the late Princess Di. Dutch Crown Prince Willem-Alexander continues Lech's royal tradition of swooping in and schussing down. See and be seen at: The intimate Gasthof Post Hotel ().

Klosters, Switzerland
Prince Charles is a Klosters kind of guy. William and Harry are also regulars at this secluded village, as are international power brokers, who try to escape media scrutiny while attending the annual World Economic Forum each January in nearby Davos. See and be seen at: The Walserhof Hotel (), the choice of Brit royals.

Gstaad, Switzerland
Old-money Gstaad was reportedly aghast when Paris Hilton romped into town for vacay last year. According to the gossip mill, the resort got another scare when local homeowner Liz Taylor recently offered her palatial estate to tabloid escapee Michael Jackson. Gstaaders seem to prefer royal celebs like Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece. See and be seen at: The castlelike, très exclusive, 104-room Palace Hotel ().

St. Moritz, Switzerland
Princess Caroline, the Sultan of Brunei, and George Clooney have been spotted cavorting in the Alpine capital of blue-blood chic, depicted in a memorable ski-chase scene in 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service, with onetime Agent 007 George Lazenby. And where else would you find an event like the annual Cartier Polo World Cup on Snow? See and be seen at: Badrutt's Palace Hotel (), where no one thinks twice about $25 martinis.

Nouveau Lodges: Beyond the Chalet

Euro-Fresh: Vigilius Mountain Resort

The Alps may conjure visions of famous peaks, edelweiss, and stuffy Swiss Miss inns, but thanks to a new breed of hotel—designed for a younger, more affluent crowd—you can have your iconic peaks and hip digs, too.

Skihotel Galzig, St. Anton, Austria
It's mere steps to the lifts from this many-windowed hotel, which offers 21 warm-hued rooms with brilliant views of mounts Rendle and Galzig. Comfy leather couches surround an open fire, and a sauna, solarium, and steam bath soothe weary skiers. Doubles from $84, including breakfast; 011-43-5446-427-700,

The Clubhouse, Chamonix, France
This newly renovated 1927 art deco mansion holds three private doubles, three bunk rooms (for six or eight), and one suite, with flat-screen TVs, teak-decked “rainforest” showers, mini-libraries, and Mont Blanc views. On the main level, an exclusive bar awaits. Doubles, $225 (three-night minimum stay), including breakfast and dinner; 011-33-450-909-656,

Naturhotel Waldklause, Läenfeld, Austria
Built with natural materials—fir, spruce, pine, glass, and stone—this 47-room hotel features simple, geometric furniture and contemporary art. A rooftop terrace and balconies off each room overlook the Öztal Valley; the new Aqua Dome thermal spa next door gives discounts to hotel guests. Doubles from $122, including breakfast; 011-43-5253-5455,

Vigilius Mountain Resort, Lana, Italy
The Vigilius is remote, grass-roofed, and heated by a low-emission, energy-saving wood-chip incinerator. Reachable only by a three-to-four-hour hike or a vintage 1912 cable car, the 35 rooms and six suites in this minimalist larch-and-glass enclave feature sleek, modern furniture and local antiques. Plus there's a music library, screening room, and spa with a spring-fed infinity pool. Doubles from $380, including breakfast and cable-car ride; 011-39-0473-55-6600,

Riders Palace, Laax, Switzerland
This cubic glass-and-larch hobnob haven—located just five minutes from Laax's lifts—offers a bar, 70 communal and private accommodations, and a concert hall that hosts international bands. Rooms are urban-chic, with Philippe Starck–designed chrome sinks and bathtubs, surround-sound entertainment systems, and PlayStations. Bunk beds from $50, doubles from $73, including lift ticket; 011-41-81-927-9700,

Competitions: Play Your Own Games

Derby de la Meije, La Grave, France, April 4–7
The rules are simple: Get from the top to the bottom of Vallons de la Meije ski area as fast as possible, by nearly any route. In a good year, about 1,000 snowboarders and tele-, mono-, and alpine skiers take on the nearly 7,000-vertical-foot, off-piste challenge. Whether you ski it or decide to skip it, be sure to stick around for the four-day festival, which includes rock, reggae, and electronica.

Engadin SkiMarathon, Maloja to S-Chanf, Switzerland, March 12
Gliding over 27 miles of frozen lakes and through forests and meadows requires a lot of endurance and heavy breathing, but more than 12,000 cross-country skiers—rom world-class fitness freaks to lounge lizards—ign up each year. Chase the course record of one hour 32 minutes or take it slow and soak in the splendor of the Engadin Valley.

Giro d'Italia, Italy, May 21–28
Followed by the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España, the Giro is the year's first grand-tour stage race. Ride Strong (www.ridestrongbiketours.com) offers one-week trips that let you spin ahead of all the pros on the tough midrace mountain stages in the Dolomites.

Hotlist

AN ALPS ICON: The Matterhorn in Zermat, Switzerland

Ski Camps
Vert Alert

Steep Skiing Camps Worldwide, La Grave, France. American freeskier Doug Coombs presides over a thrilling ski week in hairy terrain. Campers learn couloir etiquette, beacon drills, and more.

Chocolate Freeride Productions, Verbier, Switzerland. Intended for solid skiers wishing to safely graduate to big-mountain freeriding, weeklong courses sample Verbier's mammoth off-piste.
—R. S.

Trips
Epic Rambles

Portes du Soleil is a sprawling resort in southeastern France that houses 209 lifts and, in summer, 373 miles of mountain-bike trails. Ride from village to village, using the lifts and granny gears to pedal to a different hotel each night. Traces Directes organizes tours and can help get your bags from bed to bed. $1,330 for five days; 011-33-4-50-74-7040

SwisSkiSafari uses helicopters to access 7,000-vertical-foot descents in the Swiss backcountry and chill time at five-star front-country hotels. In between, blast down groomers in Saas Fee, Zermatt, and Verbier. Four days of skiing, meals, and accommodations, $7,900; 011-41-27-398-2194,

KE ¹ú²ú³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Travel's guides will show you how to crampon and piolet your way along France's Mer de Glace, Glacier des Rognons, and even up the Mont Blanc du Tacul, a 14,000-foot peak. Eight-day trip out of Chamonix, $2,555; 800-497-9675,
—Tim Neville

Steeps
Sheer Madness

Engelberg, Switzerland: Snow-porn stars Shane McConkey, Jamie Pierre, and Micah Black all visited this resort last season. Why? To ride in-bounds treats like Steinberg (4,000 crevasse-riddled vertical feet) and backcountry steeps like Galtiberg (a 6,500-foot plunge). A local guide is highly recommended.

La Grave, France: The Anti-Whistler, La Grave has no pedestrian village, disco, or official ski patrol. Instead, there's 7,000 vertical feet of no-beginners-allowed terrain.

Dammkar, Germany: Featuring a bigger–than–Jackson Hole vertical of 4,300 feet, Dammkar also gets some of the best snow in Bavaria. The area's recent decision to quit grooming explains its official name: Dammkar Freeride.

Courmayeur, Italy: Courmayeur is Chamonix's conjoined twin to the south. Above the first stage of its creaky Telepheriques du Mont Blanc cable car? Topless sunbathers. Above the third? A descent down 6,888 vertical feet of the Toula Glacier, highlighted by chutes approaching 50 degrees.

Host Cities: A Guide to Perennial Playgrounds

The Winter Olympics are practically synonymous with the Alps—and this year they return to the classic range for the tenth time. No other place so seamlessly merges rugged high-altitude life with Old World glamour and panache. Here's a look at past glory and present-day fun, from the gastronomic to the gonzo.

Olympic Locale: Chamonix, France, 1924
Why Go Now?: Alpinist crossroads of the world—the hottest Euro destination for the piton-and-pylon set. Be sure to bring an ice ax.
Highlight: The off-piste Vallé;e Blanche and the Aiguille du Midi tram ride, rising some 9,000 vertical feet to a rocky spire by Mont Blanc.
Hotspot: Chambre Neuf. It's aprè;s-ski on steroids, pumped up by rock and roll and Swedish hotties.
Info:

Olympic Locale: St. Moritz, France, 1928 & 1948
Why Go Now?: British gentility and glitzy shopping. Essential gear: polo mallets, Van Cleef jewelry, and politesse.
Highlight: The Cresta Run, the world-famous sledding site. Hop on a skeleton toboggan and zoom 50 miles an hour down nearly 4,000 feet.
Hotspot: The casino in the Kempinski Grand Hotel des Bains. Win at baccarat and maybe you can afford the pricey drinks later at Badrutt's Palace.
Info:

Olympic Locale: Garmisch-partenkirchen, Germany, 1936
Why Go Now?: Oktoberfest in the mountains. Be ready for one-liter glasses of Paulaner brew and boisterous beer-hall singing.
Highlight: The Kandahar downhill run, possibly the most dangerous on the World Cup circuit. Be like Bode and ski it nonstop from top to bottom.
Hotspot: The Gasthof Fraundorfer. Go for post-slopes suds, stay for a Bavarian meat-and-potatoes dinner, and finish with a rowdy sing-along.
Info:

Olympic Locale: Cortina D'Ampezzo, Italy, 1956
Why Go Now?: Easy skiing and extreme eating against the Dolomites' backdrop of rust-red cliffs and spiky 7,000-to-8,000-foot peaks.
Highlight: Classic rock scrambling on 5,000-foot-plus vertical limestone faces, including some small climbs that are doable in winter.
Hotspot: The Rifugio Averau, an on-mountain chalet. Have a three-hour lunch of pasta and sausage, then try skiing back to town.
Info:

Olympic Locale: Innsbruck, Austria, 1964 & 1976
Why Go Now?: What's not to love about a cosmopolitan 16th-century Tyrol city flanked by 25 villages and 76 ski lifts within a 168-mile radius?
Highlight: Year-round skiing above 10,000 feet on the nearby 2.7-square-mile Stubai Glacier, plus backcountry hut-to-hut trips in winter.
Hotspot: The Hofgarten Café;, especially on a spring day when you can sit outside and people-watch over a locally brewed Zepfer beer.
Info:

Olympic Locale: Grenoble, France, 1968
Why Go Now?: The hills are alive beyond industrial Grenoble. Drive an hour to Les Deux Alpes, then cruise the front side or ski the back face to La Grave.
Highlight: The bike ride up 21 switchbacks to the nearby ski resort of L'Alpe d'Huez. Tour de France racers will tackle the infamous climb on July 18.
Hotspot: Mike's Bar, in Les Deux Alpes, a hard partyer's hangout. Bring your skis or snowboard—they can be waxed while you drink.
Info:

Olympic Locale: Albertville/Val D'Isere, France, 1992
Why Go Now?: Big-mountain skiing on 25,000 acres. The action, on and off the slopes, is at the side-by-side resorts of Val d'Isere and Tignes.
Highlight: Off-piste challenges like L'Aguille Pers, at Val d'Isere, or the Face Nord de la Grand Motte at Tignes. Hire a guide and go where tourists dare not.
Hotspot: Dick's Tea Bar, in Val d'Isere. A favorite of Italian bon vivant Alberto Tomba during the Olympics, it keeps cranking until 4 a.m.
Info:

Hut-to-Hut Treks: Connect the Spots

The Alta Via No. 1, in the Dolomites of northern Italy, offers exquisite valley views and crosses breathtaking summits from Braies Lake, near Dobbiaco, to Passo Duran, for a total of 75 miles. Each night you sleep in a cozy rifugio where warm beds and meals await. Great Walks of the World (011-44-19-3581-0820, ) offers a ten-day all-inclusive hike for $1,700.

The Haute Route, a seven-day, 70-to-90-mile trek from Chamonix, France, to Zermatt, Switzerland, comes in two flavors: the glacier option, which includes travel on snow and ice, and the hiking version, which stays on established trails. Both routes offer stunning views of the French and Swiss Alps and end in the shadow of the Matterhorn. Reserve early at each night's hut or sign up with an outfitter like Chamonix Experience ($1,700; 011-33-6-08-80-94-27, ).

The Stubai Horseshoe, a 45-mile traverse of Austria's incredibly scenic Stubai Valley, south of Innsbruck, is a hiker's dream. The relatively strenuous seven-day circuit starts in the village of Obertal and ends in Neustift. On Top Mountaineering (800-506-7177, ) offers an all-inclusive weeklong trip for $1,900.

Alpine Splendor: The Short List

Best Airport: Züch, Switzerland
Fly here, fetch your bags, catch a train to the central station (they run every ten minutes), and within a half-hour of touchdown you're rumbling through dreamy Alpine scenery to your hamlet of choice.

Best Castle: Neuschwanstein, Germany
If it's overcast and predictable at Garmisch, bop over to Neuschwanstein, a medieval-style castle that nutty King Ludwig II built in the 19th century out of a fascination with fairy tales. Perched atop an impossible finger of rock, it's reached via a steep 30-minute climb.

Best DJ Scene: St. Moritz, Switzerland
Throw some clogs in your pack and join well-lubricated jet-setters on the party tram up Corvatsch for St. Moritz's traditional Friday Snow Night. Ski or snowboard down to midmountain, retrieve clogs, and dance in a steamy disco until last call, at 2 a.m.

Best Après Bar: Pub Mont Fort, Verbier, Switzerland
Known for cheap 20-ounce steins of Carlsberg beer and a giant, sunny deck, the two-level bar is a sea of bronzed faces that includes extreme snowboarders, freeskiers with film credits, and every other international big-mountain type.

Best place to check e-mail: CyBar, Chamonix, France
Reconnect with home as drop-dead-gorgeous Norwegian snowboarders surf the Net, while on another floor of this cavernous bar Canadian freeskiers watch The Big Lebowski. 011-33-4-50-53-69-70

Best Carbo-Loading: La Perla, Italy
The owner of this five-star restaurant in Corvara, in the stunning Alta Badia region, turns out the lights each night on the 27,000-bottle wine cellar, saying, “We let the babies sleep.” And the kitchen sends out pumpkin ravioli with truffle oil. It's the karmic antithesis to the Olive Garden.

Best Shopping: Livigno, Italy
The whole town of Livigno () is a duty-free zone, and shoppers for booze, perfume, cigars, and electronics prowl the streets, along with suspicious numbers of telemark skiers. Framed by 3,000-vertical-foot escarpments, Livigno is home to April's Free Heel Fest, Europe's biggest telemark celebration.

Best Baroque Fantasy: Pichlmayrgut, Austria
¹ú²ú³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ this “sport hotel” village (doubles, $235; ) are turrets and onion domes; inside are subterranean passages leading to indoor tennis courts, bowling lanes, and steam rooms. Across the street is one of the Dachstein-Tauern Sportregion's 111 ski lifts, accessing 140 miles of slopes.

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SELLA RONDA :: ITALY

“I AM SORRY,” says our guide, with a wry smile, shrug, and lilting Italian accent. “We asked for more powder, but the Man on the Last Floor only gave us this . . .” The guide, Icaro de Monte, points to an inviting snowfield blessed with eight inches of creamy, boot-top snow—a reminder that sarcasm, unlike theological idiom, is an international language.

We’re skiing the Sella Ronda, a loop in Italy’s Dolomites, perhaps the most dramatic peaks ever created by the Man on the Last Floor. Everywhere stand cathedrals of stratified dolomite rock: spires, buttes, needles, slabs, and cones thrusting high above onion-shaped church towers in thousand-year-old towns. Of the million or so reasons to ski the Alps—from cuckoo clocks (not so important) to chocolate (very important), seamlessly skiing from village to village ranks near the top.

Unconstrained by narrow Forest Service leases, Europe fosters vast networks of lifts that connect far-flung valleys. Forget the North American practice of yo-yoing up and down the same terrain: Here, skiers cover expanses of peaks and valleys without ever repeating a run. And few of these classic village-to-village Alps tours match the Sella Ronda’s standards for scenery, turns, ski culture, and dolce vita. Logistics are simple: Because the Sella Ronda forms a circle, skiers can finish it precisely where they began.

We start our ronda in the Badia Valley, known for its affordable four-star hotels and ravioli with truffle oil. A speedy gondola whisks us up from Corvara to an elevation of 6,706 feet on the hulking, jagged Sella massif, which gives the tour its name. We promptly see a Sella Ronda sign pointing south and follow it down a groomed, corkscrewing slope to the next lift. In our case, the sign is orange, designating a clockwise tour; counterclockwise skiers observe green signs. Both routes are so thoroughly marked they could be located in a howling whiteout by a shitfaced grappa drunk. (Hey, it happens.)

All told, the Sella Ronda wends about 23 miles (about nine on lifts, 14 skiing) around the massif. Though the Dolomites are rife with sheer walls that recall Yosemite’s El Capitan, the pistes connecting the Sella Ronda are downright gentle. Intermediates can lap the circuit in seven hours, experienced skiers in five—and that’s with the requisite pasta breaks. But rushing isn’t the point. Not when you can relish mountains that provided the soaring backdrop for Cliffhanger. (They doubled for the insufficiently cinematic Colorado Rockies.)

After catching a T-bar and cruising into the Arabba Valley, we realize we’ve covered almost 20 percent of the tour in 45 minutes. It’s time to slow down. Luckily, we’re in the Italian Alps, so an espresso shack/alfresco bar beckons just off the slope. With miniature steaming coffees in our hands and the um-ticka, um-ticka, um-ticka beat of Euro trance in our ears, we pore over the Sella Ronda map. Ahead of us lie villages, huts, and passes with musical names: Passo Pordoi, Lupo Bianco, Valentini, Val Gardena. And we can visit all of them with ease: Our Dolomiti Superski tickets entitle us to an astounding 464 lifts, the most of any single ski pass in the world. As a result, there’s almost unlimited potential for side trips, and in the coming days we’ll detour to a wine-spattered rifugio and a canyon framed by towering peaks.

But that’s for later. Today we have orange signs to follow. After lunch—a sausage-and-cheese platter, Chianti, and a couple shots of Jägermeister—we drop a procession of silky-smooth groomers, passing a smooching couple here and a wooden troll there. So it goes on the Sella Ronda: abandoning slopes after only one run, then chasing the horizon toward whatever the Dolomites offer up next.

Hahnenkamm, Austria

HAHNENKAMM :: AUSTRIA
THE HAHNENKAMM RUN, in Kitzbül, Austria, is arguably the most technical and dangerous downhill course on the World Cup circuit. On race days, the course is rock-hard and slippery as a hockey rink, but this two-mile black-diamond run is always very steep and off-camber, with huge jumps and whiplash turns. Like some gravity-fed serpent, it dispatches the unworthy with a flick of its tail. Skiers never conquer the Hahnenkamm—they’re simply allowed passage.

Kitzbül, on the other hand, is as friendly and easygoing as the course is not. The village becomes a partying base camp during Hahnenkamm race weekend, in January, with sing-along techno-pop pumping out of the speaker stacks lining the streets. When fans pour down from the mountain after the races, the town assumes the spirit of a rowdy soccer match, except that all of Europe’s nations are playing at once: Austrians blow their horns, Swiss clang their cowbells, and everybody sings choruses of taunts and praise.

Horse-drawn sleighs look perfectly at home in Kitzbül, and the woodpiles are meticulously stacked. Wide eaves and brown-shingle roofs top the cream-colored buildings, chalet style. Temperatures last January were well below freezing, yet when a ferocious Lamborghini pulled up next to me on an ice-covered street, a long-legged woman stepped out in heels. Kitzbül is every bit as chic as it is tough.

The list of Austrian World Cup champions is long and includes Franz Klammer and Hermann Maier. And though native Stephan Eberharter won last year’s Hahnenkamm downhill by 1.21 seconds, Americans came in second (Daron Rahlves) and won the overall title (Bode Miller). U.S. skiers have been competing here long enough to take part in the Europeans’ well-oiled traditions—after the races, Rahlves and Miller had to tend bar with the other top finishers at the Londoner, a Kitzbül hot spot.

The region’s dramatic elevation changes, wet climate, and northern latitude foster huge snowfields and glaciers. Skiers take a gondola that stretches about a mile and a half from town and deposits them above tree line, where several lift systems converge. No resort boundaries here—just miles of high-alpine terrain, each drainage leading to a different village.

For many vacationing Europeans, this kind of skiing is about sightseeing—not sport—and the spirit of après-ski begins with a late breakfast, continues during a two-hour lunch, and swings into full force with cocktails at three. I took a different tack, skipping lunch for “just one more” powder-supported free fall. When the time was right, I knew where to find the beautiful people: Just follow the chorus of bells, horns, and song.

Pic Du Midi, France

PIC DU MIDI
IT’S 9:30 A.M. when the lift operator starts the cable car, and then we’re hanging in the sky, moving up so fast that our ears pop before we have a chance to swallow. We rise above windblown snowfields, past rock outcrops, and finally into the clouds before the surreal telescope domes of Pic du Midi’s observatory appear. They cover the entire mountaintop, the metal glistening in the sun.

Fog in the French Pyrenees has kept me waiting five days to ski the steeps of 9,439-foot Pic du Midi. I’ve begun to doubt that the mountain even exists—until its intimidating flanks come into view.

That I’m here at all is surprising, because the Pic has long been the exclusive territory of astronomers. Local guides lobbied town officials for years to open the mountain to skiers, using the astronomers’ cable car for access, and finally in 2002 the Pic du Midi association of towns opened this icon of the Pyrenees to experts accompanied by an instructor or guide. The easiest—and most popular—runs are on the south face, above the Barèges and La Mongie resorts, which surround the base.

Near the summit, I look out over the impressive panorama of jagged peaks from the observatory’s terrace. My guide, Stéphane Delpech, remarks that the Pyrenees “do not get the proper respect like the Alps do, but wait till you ski them!” He smiles as he points to the 45-degree Poubelle (“Trash Can”) couloir, barely wide enough to fit a pair of skis sideways. We climb past the fence behind the observatory and boot up a few more feet between domes and satellite dishes to the launching platform for the south face. This observatory, built in 1873 as a meteorological station, now hosts world-renowned astronomers, and its museum is worth a visit for a quick immersion in planets, galaxies, and coronas.

Our first few turns down the 40-degree slope are in perfect powder, but too soon we hit cement. “Oo-la-la,” Delpech shouts, “la croûe des Pyrenees“—a crust resulting from spring fog. We ski 4,600 vertical feet through rocks, crunchy snowfields, and tight gullies. My thighs burn as we finally traverse out at the bottom to a chairlift at Barèges.

On good days, fanatics can take four runs, skiing 18,400 vertical feet a day. But for most, it’s more enjoyable to take one run and then retreat to Pyrenees culture in the valleys, which is what I do.

Back in the village of Bagnères-de-Bigorre, where medieval houses line the cobblestone streets, we finish a delicious meal of herbed lamb with a local cabernet before hitting the thermal baths of Aquensis, a remodeled 19th-century casino with a cathedral ceiling. As my quads start to relax in the warm water, I watch the clouds part once again, exposing Pic du Midi, rising dramatically away from its neighbors. I’m happy to have skied it, but equally glad to be right where I am.

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The Four Seasons Jackson Hole, which opened last year and is the chain’s first hotel in snow country, does everything for its guests except ski: Attendants bring complimentary heated robes and towels, hot chocolate, and s’mores to the outdoor, geothermal-style Jacuzzis and heated swimming pools. The ski concierge provides custom boot fittings, outfits guests with the latest Atomic or Salomon gear, arranges lift tickets and guiding services, and tunes and stores your equipment. Meanwhile, you’re going to want to permanently relocate to one of the 550-square-foot rooms, which come with a fireplace, broadband, and twice-daily maid service. One minor glitch: The morning hike to Jackson’s fastest lift, the Bridger Gondola, requires about 20 steps. What are we—mountain goats? Doubles, $350 to $450; 800-295-5281,

four seasons Jackson hole

Fresh Tracks Can Wait: the presidential suite at the Four Seasons

R&R
Feeling Kneady
When you’re sore, there’s nothing like TEN THOUSAND WAVES JAPANESE HEALTH SPA’s Thai Massage: This 85-minute mix of tough-love stretching and chiropractic tweaking will twist, fold, and manipulate every last mogul from your weary legs. Ten Thousand Waves’ 12-room, 21-acre complex is also the closest lodging to Ski Santa Fe, just northeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thai massage, $139; doubles, $190–$260; 505-982-9304, —John Bradley

Real Estate
Mount Mine
“Idaho’s time has come,” says Jean-Pierre Boespflug, the developer behind TAMARACK RESORT, the first U.S. ski destination under construction in more than 20 years. Investors are lining up: 104 of the resort’s 2,043 properties went for a total of $46 million last January, and 64 more sold out in June, netting $33 million in one day. Ninety miles north of Boise, the $1.5 billion, 3,600-acre “mountain, meadow, and lake” resort—slated for completion by 2019—will officially open in December and will eventually offer 2,800 vertical feet of alpine skiing. Up next, a January sale of 93 lots, homes, condominiums, and chalets. “How often do you have a chance to buy a ski-in/ski-out lot in the West?” asks Tamarack property owner Joe Gregory. “Never.” —Andrea Vogt

Snow Report 2005

Atomic Neox EBM 412

Atomic Neox EBM 412

Völkl Sanouk, Fischer Big Stix 10.6, Atomic Big Daddy

Wide Sizing Available: from left, Völkl Sanouk ($1,000; 800-264-4579, ), Fischer Big Stix 10.6 ($795; 800-844-7810, ), Atomic Big Daddy ($799; 800-258-5020, )

Tecnica's Diablo Magnesium Hot Form

Tecnica’s Diablo Magnesium Hot Form

Technology
These Bindings Byte
Is the world ready for a digital ski binding? ATOMIC aims to find out. Sensors inside its new NEOX EBM 412 monitor whether or not you’re correctly locked in, then—if all is well—beam an LCD “OK” to the cold-impervious display screen. $1,099; 800-258-5020,

Powder Skis
Big Is Beautiful
This is the year to get ultra-fat. Underfoot, that is. Scope the slopes this winter and see for yourself: A half-dozen companies are offering boards that are more than four inches across at their narrowest point, with shovel-wide tips. These planks float powder like hovercraft and crash through crud with aplomb. And, unlike the glorified two-by-fours of the fat-ski past, these sticks have real sidecuts for carving on the groomed stuff. True, tankers aren’t for everyone, nor every day: Even a strong skier will struggle to whip ’em through short-radius turns, and on icy New England runs you may find yourself skidding more than skiing. But if you’ve been known to stomp big mountains in Haines, Alaska, or swing GS arcs through the fresh on Jackson Hole’s Hobacks, you’ll want to throw your arms around these three full-figured phenoms.
—Christopher Solomon

Boots
Buckle Up
TECNICA’s DIABLO MAGNESIUM HOT FORM alpine ski boot is built specifically for today’s shaped sticks. Designers precisely tweaked the location of your foot inside the liner to more efficiently transfer lateral pressure to the inside and outside edges of your planks. $860; 603-298-8032,

Snow Report 2005

Soldiers Spy Optic

Soldiers Spy Optic

Burton's Dominant

Burton’s Dominant

Subaru Outback 2.5 XT Wagon

Subaru Outback 2.5 XT Wagon

Goggles
Eye Spy
The SOLDIERS, a stylish set of lenses from SPY OPTIC, offer 100 percent UV protection and generous underside vents. For you, that means that the only thing getting inside is fresh, defogging air. $90–$120; 800-779-3937,

Leather Goods
Hide Ride
Answering snowboarding’s never-ending call to bring the unexpected to the slopes is BURTON’S DOMINANT, a board upholstered in—get this—a thin layer of brown pebbled leather over the wood-and-fiberglass deck. The result, with tip and tail painted gold, is one pimpin’ ride, in a flexy pipe-and-park board that will gladly get you airborne for a McTwist, or any other freestyle magic you have up your sleeve. $380; 800-881-3138,

Wheels
High-Speed Quad
It was while snaking my way up to the local ski hill in the new turbocharged SUBARU OUTBACK 2.5 XT WAGON that I felt a thrill I’d never experienced in a car built to haul people, dogs, and gear: headrest-smackin’ speed. That same giddy rush from ripping down the steep faces of black-diamond groomers was now flooding my brain as I worked the sports-car-tight handling of this rocket through the 25 hairpin turns leading up to the 10,000-foot base. Unlike non-turbocharged engines at altitude, this ride kept on wailing in the rarefied air two miles above sea level. Then there was Subaru’s all-wheel drive, which makes short work of slick and icy roads by switching power to whichever fat, 17-inch-wide tires are gripping when the others are slipping. I topped out in record time, a blinding 15 minutes ahead of what I usually clock in my ten-year-old SUV, which is about how long it takes me to notch a top-to-bottom round-trip run. On a powder day, getting on the first lift matters. A lot. SPECS: 250-horsepower four-cylinder, all-wheel drive, 61.7-cubic-foot capacity, seats five, 19/25 mpg (city/highway); $32,695, as tested; —Grant Davis

Style

ski apparel

ski apparel

Boarding School Is in Session
From top, BOLLE’s 5-0 sunglasses ($100; 800-222-6553, ) blend retro cool with today’s optical superiority; the waterproof nylon on the OAKLEY ANORAK ($160; 800-414-5215, ) keeps you dry through powder, slush, and sleet; with sticky rubber on the palms and fingers, DAKINE’s GORE-TEX BRONCO GT gloves ($60; 541-386-3166, ) let you grab both rails and railings with ease; side vents on THE NORTH FACE’s waterproof-breathable SURVEILLANCE PANT ($189; 800-447-2333, ) will help you keep your cool; the leather on RIDE’s IO boots ($195; 800-757-5806, ) makes them fit like a glove; SALOMON’s SPX7 bindings ($280; 800-225-6850, ) join forces with the DAVID BENEDEK ERA PRO snowboard ($550; ) for a setup that can whip-snap you through turns yet hold steady on steep descents.

Best in Class
From top, see the light (and terrain variations) with a pair of SR5 goggles from VERSION OPTIC ($75; 866-734-5748, ); the four-way stretch fabric on HELLY HANSEN’s SANTO JACKET ($350; 800-435-5901, ) is the right stuff for aerial moves; the CONVERT AMPED GLOVE ($60; 800-547-8066, ) has a topside pocket to hold a heat pack; wear cords while you’re on the corduroy with SALOMON’s TENEIGHTY pants ($149; 800-225-6850, ), then hold your lines with help from Salomon’s CUSTON-FIT PRO MODEL SC SPACEFRAME ski boots ($675); park-and-pipe hounds, all you need to succeed is a set of K2 PUBLIC ENEMY FREESTYLE SKIS ($475; 800-972-4063, ) and poles ($75), MARKER COMPY FREE 14.0 bindings ($340; 800-453-3862, ), and, of course, brass cojones.

Snow Report 2005

Apple G5

Apple G5

teton gravity research

The Producers: from left, TGR’s main men, Steve Jones, Corey Gavitt, Todd Jones, and Dirk Collins

Filmmaking
DIY Ski Porn
Ever wanted to produce your own ski porn? Yeah, we thought so. But before you book the talent, hire the heli, and print up those premiere-party invites, you need to acquire the right equipment. ¹ú²ú³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ asked Reno, Nevada–based Itai Nemovicher, a 27-year-old ski-film director and producer with Omen Productions, to recommend shooting and editing gear that will help you turn your hucks into DVD bucks.
» VIDEO CAMERA Sony DSR-PD170 Pro DVCAM: “It puts out a high-quality image but won’t break the bank. A lot of professionals are using this level of camera. And since it can store JPEGs as well, you can insert the stills in the video.” $3,940; 800-686-7669,
» HELMET CAM Custom Video Cameras SportCam Xtreme: “The lens transmits a clean image to the video camera, plus it’s pretty much indestructible.” $699; 406-387-5732,
» HARDWARE Apple Power Mac G5 with 20-inch Cinema HD Display: “I like working on Apples, because they’re a little more intuitive and process information better. Also, they’re memory-sensitive and don’t overly waste hard-drive space.” $3,798 as shown; 800-692-7753,
» SOFTWARE Apple Final Cut Express 2: “iMovie is fine for the home user, but with hundreds of transitions and filters, Final Cut Express 2 has many of the tools that aspiring professional filmmakers need.” $299; 800-692-7753,
» TRIPOD Manfrotto MDeVe 754: “What tripod you use depends on the weight of the camera. But if you go top-of-the-line, you won’t have to replace it tomorrow. And a cheaper tripod means jerky pans. You want a smooth head, like you get on the Manfrotto, for smooth pans.” $616; 201-818-9500,
TOTAL COST: $9,352 —R. S.

Home Entertainment
Chill Footage
YEARBOOK ($28, Matchstick Productions; 50 minutes): BASE jumping off Switzerland’s Eiger—with skis. Punk pros amp up the antics, hucking the world’s best vert, from Norway to British Columbia. X ($28, Poor Boyz Productions; 42 minutes): Highlights? Big-mountain masters rip through the Russian backcountry, and X Gamers bow to Swede Jon Olsson’s 22-foot launch out of the pipe. SOUL PURPOSE ($28, Teton Gravity Research; 55 minutes): Get ready to replay Sage Cattabriga-Alosa’s corked 720’s over the 160-foot Chad’s Gap, in Utah’s Little Cottonwood Canyon. You’ll never be that good. Or that crazy.

And for the most mountain garb you’ve ever seen in New York City, head over to TGR’s November 19 release party at Avalon NYC, in Chelsea, where more than 1,100 urbanites will mingle with some of the ski-and-snowboard world’s hottest pros.
—T. Z.

Paycheck to Powder

skiing jobs

Relax, I’m a trained professional: tram driver Jon Bishop at Jackson Hole

SKI PATROLLER: What’s better than getting fresh tracks on a big powder day? Tossing dynamite over cornices first! And you thought working patrol just meant wearing a cool red jacket, scanning lift tickets, and giving sled rides to beginners with mangled knees.
TRAM DRIVER: Somebody has to get the patrollers up the mountain, and there’s no bigger powder snob than a tram driver. After all, the only thing better than tossing dynamite over cornices is getting free and clear tracks after the bombing and before the crowds. And the view from the tram’s not bad, either.
GO-GO GIRL: Tommy Africa’s, at Whistler Blackcomb, British Columbia, spearheaded the retro go-go trend ten years ago. Now clubs near ski resorts everywhere are getting in on the act. It’s not a get-rich-quick job, but you’ll look hot, get paid to dance, and keep your hips and back in shape—for on- and off-slope action.
CONCIERGE: When it comes to hotel service, Aspen’s Little Nell (970-920-4600, ) has a righteous setup. Though its five concierges are paid a measly $7 an hour and have to attend to every last need of their superstar guests—whether it’s fetching takeout for Ivana Trump or warming ski boots for Jordan’s Queen Noor—the fringe benefits are outrageous: free skis, stock tips from guests in the know (“Which worked for me,” says head ski concierge Ray McNutt), rides in $40 million private jets, and $5,000 tips from rock stars. —Peter Oliver and Tasha Zemke

Flick Chick

Ingrid Backstrom

Ingrid Backstrom

Forget 15 minutes of fame. Ingrid Backstrom needed only 30 seconds to immortalize herself in the world of ski films. In Backstrom’s first-ever action shot for Yearbook, a new release from Matchstick Productions, a helicopter dropped her onto a peak near Bella Coola, British Columbia. She sliced down 1,500 vertical feet in three turns, besting pro Shane McConkey’s six turns on the same face last year. “It was the most amazing run of my life,” she says. “I was 100 percent stoked.”
PODIUM GIRL: The Seattle native and three-time collegiate All-American skier entered her first freeski competition in April 2001. A year later, she was ranked second in the world, a position she’s maintained. Last season she won the Canadian Freeskiing Championships and took third at the U.S. Freeskiing Nationals.
SECRET TO SUCCESS: “I pick a line that scares me enough to perform my best,” Backstrom says.
LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD: When rainy weather in March forced Backstrom and nine guys to hole up in the Brockton Place motel, outside Bella Coola, the Playboy Channel was a constant in the common room. “I told them that for every 30 minutes of Playboy, we had to watch half an hour of Friends,” she says.
MOMENT OF RECKONING: After college, Backstrom lived in Hanover, Germany, then moved back to Squaw Valley five months later. “I’d rather be in the mountains,” she says.
SECOND OPINION: “Ingrid put out the best female segment of any ski movie,” says Matchstick producer Steve Winter. “She hauls.”—T. Z.

Pitcher Perfect

best skiing pubs

MANGY MOOSE
(Jackson, WY)
True: A stuffed moose hangs from the ceiling. False: Ski patrollers jump off the balcony in attempts to ride the sleigh-pulling beast during their annual Christmas party. This used to happen, but no more. These days the focus is on swilling the custom-brewed Moose Drool beer. 307-733-4913

AVALANCHE
(Crested Butte, CO)
A weathered A-frame at the base of this Colorado ski area, the Avalanche is a Crested Butte-ician’s first choice for a hangover breakfast—and a fine place to acquire said hangover. Try the Avalanche Warning, a fruity drink with four types of alcohol. 970-349-7195

SITZMARK CLUB
(Alta, UT)
A pine-paneled refuge in Utah’s Alta Lodge, the Sitzmark Club is as old-school as this no-snowboards ski area. Order the house specialty, a bloody mary. 801-742-3500

BIERSTUBE
(Big Mountain, MT)
With 20 beers on tap, a pool table, and a Wednesday tradition of bestowing a stuffed monkey (with one leg in a cast) on the resort’s clod of the week, the ‘Stube never lacks for action. Ask for the signature cocktail: Jack & Coke. 406-862-1993

WOBBLY BARN
(Killington, VT)
The three-story Wobbly Barn, in central Vermont, shimmies at après-ski time, thanks to its free nacho bar and the Turbo: a pint glass full of Stoli Ohranj, 7Up, and orange juice that’s meant to be sucked down—fast. 802-422-6171

WEST END TAVERN
(Telluride, CO)
Located dead center between the town’s two lifts, the new West End draws patrollers and tipplers hankering for Telluride’s best margaritas. 970-728-1808—R. S.

Chow
Rise and Dine
DRAGONFLY CAFÉ & BAKERY, TAOS, NEW MEXICO
Today’s Special: red beans and rice with poached eggs, drizzled with basil aioli. 505-737-5859

DUTCH PANCAKE CAFÉ, STOWE, VERMONT
Today’s Special: a potato pancake with Vermont cheddar, topped with molasses-like Dutch stroop syrup. 802-253-5530

THE KNEADERY, KETCHUM, IDAHO
Today’s Special: Rocky Mountain Benedict with smoked Idaho trout and a cup of joe from Java’s Coffeehouse, down the road. 208-726-9462

WINONA’S, STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, COLORADO
Today’s Special: the green-chile-smothered breakfast burrito, followed by a softball-size cinnamon roll. 970-879-2483
—Cameron Walker

Diversions
On Your Day Off…
VAIL, COLORADO: Vail is to partying what Bode Miller is to racing—plenty fast, a little wild, always entertaining. The international race contingent (which boogied here during the 1989 and 1999 Alpine World Championships and various World Cup events) likes pounding schnapps at Pepi’s, gorging at chichi restaurants like Sweet Basil and La Tour, and going hard and late at 8150 and other clubs. 877-204-7881,

MONT-TREMBLANT, QUEBEC: This pedestrian-friendly, Paris-flavored village pulls in hip Montrealers, who come to sample the best restaurants of any resort in eastern North America. Save room for Le Scandinave (819-425-5524, ), an indoor-outdoor spa with multiple pools, baths, and a sauna, which sits on a stone terrace alongside the Du Diable River. 866-836-3030,

SQUAW VALLERY, CALIFORNIA: Sinful slot machines are only a snowball toss away, in Stateline, Nevada. Plus, Squaw Valley’s 8,200-foot High Camp, in a bowl halfway up the mountain, is a high-altitude circus, with an ice-skating rink, sundecks for stripping down, and, come March, an outdoor swimming pool. 800-403-0206, —P.O.

The post The Right Fluff appeared first on ¹ú²ú³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Online.

DAWN WAS BUT A RUMOR on the eastern horizon when our climbing team set off from base camp, heading north toward a mountain so elusive it wasn’t even named until 1998. By 11:30 a.m., after a morning of steady advancement, our party of seven had gained the summit ridge. No one was showing signs of edema; we pushed for the top…

Hike the Heartland: Mountains of Kansas and Iowa

Hike the Heartland: Mountains of Kansas and Iowa

Hike the Heartland: Mountains of Kansas and Iowa

Suddenly, a large creature stormed our right flank. Crowned by a woolly gray mane, it walked erect and emitted humanoid noises. “Egad!” I exclaimed, flinching. Was this the fabled yeti, terrorizing another doomed high-altitude expedition?

No. It was retired farmwife Donna Sterler, who emerged from her white clapboard house with a hearty midwestern hello.

“Welcome to our home,” she chirped. “And the highest point in Iowa!” She passed out plastic key chains that read HAWKEYE POINT, ELEV. 1,670 FT., and then pointed toward some farm buildings and a million ears of corn. “The summit is over there,” she said. “To the right of the cattle trough.”

We climbed six, maybe eight feet and conquered the first of the Seven Summits.

Big-time climbers will object, saying the Seven Summits consist of the highest mountain on each continent, and Hawkeye Point definitely isn’t one of them. But that’s a modern alpinist for you: an unthinking yes-man, toeing the company line. Do these so-called mountaineers even bother to explore anymore? It seems to me they just mindlessly follow lemming tracks up places like Rainier and Everest, blathering about European knots and turnaround times, rarely attempting anything new.

What would George Mallory think? Would he feel kinship with monkeys who climb “because it’s been done—often”? Hardly. I think he’d be more impressed with seven slow-footed high school buddies who decided, for no good reason, to stage a reunion in which they claimed truly unknown peaks far off the beaten path. Namely, the roofs of Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.

It was all my twin brother’s idea, actually. A California-based documentary filmmaker who helmed the riveting A&E special on the history of cleavage (called, helpfully, Cleavage), Dave figured he could squeeze a film out of our still-close gang—two decades after graduation—as we schlepped around in a van, notching heartland “peaks.” Though we wouldn’t be the first to take on seven relatively lame summits—way back in 1987, a group of Kansans blitzed through Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma—we liked to think we would do it with a style and lack of grace all our own.

So it was that, at the start of a long holiday weekend, Dave convinced six of us—Casper, Drew, Spade, Dorrell, Steve, and me—to assemble with him at base camp (that is, our parents’ homes in the suburbs of Kansas City, Kansas, where we’d grown up). There, we loaded sleeping bags, mats, climbing gear (sport sandals and Hawaiian shirts), and an ammo box stuffed with 98 Nicaraguan cigars into a rented 15-passenger Ford Econoline Club Wagon. At exactly 5:17 a.m. on a Friday, we set off for peaks that Reinhold Messner has never mustered the courage to challenge, on a journey that would demand more than 3,100 miles of motoring—and fully 17.8 miles of strolling …er, I mean hiking and climbing.

And now, just six hours and one greasy breakfast later, we’d bagged our first peak and were ready to aim the Econoline northwest, toward the Dakotas. Triumphantly, we descended the summit ridge.

Or, as Donna Sterler called it, “the driveway.”

“TRAVELING TO STATE HIGHPOINTS involves healthy outdoor recreation with concomitant learning of state and regional geography and history….It can expand the senses and bring joy to the heart.” This according to a 1997 journal article called “Highpointing”—Summiting United States Highpoints for Fun, Fitness, Friends, Focus, and Folly, written by Thomas P. Martin, a health professor at Wittenberg University, in Springfield, Ohio.

Martin rated America’s 50 state highpoints using a ten-point scale of difficulty, with Florida’s 345-foot Britton Hill earning a mere 1 and Alaska’s Mount McKinley, at 20,320 feet the tallest of them all, getting a 10. In between are drive-ups like Rhode Island’s 812-foot Jerimoth Hill and airy scrambles like Idaho’s 12,662-foot . He informs us that highpointing was first mentioned in a 1909 edition of National Geographic and that a 1986 ¹ú²ú³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ item about the pastime spurred the establishment, in Mountain Home, Arkansas, of a national Highpointers Club, some of whose 2,700 members amuse themselves by seeking the second-highest point in each state. One of the leading guidebooks, Highpoint ¹ú²ú³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏs, published in 2002 by Colorado highpointers Charlie and Diane Winger, points out that more than 800 people have successfully climbed Mount Everest but only 100 or so have claimed all 50 U.S. highpoints.

Interesting. But we felt disconnected from Thomas P. Martin’s world of wonder even before Iowa’s flapping cornfields gave way to the arid vastness of the Great Plains. See, traditional highpointers are like birdwatchers: They have time on their hands, and they’re willing to spend decades adding to their life lists. We had just one long weekend to get the job done, and as the Econoline chugged westward, our task seemed as immense as the sky.

The basic plan was to bag peak two in North Dakota, then work our way in a southerly and easterly meander through South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas before zipping back north to Kansas City to catch our flights. Friday night found us at the Butte View Campground, in southwestern North Dakota, sleeping under stars that never have been—and probably never will be—sullied by urban light pollution. Butte View also boasted excellent bathrooms, and the next morning its showers wooed six of us. Only Casper—who insisted we were moving too slow, since by this time we’d climbed only one peak in 26 hours of travel—begged off. Little did we realize that his refusal to groom when he had the chance would later imperil our entire quest.

We packed up and drove roughly 25 miles to White Butte, at 3,506 feet the highest point in NoDak. Like Hawkeye Point, White Butte towers above private property. Unlike Hawkeye Point, its owners don’t give anything away. We had to pay a woman $20 to climb it—and she didn’t even hand out key chains! Fortunately, the cost was offset by the stark beauty of the sandstone formation, which gave off fine white dust that coated everything. Even the bugs, which were big and plentiful. As a note on the summit register put it, “the crickets scared the crap out of me!”

We ate breakfast in Bowman, North Dakota, at a place called the Gateway Cafe, a fine establishment that furnished sticky buns and a local newspaper, The Dickinson Press. Its lead story: A 70-year-old woman touring nearby Theodore Roosevelt National Park had been seriously injured after getting gored by a bison, thrown 20 feet into the air, and impaled on a tree.

This troubling news gave us much-needed perspective. Though a three-hour drive and our highest summit—South Dakota’s 7,242-foot Harney Peak—awaited, we were ready, willing, and punctured by neither horn nor branch: the Chosen Ones of the Great Plains!

I DON’T KNOW OF MANY high school posses that have stayed as close as ours. This happened, in part, because my buddies and I liked high school so much that we’ve mythologized it. (Hey, it happens. Call it the Diner syndrome.) Steve served as student-council president; Dave was veep. Dorrell edited the yearbook. I worked for the student newspaper and was lineman of the year on the football team. Spade was a star golfer. Casper was the class clown. Drew, who gets along with everybody he meets, was one of the most popular guys in school. Our friendships have never faded; we would march to the grave for one another. And though we’d all made it to our 20th high school reunion the summer before, we relished a chance to meet up again.

Which is how we found ourselves roaring past Mount Rushmore with barely a glance—who needs it?!—heading merrily toward South Dakota’s apex. On the Martin difficulty scale, Harney Peak is a 4, thanks to its height, its 1,500 feet of vert from trailhead to tippy-top, and its round-trip hike of 5.8 miles. A sign on the summit reminds visitors, incorrectly, that Harney is the highest point between the Rockies and the towering Pyrenees of Spain and France. It’s capped with an elegant stone lookout built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1939.

Of course, there’s a built-in problem with a soaring, 7,000-plus peak: It’s a real mountain, so it attracts real mountaineers. At the summit, while taking celebratory sips of whiskey from my Kansas City Chiefs flask, we were approached by an athletic couple from Colorado. Mistaking us for like-minded “serious” climbers, they gushed, “You gotta go sit in the Chair!”

The what?

“An armchair-size divot in the cliff just downhill from here,” one of them explained. “You can sit in it and dangle your legs over 300 feet of nothingness.”

This intrigued Steve, who just can’t resist a challenge—despite his utter lack of coordination and kinetic awareness. One time in high school, Steve tried to hurl a pack of lit firecrackers out a half-open car window and hit the glass instead. The fizzing explosives tumbled to the floor of Drew’s mom’s Thunderbird, blowing a hole in the carpet.

While Steve managed to sit in the Chair without tragedy, the sight of him wiggling on the precipice made the rest of us hit the flask repeatedly. We drank more that night at dinner, which meant the only sober driver available was . . . Steve. He gave up drinking a while ago, but he remains, quite simply and without peer, the worst driver of all time, constantly alternating between sudden acceleration and braking. His hands shake constantly; throw in his current addictions to coffee and cigars and you get transport that is, at best, fumbling and herky-jerky, at worst, upside down in a ditch, surrounded by flashing lights.

As Steve pointed us toward Nebraska, Spade, Dorrell, Dave, and I nodded off. Drew and Casper claimed they “couldn’t sleep in cars” and watched Steve drive—with the color drained from their faces and their fingernails dug deep into Econoline vinyl. Whatever they did as backseat drivers must have worked, because Steve successfully, if shakily, kept us on the road.

IT WAS 2 A.M. ON SUNDAY by the time we reached the highest spot in Nebraska: Panorama Point, a 5,424-foot bulge in the extreme western part of the state, near the forlorn three-way junction with Wyoming and Colorado. Though Panorama is more than a mile high, you can’t exactly rappel off it. It’s a big mound with a crude metal-and-stone marker on top, put there to remind you that it’s something special. We pulled the Econoline within six feet of the marker, unfurled our bags, and slept on the summit itself.

We woke shortly after dawn to the lowing of bison from a ranch located half a mile south, in Colorado. Dave got on top of the Econoline to get a bird’s-eye digicam view of the utterly horizontal summit, and then we were off. Thirsting for a strong cup of joe, we kept our sand-encrusted eyes peeled for any sign of gourmet coffee. But the Great Plains is the only region in the lower 48 where you can drive for four days and never see a Starbucks. We settled on a venerable diner, the Longhorn Cafe, in Kimball, Nebraska, and sat among ranchers sporting their Sunday-best Stetsons. Near a pot of bitter brown water masquerading as coffee, on a platter perched atop red-checked oilcloth, sat the finest apricot turnovers this side of anywhere.

“Mmm. Succulent orange goo encased in flaky, sugarcoated crust,” ventured Spade, a telecom executive who now lives in Colorado Springs.

“This transcends mere breakfast pastry,” said Dave, his mouth stuffed.

“This is a reason for even jaded coastal dwellers to come to ‘flyover country,’ ” added Steve, a public defender who lives among jaded coastal dwellers in Silver Spring, Maryland.

I didn’t say much. I snarfed three turnovers and later wished I’d pocketed a fourth.

From Kimball, we zigzagged east on Interstate 80, south on U.S. 385, east on I-70, and south on narrow gravel roads toward Mount Sunflower, Kansas. Since all seven of us hail from the Sunflower State, we badly wanted this 4,039-foot trophy.

If you’re not from Kansas, you don’t understand. You tease us with lame Wizard of Oz jokes. (Note: “We’re not in Kansas anymore” is a line from 19-bleeping-39. Let it go.) You find the very concept of Mount Sunflower—a noble hillock that sits one-tenth of a mile from the Colorado state line—to be automatically laughable. But when we were in elementary school, the fact that Mount Sunflower towers above most of Vermont’s Green Mountains was balm to our Kansas souls, like learning to sing the sweet state song, “Home on the Range.”

Mount Sunflower earns a meager 1 on Martin’s scale, involving fewer than ten feet of vertical gain after you park. Non-Kansan eyes might survey the featureless landscape surrounding it and conclude that the nearest town, Weskan, should have stuck with its original name: Monotony. Yet when the Econoline’s doors opened peakside, we saw a dreamscape. Atop a treeless, imperceptible uplift stood a majestic, ten-foot-tall iron sunflower. An American flag waved from its stalk. A small corral surrounded the exhibit, echoing Kansas’s rich cattle-drive heritage.

Highpoint ¹ú²ú³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏs raves, “Kansas gets our vote for the most creative and whimsical highpoint monument!” We couldn’t have agreed more. State pride engulfed us, despite the moronic entries scrawled in the summit register: “No hiking stick required!” and “It’d be better if you had naked chix!”

WE’D ALL AGREED to fly home from Kansas City on Tuesday. That way, we could highpoint deep into Monday night if necessary. But during the drive from Mount Sunflower to Black Mesa, Oklahoma—a 4,973-footer at the western fringe of the panhandle—absentminded Dorrell dropped a bomb. In the parking lot of a convenience store in Lamar, Colorado, he looked at his airline ticket and mumbled, “Uh, guys…my flight’s at 6:20 Monday night.”

Murmur ensued. Followed by hubbub. Succeeded by malice.

Six-twenty on Monday? That was 25 hours away! And we were looking at two or three hours to Black Mesa, at 8.6 miles the longest hike of all. After that there would be 700 miles across the Texas panhandle and Oklahoma before we got to Arkansas and the last summit—not to mention the final four-hour slog back to K.C.

Our spirits were crushed like the Cool Ranch Doritos fragments littering the Econoline’s floor. We’d have to forget Arkansas or drive all night or both. We’d been slugging it out against the vexing factor of distance, but now that other awful variable—time—had jumped us from behind and was punching our kidneys.

We rolled up to the Black Mesa trailhead just before sunset. We were tired, grumpy, and about to hike for several hours in the dark. We grabbed three flashlights, two of which worked, and set out across a grassy field studded with scrub pines. We made good time until the trail angled up Black Mesa itself, which is notorious for rattlesnakes. We had to squint at the trail and proceed with caution to make sure nothing was slithering.

Once atop the mesa, we regrouped for the summit push. The marker—an eight-foot-tall dark-granite obelisk—looked eerily like the ape-maddening slab in 2001: A Space Odyssey. We fired up our cigars and read on the marker that Texas was 31 miles away, Colorado was 4.7, and New Mexico was but 1,300 feet to the west. Thank goodness the marker didn’t mention the mileage to Arkansas, which would have been depressingly huge.

Hiking down a dark mesa with a lit cigar was a kooky joy, but it had evaporated by the time we reached the van. It was a little after midnight, and mutiny wafted through the air. Casper, the father of an infant son, was especially ready to quit—having skipped his shower in North Dakota, he was desperate for creature comforts.

“Let’s call it six and a memorable weekend,” he moaned. “Let’s get a motel. Showers, clean sheets, sleep, glorious sleep. C’mon …”

Steve, also a father, and Spade, who wanted to watch ESPN to see how his college football bets had turned out, recognized Casper’s patriarchal wisdom and began to cave. Which, frankly, made Drew and me sick. After all this, we were supposed to give up? To tell people that we’d conquered six runts rather than seven, because we couldn’t handle the driving?”

“No way,” I said, though in much coarser language. “Get in the van now! We’re burning daylight standing here! Well, darkness…”

Even though I refused to be stopped, I could see Casper’s point. All of us could. There would be ramifications if we returned to our families and jobs looking like hollow-eyed carcasses. We were 39-year-old men attempting a trip that would exhaust guys half our age. We should be proud enough for bagging six summits—two of which required actual effort. Not to mention the logistical wizardry it took just to get us together in one place.

At the moment, though, that one place happened to be an extremely sad parking lot in the Oklahoma outback. We got in the van and hit the road.

OUR ECONOLINE featured two captain’s seats up front and four bench seats. We had removed the rear bench to make room for luggage, which meant only one guy at a time could catch quality winks by going horizontal.

It wasn’t enough. We needed another sleep bay. After arriving punch-drunk at a truck stop in Amarillo, Texas, I positioned a Therm-a-Rest atop the luggage in the very back. I stretched out on it, not caring how many toothpaste tubes I squished. It was absurdly comfortable. Fresh, rested drivers were suddenly a possibility.

We rocketed east, intercepting dawn near Henryetta, Oklahoma. Then came serendipity: In Fort Smith, Arkansas, we stumbled across a restaurant called Sweet Bay Coffee. We caffeinated until we could caffeinate no more.

From Fort Smith, a series of twisty roads took us up into the Ozark National Forest. After spending so much time navigating open range, the Ozarks’ leafy glades seemed foreign and wrong. Had we really been in North Dakota just two days ago? Our instincts said it couldn’t be possible, though the odometer and our collective stench insisted that it was.

At 2,753 feet, Magazine Mountain was the second-shortest of the Seven Dwarfs but the fourth most difficult, requiring a 20-minute uphill walk. A simple wooden sign marked the top. I touched it. Dave filmed. We sipped bourbon from my flask. And history was made.

Seven up, seven down. As we headed back toward Kansas City, we felt like the heroes we truly were. For about two hours. Then, on U.S. 71 outside Butler, Missouri, we came to a screeching halt behind a long train of barely moving cars.

“Good God,” Dave groaned. “Do these people know who we are and what we’ve done? We’ve been elite road warriors all weekend! But now look at us. We’re just more schlubs stuck in holiday traffic.”

There was no way we’d get Dorrell to the airport in time if we stayed on 71. Our only option was to cross into Kansas and hope that U.S. 69 would take us to K.C. through less traffic.

It worked. Dorrell made his flight; he even had time to take an ineffective sponge bath in the airport loo. The van was returned and Payless Car Rental called me only once to complain about its condition. Dave went back to Santa Monica, where he has yet to begin editing the alleged documentary that brought us to the Great Plains in the first place.

He has, however, found time to compile our statistics. We were out on the road for 86.5 hours. We drove 3,168 miles. We were cited for zero moving violations, though one or two might have occurred. We returned home feeling like mountaineering legends, but as the numbers made clear, the real champ was the Econoline.

“If you do the math,” Dave later wrote us, “you see that, even at the moment we were gorging on apricot turnovers at the Longhorn Cafe, it was still averaging 36.6 miles per hour.”

The post Climb Every Mole Hill appeared first on ¹ú²ú³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Online.

ROUTE: Havre to Libby, Montana

ROADS: U.S. 2
MILES: 354

In Montana, saying you’ve been up on the Hi-Line is secret code for aimless wandering. This stretch of U.S. 2 parallels (and shares its nickname with) the Great Northern Railway, which was strung just south of the Canadian border in 1887. Montana’s portion of U.S. 2 seems to be afflicted with the highway equivalent of multiple-personality disorder: Traveling west from Havre, you run straight as a wire through vast stretches of farmland until the prairie breaks into sagebrush-covered foothills and the Rocky Mountains begin jutting up from the horizon as if the earth were teething. After cutting across the center of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, you wind through escalator-like foothills, crossing the Continental Divide at Marias Pass, 5,215 feet above sea level. When you begin the descent, with Glacier National Park to the north and the Great Bear Wilderness Area to the south, you’re surrounded by one of the biggest chunks of contiguous wilderness in the lower 48.

**ADVENTURE STOPS
Fly-Fishing Mission Lake: Take a shot at huge rainbows on this 750-acre glacially carved lake on the Blackfeet Reservation (off the south side of U.S. 2, just before you hit Browning). The fish strike on dries and streamers from early spring till fall. Though no state license is required, you’ll need a tribal fishing license (single day, $20; three days, $30). Visit Cut Bank Creek Outfitters, in Browning, for licenses, guides, and fishing intel. (406-338-5567)
Hiking in Glacier National Park: East of Essex, park at the Walton Ranger Station and hit the Scalplock Mountain Lookout Trail, which switchbacks through thick forests of fir and pine, climbing 3,079 feet in 4.7 miles to the fire lookout. From the summit you can see 9,000-foot glaciated peaks and fingers of conifer forest reaching into alpine tundra.
Rafting the Middle Fork of the Flathead River: Glacier Raft Company, in West Glacier, offers half-day ($40) and full-day ($65) runs on the river’s Class II-III rapids. Or horseback in and raft out on a five-day guided trip into the Great Bear Wilderness ($1,500). (800-235-6781, )

**TOP DIGS
The 37-room Izaak Walton Inn, in Essex, was constructed in 1939 to house railroad workers. It’s a Hi-Line classic, stuffed with memorabilia like photographs of train collisions and avalanche disasters. (Doubles start at $108; 406-888-5700, )

**BEST EATS
For the real taste of the Hi-Line, bite into some Montana rib eye at the Sports Club, a local ranchers’ hangout right on U.S. 2 in Shelby. (406-434-9214)

**DON’T MISS
The best time to hit the Hi-Line is the second week of July, during North American Indian Days on the Blackfeet Reservation, with native dancing, drumming, and, if you’re really lucky, a demolition derby. (406-338-7521)

**ON THE STEREO
The lonesome pedal-steel symphonies of Japancakes sound just right east of the mountains; across the Great Divide, try Johnny Cash’s latest collection, Love, God, Murder.

North Carolina

The Outer Limits

ROUTE: Cedar Island to Corolla, North Carolina
ROADS: North Carolina 12
MILES: 130

Driving North Carolina’s Outer Banks takes you off the pavement so many times, you almost forget it’s there. With the ferries and four-wheel beach access along these barrier islands, the road seems to come and go as often as the tides. When your tires hit the sand-dusted two-lane on the narrow spit of Ocracoke Island (after a two-and-a-half-hour ferry ride from Cedar Island), you’ll find yourself surrounded by 409 square miles of sand and crashing sea. To the east, the Atlantic surf breaks against 70 miles of nationally protected seashore. To the west, the indigo-blue waters of Pamlico Sound lap grassy marshes thick with egrets and blue herons. You’ll pass through Hatteras and Buxton on Hatteras Island, where cedar-shake-shingled cottages sit on stilts above the dunes, pastel surf shops keep their doors propped open for the droves of summer “dingbatters,” and local fishermen in one-dock marinas work off boats with names like Sweet Caroline. Out here, the road is an afterthought to the beach: Expect to get plenty of sand on the floor mats.

**ADVENTURE STOPS
Scuba Diving Diamond Shoals: Some 1,500 vessels have sunk off the Outer Banks. Dive cargo and tanker ships like the Australia and the Northeastern at Diamond Shoals, ten miles of shallow, shifting sandbars off Cape Hatteras. DiveHatteras, in Hatteras, offers charters and equipment rental. (703-818-1850, )
Surfing at Cape Hatteras National Seashore: Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, near Buxton, is a surfing legend known as the Wave Magnet. Annual competitions are held at this left break, where the north and south swells can stir up waves of ten feet and higher. For longboard rentals, check out Windsurfing Hatteras, in Avon, about five miles north of the lighthouse. ($15 per day; 252-995-5000, )
Windsurfing Pamlico Sound: Throw your board out at Canadian Hole, famous for its steady winds, shallow waters, and throngs of pro Canadian windsurfers (go figure). Four miles north of Buxton, look for a small parking lot on the left side of the road—you’ll see license plates from as far away as California and Ontario. Rent a rig at Windsurfing Hatteras, which also offers kiteboarding lessons ($45 per day).
Hang Gliding at Jockey’s Ridge State Park: A 420-acre sandbox with the tallest dune in the East, this park near Kill Devil Hills is the perfect launching and landing pad. A three-hour lesson with Kitty Hawk Kites is $85; tandem flights at 2,000 feet go for $125. (800-334-4777, )

**TOP DIGS
The Sanderling Resort, three miles north of Duck, offers 88 guest rooms plus suites and villas overlooking the Atlantic, as well as a spa and fitness facility. At the 3,400-acre Audubon Sanctuary next door, you can hike or bike the five-mile trail along Currituck Sound, and the resort’s eco-center organizes kayak tours to spy the area’s 21 species of waterfowl. (Doubles start at $240; 800-701-4111, )

**BEST EATS
Check out the Blue Point Bar and Grill, a swank diner on Currituck Sound, in Duck; hit the deck and order the oyster stew with fresh dill and smoked bacon. (252-261-8090)

**DON’T MISS
Join the pack of humans that gathers weekly to howl with the 100 or so red wolves at Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, a 15-minute detour west off North Carolina 12. With only 255 of the captive and wild animals remaining in the U.S., the howling is part of the Red Wolf Recovery Project’s efforts to teach visitors about habitat protection. (252-473-1131, )

**ON THE STEREO
They don’t call them the Outer Banks for nothing. Try the Raveonettes’ Whip It On (to get your big-wave courage up), Band of Bees’ Sunshine Hit Me (for après-surf barbecues), and Yo La Tengo’s Summer Sun (for the sunsets, of course).

Kentucky

Big Holler

ROUTE: Manchester to Breaks Interstate Park, Kentucky
ROADS: Daniel Boone Parkway, Kentucky 118, U.S. 421, U.S. 119, Kentucky 805, Kentucky 197, Kentucky 80
MILES: 175

This is not the Kentucky of white fences, manicured horse farms, and mint-julep parties. This is the Kentucky of Daniel Boone, Appalachia, and the 3,000-foot Cumberland Mountains, a serrated plateau of sheer ridgelines and deep valleys. The friendly folks you meet will immediately peg you as a “furriner,” and any attempt at blending in will be futile at best. Just relax and enjoy the sinuous stretches of narrow two-lane as they wind alongside lowland streams running through what you might be tempted to call gullies or ravines but Kentucky locals fondly dub “hollers.” After a few days, you’ll know why the local “mountaineers” wouldn’t dream of trading places with you, city boy.

**ADVENTURE STOPS
Mountain Biking the Redbird Crest Trail: This 52-mile loop traverses the Daniel Boone National Forest west of Hyden. Strenuous climbs open onto ridgetop vistas, and multiple trailheads let you tackle smaller sections, but watch out for the ATVs and motorbikes that share the doubletrack trails. (Redbird Ranger District Office, (606-598-2192, )
Hiking Bad Branch State Nature Preserve: Ten miles southeast of Whitesburg, off U.S. 119, the 7.4-mile High Rocks loop takes you through mixed hemlock and hardwood forest and past the cooling spray of 60-foot Bad Branch Falls as you make your way to the summit of 3,273-foot Pine Mountain. (502-573-2886, )
Paddling Breaks Interstate Park: The Russell Fork River runs through The Breaks, a 1,600-foot-deep, five-mile-long gorge—the largest canyon east of the Mississippi. Come October, when water is released from Virginia’s Flannagan Dam, Class IV-V rapids form in the gorge, and playboaters descend en masse. (Breaks Interstate Park, 800-982-5122, ).



**TOP DIGS
Home to high ceilings and classically furnished guest rooms, the brick Benham School House Inn was built by Wisconsin Steel in 1926 as a school for coal miners’ children. (Doubles, $70; 800-231-0627, )

**BEST EATS
Feast family style at the Wendover Big House, a 1925 log cabin four miles south of Hyden where it’s five bucks for all-you-can-eat vittles—biscuits, ‘kraut and wieners, corn bread, cole slaw, and sweet tea. (606-672-2317, )

**DON’T MISS
At Pikeville’s Hatfield-McCoy Festival (June 12-15), featuring Appalachia’s famous feuding families, you’ll find everything from world-class quilts to unmatched banjo picking and clogging. For details, contact Pikeville Tourism (800-844-7453) or .

**ON THE STEREO
Tune in to “the Voice of the Hillbilly Nation,” Whitesburg’s WMMT 88.7 FM, for homegrown bluegrass.

Vermont

Like Maple Syrup

ROUTE: Wilmington to Stowe, Vermont
ROADS: Vermont 100
MILES: 145

Slow it down—way down. Vermont’s Route 100 runs the length of this verdant state, through cow-speckled pastures and gently rounded mountains, but we recommend the most New Englandy section—starting in the south, in sleepy Wilmington, and ending in oh-so-quaint Stowe. As you wind through the West River Valley, Gothic Revival homes line up like decorated soldiers along pretty town greens, and locals patiently wait 25 minutes for their poached egg and corned beef hash at Cindy’s Restaurant & Bakery, in North Wardsboro. In Black River, the next valley north, the hamlets of Ludlow and Plymouth Union make you question your caffeine addiction, and a ruddy-faced farmer on his John Deere tractor drives down Granville’s main street, oblivious to the string of cars behind him. Farther north, in the Mad River Valley, the land opens up to dairy farms and blue sky, and old beaters weighed down by kayaks turn off to catch Mad River waves. Our advice: Just downshift and enjoy the ride.

**ADVENTURE STOPS
Mountain Biking Mount Snow: The 1,700-vertical-foot rise at Mount Snow Ski Resort, eight miles north of West Dover on the eastern edge of Green Mountain National Forest, dishes out some of the most technical terrain in the Northeast. Forty-eight miles of intermediate and advanced singletrack, logging roads, and ski trails crisscross the resort. Call the Mountain Bike & Hike Center for rental rates (802-464-4040).
Swimming at Warren Falls: One mile south of Warren, look for a large dirt pullout on the west side of the road. Before you even break a sweat on the short path that starts on the right, you’ll hear the roar of the Mad River. Smooth sandstone ledges around the 25-foot waterfall are perfect launchpads for cannonballing into deep, clear pools.
Hiking Camel’s Hump: Set aside a whole day to do this popular 6.8-mile round-trip hike above timberline to the 4,083-foot summit. On the way down, soak your feet in icy brooks and snack on late-summer blueberries. The trailhead is 8.7 miles west of Vermont 100 in Duxbury. For more information, contact the Green Mountain Club (802-244-7037, ).
Fly-Fishing the Winooski River: Local anglers swear there’s “wicked-good” fishing in the Green Mountain State. To guarantee a fish fry of 15- to 18-inch trophy trout, tie on an elk hair caddis and cast a two-mile stretch that starts at the Winooski Street Bridge, in Waterbury, and ends upstream at the Route 2 Bridge. Call the Fly Rod Shop, in Stowe, to get the skinny (800-535-9763, ).

**TOP DIGS
The remote 12-room Blueberry Hill Inn, about 20 minutes west of Vermont 100 on Vermont 73 near Goshen, is surrounded by the 20,000-acre Moosalamoo region of the Green Mountain National Forest. Wind down with a lavender salt bath, chef Tim’s pan-seared free-range chicken in porcini mushroom sauce, and a hike on 50 miles of trails. (Doubles, $250-$320, including breakfast and dinner; 800-448-0707, )

**BEST EATS
What was the town funeral parlor 100 years ago is now an airy eatery with an old-fashioned soda fountain. Get your sugar fix with a frothy maple milk shake, made with sugar maker Jay McIntyre’s Fancy Grade Vermont pure maple syrup, at the Rochester Café. (802-767-4302)

**DON’T MISS
Soar above the Mad River Valley in a two-seat glider or learn how to pilot one solo with Sugarbush Soaring, in Warren. (802-496-2290, )

**ON THE STEREO
Mellow out with A Picture of Nectar, from those inveterate noodlers, Phish, who got their start playing at Nectar’s in Burlington.

Wisconsin/Minnesota

Ya, Shore, You Betcha

ROUTE: Bayfield, Wisconsin, to Grand Portage, Minnesota
ROADS: Wisconsin 13, U.S. 53, North Shore Drive, Minnesota 61
MILES: 236

There’s no place like home away from home—probably the reason Norwegians, Swedes, and Finns flocked to the Lake Superior shoreline back in the 1800s. Just like in the old country, granite crags jut out of icy blue water, daisies line the roads, and tall pines sway in the cool breeze. Plus, there’s plenty of herring to catch and pickle. A drive along this section of Lake Superior skirts a web of trails for hiking or reaching kayak and canoe put-ins, and there’s no end to the Scandinavian kitsch: In Duluth, you’ll pass a replica of Leif Eriksson’s Viking ship, and in Grand Marais, near the Canadian border, Sven and Ole’s Pizza serves the Vild Vun (topped with wild rice). For the drive’s “wow” moment, hike to Shovel Point in Tettegouche State Park—big-water views and dense forests are the real stars along this shoreline.



**ADVENTURE STOPS
Sea Kayaking the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore: Paddle four miles off Little Sand Bay, west of Bayfield, to Sand Island, where you can pitch your tent at the full-service campsite near the East Bay dock and explore sandstone sea caves one mile east. Trek & Trail, in Bayfield, offers kayak and equipment rentals, outfitted trips, and sea-kayaking clinics. (800-354-8735, )
Sampling the Superior Hiking Trail: Trek part of the woodsy 226-mile trail that runs from Two Harbors north to Canada. Start in Temperance River State Park, just southwest of Lutsen. Primitive campsites dot the trail, and an inn-to-inn shuttle service is also available. Contact Boundary Country Trekking (800-322-8327, ).
Mountain Biking at Lutsen Mountains: The 1,088-vertical-foot rise at Lutsen Mountains ski resort, 90 miles north of Duluth in the Sawtooth Range, is the closest you’ll come to mountains in the Midwest. Downhillers can ride chairlifts to the top of Moose and Mystery mountains, then bomb down 35 miles of rocky singletrack. A $27 pass gives you all-day access to the trails and unlimited rides on the Alpine Slide. Call the Lutsen Mountains bike shop (218-663-7281, ) for info.

**TOP DIGS
It’s Dirty Dancing meets Ingmar Bergman. The grand old Lutsen Resort has been a stronghold on the North Shore since the 1880s. The 31-room lodge sits right on Lake Superior and is all Scandinavian, with hand-hewn beams, massive stone fireplaces, and guest rooms of high-gloss knotty pine. (Doubles, $99-$139; 800-258-8736, )

**BEST EATS
The rehabbed seventies-diner exterior of the New Scenic Café, eight miles northeast of Duluth, may lack the clapboard charm of a Maine lobster shack, but don’t let it scare you off. The remodeled wood interior, graced with local artwork and Great Lake views, is all about ambience and the apricot- and ginger-roasted chicken is divine. (218-525-6274, )

**DON’T MISS
Two miles north of Two Harbors, on Minnesota 61, you’ll find Betty’s Pies, home to some of the most decadent five-layer-chocolate, coconut-cream, and bumbleberry pies you’ll ever eat. (218-834-3367, )

**ON THE STEREO
Anything ABBA—they sing like the Swedish Chef, and their songs are sunnier than Minnesota boy Bob Dylan’s.

Moab, Utah, to Telluride, Colorado

Outlaw Territory

ROUTE: Moab, Utah, to Telluride, Colorado
ROADS: U.S. 191, Utah 211, Utah 46, Colorado 90, Colorado 145
MILES: 132

Sage grows thick in the ruddy valleys beyond the shoulders of these roads—a good thing, since athletic travelers tend to work up quite a sweat en route. I like to cut a small stalk of sage, place it on my dashboard, and hope the herbal aroma chases away the backcountry musk, compliments of my five-days-without-a-wash bike shorts. Then my senses can get back to marveling at this drive’s harmonic blend of desert and mountains. The road rises from Moab’s red-rock canyons, skirts Utah’s La Sal Mountains, drops into Colorado’s dry Paradox Valley, crosses the Dolores River, and follows the San Miguel River up to Telluride, in a steep bowl of the San Juan Mountains. As the ubiquitous squiggly-line signs along the road indicate, straightaways are scarce, but revelatory panoramas (and promising trailheads) seem to hide around every corner. No doubt this is some of our nation’s finest western scenery, beloved by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and all who escape to the Four Corners to behave like unwashed outlaws.

**ADVENTURE STOPS
Climbing Indian Creek Canyon: Instead of turning east on Utah 46, stay south on U.S. 191, then head southwest on Utah 211 to get to Indian Creek (a 40-mile detour) for excellent sandstone climbing on spires and canyon walls ranging in difficulty from 5.8 to 5.13. The 5.10 Supercrack is a desert classic. Contact Moab Desert ¹ú²ú³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏs (435-260-2404, ).
Rafting the San Miguel River: Put in at Specie Creek, four miles northwest of Placerville on Colorado 145, and float Class II-III rapids nine and a half miles through a narrow, pi-on-studded canyon to Beaver Creek, a half-day run. Rainy summers can keep the river runnable till September, but the rafting is best before mid-July. Contact Telluride ¹ú²ú³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ ($65; 800-831-6230, ).
Mountain Biking in Telluride: Since Moab’s summer heat can be intense, save your knobbies for Telluride. Rides here range from mellow converted-railroad grades to a World Cup downhill course. Start with the Mill Creek Trail, a singletrack-intensive loop that takes you from the San Miguel River to steep, winding hillside traverses, all in only 6.4 miles. Back Country Biking rents full-suspension bikes and runs guided tours (970-728-0861).

**TOP DIGS
At the undeveloped Oowah Campground, which hovers at 8,800 feet in Utah’s La Sal Mountains, you’ll find views of the 12,000-foot summits and the fattest aspen trees you’ll ever hug. Hike up the Deep Creek Trail to Burro Pass to watch the sun set behind the Henry Mountains, the last range to be mapped in the lower 48. For more info, contact Manti-La Sal National Forest, Moab Ranger District (435-259-7155, ).

**BEST EATS
Named after Norwood’s signature mountain, the Lone Cone Restaurant & Saloon follows the unwritten law that eateries named after geologic features shall serve big portions of prime rib and a fine apple pie. (970-327-4286)

**DON’T MISS
At the Bedrock Store, an outpost for travelers in Colorado’s lonely Paradox Valley since 1876, admire the decorative barrels of antlers and stock up on a slab or two of honey-glazed beef jerky. (970-859-7395)

**ON THE STEREO
Long-haul landscapes require otherworldly sounds: Go with the Flaming Lips’ stellar Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and the spaghetti-western strains of Calexico.

Mississippi

Miss. You

ROUTE: Tupelo to Natchez, Mississippi
ROADS: The Natchez Trace Parkway
MILES: 262

Bisecting the land that brought you fatback and collard greens is one of the only unclogged arteries left in the heart of Dixie, the Natchez Trace Parkway. A leisurely roll south along its sunlight-dappled tarmac constructed on and beside an ancient Native American trading route once used by conquistadores, French trappers, and pioneers will take you through wildflower meadows and a winding colonnade of redbud, dogwood, and magnolia trees. Because the National Park Service maintains the Trace for its historic value, not a single traffic light or convenience store will mar your drive through Mississippi-style wilderness (though there is a lone gas station at the halfway point). A telling mix of sharecropper homesteads and fading antebellum decadence surrounds the Trace, but out here in the fragrant forest, it’s just you, a silky-smooth road, and wailin’ blues on the stereo.

**ADVENTURE STOPS
Fishing Davis Lake: Remember to pack the rods—your first stop is a quiet fishing (and swimming) hole in Tombigbee National Forest, teeming with catfish, four miles west of the Trace, at mile marker 244. (662-285-3264, )
Hiking in Tombigbee National Forest: The Witch Dance trailhead, near mile marker 233, leads to a hilly six-mile loop over loamy soil in a spooky loblolly pine forest.
Biking from Clinton: The highest point in Mississippi is 800 feet, and it’s nowhere near here, which makes cycling the Trace a high-speed pursuit. Take a break from driving and ride about 30 miles south from Clinton to the Rocky Springs rest stop, at mile marker 55.
Canoeing the Pearl River: The lazy Pearl is ideal for a late-afternoon float. Slip your canoe in at the River Bend rest stop, at mile marker 122, and explore this bald cypress swamp where you can quack at the wood ducks and pick your fill of wild blackberries. BYO canoe.



**TOP DIGS
Sip iced tea on the breezy veranda of Oak Square Bed and Breakfast, in quiet Port Gibson, an 11-room Greek Revival mansion surrounded by 200-year-old oak trees. (Doubles start at $105; 800-729-0240)

**BEST EATS
Deep in the sticks, six miles east of the Trace in Montpelier, you’ll find AJ’s Bar & Grill, an old juke joint that serves up cold suds, hot music, and the best barbecued-pork sammies on the Trace. (662-492-0101)

**DON’T MISS
In Natchez, numb your road-weary bum at the Old South Winery by sampling sweet wines made from the local muscadine berry. Grab a bottle, walk west to the bluffs overlooking the mighty Mississippi, and raise a toast to Old Man River. (601-445-9924, )

**ON THE STEREO
Nothing but old Mississippi bluesmen: Asie Payton, Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside, Robert Johnson, and T-Model Ford. If that gets too old, slide Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis into the CD player and get misty.

California

Going Cali

ROUTE: Gaviota State Park to Piedras Blancas, California
ROADS: California 1, U.S. 101
MILES: 120

Elsewhere on the Pacific Coast Highway, weekenders in minivans are fighting off nausea at every famous curve, traffic is crawling beside a string of crumbling cliffside mansions, and a busload of tourists has pulled off the road, point-and-shoots at the ready. Not here. On this forgotten, slightly inland stretch of California 1, a couple hours north of Los Angeles, you’ll zip north unhindered over a roller coaster of green hills. What this road lacks in vertiginous sea cliffs, it makes up for with a huge dose of the original California fantasy: eucalyptus-fringed ranches, enormous blue skies, and no-name vineyards. And it parallels a blissfully undeveloped stretch of coastline where a trip to the beach means a tiny detour down a seldom-traveled side road that’s managed to evade the last few centuries of progress.

**ADVENTURE STOPS
Hiking in Gaviota State Park: The 6.4-mile Gaviota Peak Trail takes you to a 2,450-foot hilltop with views of the Pacific, the Channel Islands, and the road you’re about to embark on. On the way down, stop at the hot springs (well, warm springs) half a mile from the trailhead. Call the Channel Coast District Ranger Station for more information. (805-968-1033)
Surfing at Jalama Beach: Fourteen miles west of Lompoc lies the farthest point on the California coastline from any highway, Jalama Beach Park, where a summertime south swell delivers head-high beach and point breaks. Windsurfers take over when the standard 15- to 25-mile-per-hour breeze kicks up in the afternoon. Anglers surfcasting for rock cod can buy bait and tackle in the Jalama Beach Store, home of the deliciously sloppy Jalama Burger. (805-736-6316)
Wildlife Viewing at Piedras Blancas: At the Piedras Blancas elephant seal colony, on the coast north of San Simeon, dozens of stout-snouted, refrigerator-size pinnipeds loaf on the sand. Contact Friends of the Elephant Seal to learn more. (805-924-1628, )

**TOP DIGS
Every room at the Sycamore Mineral Springs Resort, in Avila Beach, comes with its own spring-fed outdoor hot tub. A paved bike path out the front door runs three miles west along a sycamore-shaded creek to a calm bay, where you can rent sit-on-top kayaks ($13-$18 per hour; Central Coast Kayaks, 805-773-3500, ). Paddle over a submarine kelp forest, home to extremely social—and harmless—harbor seals. (Doubles start at $153; 800-234-5831, )

**BEST EATS
An anomaly in the one-road, fish-‘n’-chips town of Cayucos, Hoppe’s Garden Bistro has a gourmet California menu that could hold its own in any metropolis. In the 1875 dining room or the English garden, nibble on lemon-cured halibut and mussel ceviche. (805-995-1006)

**DON’T MISS
After 28 years of villain-booing, hero-cheering, and heartfelt honky-tonking, the Great American Melodrama & Vaudeville, in Oceano, is still turning out six weekly performances. (Tickets, $13.50-$16.50; 805-489-2499, )

**ON THE STEREO
Mix two parts Best of Burt Bacharach with a shot of Dick Dale. Top off with the High Llamas, and The Long Goodbye, the latest from the Essex Green. Stir.

Nevada

The Loneliest Road

ROUTE: Baker to Lake Tahoe, Nevada
ROADS: U.S. 50
MILES: 412

“Highway 50 is all mine,” I tell myself, flooring the accelerator. “I own this road.” There’s no one around to prove me wrong. Venturing out into its great desolation like an explorer searching for a new route west, I’m adrift in the ephemera of a heavy road trip: Maps and spent coffee cups are piled around me as I trace the old Pony Express Trail across the Great Basin toward the Sierra Nevada. The unbroken sky and the rolling flux of mountain range and alluvial plain have a way of reworking one’s perspective. Out here, the world dissipates like a mirage on the hot tarmac, leaving only the open highway and the promise of discovery. “Yeah,” my 89-year-old great-uncle harumphed when I told him where I was going, “if you like tumbleweed.” I love tumbleweed—but that’s not the point. On U.S. 50, travelers can’t help but bear witness to their own passing. Like many others before me, I leave a pair of shoes dangling in a lone tree by the side of the road, my name spelled out in rocks on the pale earth nearby. These strange roadside shrines present an existential dilemma: Am I driving this road or is it driving me? Either way, this highway changes you.

**ADVENTURE STOPS
Hiking in Great Basin National Park: Stretch your legs in this 77,082-acre park just outside of Baker. The 2.8-mile round-trip hike on the Bristlecone Trail takes you to an ancient grove of the 4,000-year-old pines for which the trail is named. A mile farther, you can step onto Nevada’s only glacier, on 13,065-foot Wheeler Peak. (775-234-7331, )
Mountain Biking Austin Singletrack: The Pony Express traversed this area in 1860, and the ideal mail carrier was an “expert rider willing to risk death daily.” The same can be said for pedaling the 11.5-mile Cahill Canyon Run, a rocky single- and doubletrack loop outside of Austin that cuts through stands of juniper and aspen groves in the 11,000-foot Toiyabe Range. Pick up a trail guide at the Tyrannosaurus-Rix bike shop, in Austin (775-964-1212, ).
Sea Kayaking Lake Tahoe: U.S. 50 takes you to the edge of this huge 1,685-foot-deep lake, but why stop there? Rent a sea kayak at Kayak Tahoe, in South Lake Tahoe, California, and paddle the startlingly clear waters of Emerald Bay. (530-544-2011, )



**TOP DIGS
Pull over at the Bob Scott Campground, six miles east of Austin in the Toiyabe Range. Surrounded by piñon pines, this free campground with running water and flush toilets is a favorite way station for mountain bikers, who come to ride the steep ascents and technical downhills of the 8.5-mile Bob Scott Slide Trail. (775-964-2671)

**BEST EATS
In the old silver-mining boomtown of Eureka, grab a double bacon cheeseburger at DJ’s Diner, a fifties-style drive-in with booths, pool tables, and a jukebox. (775-237-5356)

**DON’T MISS
The Burning Man Festival, August 25-September 1, is a makeshift city of art installations and creative mayhem where 25,000 revelers congregate to burn “the Man” a 50-foot wooden effigy 77 miles north of Fallon, in the scorched Black Rock Desert. (415-863-5263, )

**ON THE STEREO
Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief for the head-stretching spaces; Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night for when it gets really dark.

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