The > Travel > Escapes > Journeys: Skiing Without Boundaries

N January, the Telluride Ski and Golf Resort in Colorado will open up a coveted new type of real estate. This territory isn't slopeside; it's the slopes themselves - new ones to conquer, and without the usual competition.

For an additional 0, a strong skier who has taken a half-day private ski lesson can don an avalanche-safety beacon and a shovel and then hike with a guide for 30 minutes to the high point of Prospect Ridge, leaving behind the skiers and snowboarders jockeying for powder. There, with 13,320-foot Palmyra Peak glaring over their shoulders, they will snap into their bindings and plunge down a ski run that is off limits to others. Wild country, deep snow, a shiver of sweat and excitement down the spine - this is as close as many skiers will ever get to backcountry skiing.

Call it Backcountry Lite. Traditional ski resorts around the West are cashing in on the cachet of an escape from the well-groomed and well-used slopes. They are offering more hike-to terrain, more excursions with guides along their ski areas' perimeters, more rides in tank-treaded Sno-Cats that carry skiers to ridgelines just beyond the chairlifts.

"You really feel like you're doing something special that other people are missing out on," said Hannah Swett, 35, a Manhattanite who takes guided ski excursions to the backcountry at Jackson Hole, in Wyoming, where she owns a home. She found her opportunity to join the trend when she discovered a guide program two winters ago at Jackson Hole; 5 buys a guide for a day to accompany up to five skiers.

Equipped with avalanche beacons and shovels, Backcountry Lite skiers at Jackson Hole jump on an early tram to the mountaintop and duck through the gates into its famous beyond-the-ropes stashes like Rock Springs Bowl. "You see people heading out these gates," Ms. Swett said, "and you think, `I just have to go.' " Once beyond the prepared ski runs, she added, "You don't see anyone."

When the groups in the guide program return to the lifts, that 5 also gets them line-cutting privileges. The program has grown so popular that the United States Forest Service recently granted approval for Jackson Hole, which is largely on public land, to triple the number of guided visitors in the backcountry to 900.

"This is definitely a trend, and an increasing trend," said Nolan Rosall, president of RRC Associates, a Boulder, Colo., company that does market research, planning and consulting for the ski industry. Terrain is opening up that "wasn't available before, or wasn't utilized as much, or marketed as much," he said. "It's adding diversity to the sport that really didn't exist to anywhere near the same degree 10 or 15 years ago."

Back then, backcountry skiing was the domain of scruffy, large-lunged guys who chafed at lift tickets and the tyranny of boundary ropes. Today out-of-bounds is hot. Ski films by companies like Teton Gravity Research long ago stopped using the soporific slopes of the world; today's sequences show ski stars swinging big turns in places like Greenland. And at specialty ski stores, sales of telemark gear, which is frequently used in the backcountry because its free-heel bindings allow easy movement, increased more than 74 percent last season from the season before, according to Snowsports Industries America, which tracks industry trends. At the same time, sales of alpine skis and snowboards were flat.

The resorts' Lite version demands a fraction of the sweat of true backcountry skiing (whose unofficial credo is "earn your turns"). Skiers usually don't have to buy any specialized gear or take training, and avalanche-prone slopes are dynamited into submission. It's a chance to try something exotic that doesn't require big lungs, a big investment or acceptance of big risk.

The sea change in mainstream alpine ski equipment adds to the number of skiers who can join in. Today's skis are shorter and fatter and buoy skiers in powder snow. They're also easy to steer through uneven conditions. "Viagra skis," some call them, because they've made skiing fun again, especially for older thighs.

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