I’ve always enjoyed backcountry skiing, but venturing into the woods off trail can be challenging on regular x-country gear. This year I invested in AT gear. This is the type of gear that many of the extreme skiers use to skin up mountain summits in order to have that perfect powder run. Now this is in no way one of my ambitions, but the new lightweight gear available is perfect for backcountry exploring. The wide bottom shorter skis make traversing through mtn trails much easier, and the fish scale bottoms allow for climbing most grades without the use of skins. Skins can still be utilized for those steeper accents.views while skiing down Flattop mtnI’ve logged many miles this winter on this new type of gear. Flattop mtn is a popular area to climb up and have a gentle downhill run through the burned out forest. The trail to this area leaves from Marias Pass and is a fairly easy route directly to the mountain play area.nice gentle slope through burned areaBig River trail is also a nice route to explore during the winter months. I recently attempted to travel up this trail and connect to the Edna creek trail in hopes of making it to the Tranquil Basin overlook. Edna creek trail is extremely steep and after about a mile of traversing up this trail I realized it was more than my experience level was ready for. The narrow trail and steep hillside warranted that I leave the climbing skins on to slow my decent while making my way back down this section.Start of big river trail #155Imperative to take pic at the wilderness line!It was such a beautiful day to be skiing in the backcountry!Another route up to Tranquil Basin is directly up the drainage from the lake. In my youth a good friend and I would make a yearly backpack trip up to Tranquil using this route. Unfortunately it’s been 40 years since those days and my recollection of the route was pretty faint. Slide area I skied up the drainage and the slide area but could find no semblance of a trail. Usually one can find some cut logs or other evidence, but the snow was covering all signs of past trail routes. This trip is going to have to be on the agenda for summer backpacking so I can get familiar with the area again.Still this was a great backcountry excursion. The area had received about 1′ of new snow a couple days earlier.If your more partial to skiing groomed trails or trips around the local golf course, then this type of gear may not be best suited for you. But if you like getting off the beaten path and experiencing the backcountry, check this AT (alpine touring) gear out. It will definitely be worth the investment.
