Month: March 2023

Carving the relatively untracked powder of Seven Utes and State Forest State Park with a yurt as your basecamp is a must this winter.

The nice guy with the Willie Nelson braids thinks I should microdose psilocybin on our backcountry ski tour tomorrow in Colorado’s Seven Utes. I’ve been struggling with the altitude and he thinks it’ll help me handle the climb. “The mushroom was the first living thing on Earth,” he says. “We can learn a lot from fungi.”

The guy with the braids is Mark Morris, a professional skier and kind of a rock star; he’s the front man for the bluegrass band Rapidgrass. He hucks big cliffs in the winter and tours around the world with his band in the summer. I’m inclined to listen to a man with that sort of pedigree. We’re standing in the kitchen of a backcountry yurt watching our friend pour chicken broth into a giant pan of paella. We’ve been talking about the “Mother Mushroom,” parallel universes, and the search for the “God Particle” for the last several minutes.

It’s a heady conversation considering our situation. This isn’t some truth circle or sweat lodge confession; I’m with a group of skiers exploring the relatively untracked powder of Colorado’s State Forest State Park, a 71,000-acre swath of jagged peaks (hello, Seven Utes) and remote lakes adjacent to Rocky Mountain National Park.

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The idea that taking a small dose of mushrooms might help me be a better backcountry skier is intriguing. We spent the afternoon touring the edge of 11,800-foot North Diamond Peak, running laps through ankle deep powder as we linked together a series of meadows separated by thin bands of ghost-white aspens. The powder turns were absolute bliss—meadow skipping at its finest—but climbing to the top of those runs was brutal, and it became apparent early on that I was going to have a hard time keeping up with Morris. He’s known for his big air, but he’s also a fifth-generation Colorado native, so backcountry skiing is in his blood. He climbs like a mountain goat, pulling a hundred yards ahead of the group, and I know that no amount of magic mushrooms will help me keep pace.

I can’t complain about the scenery, though. Or the powder. State Forest State Park’s neighbor, Rocky Mountain National Park, gets a lot of attention in the winter for its backcountry skiing, thanks largely to Hidden Valley, a lift-served ski resort that went belly up in the ‘90s but has become a beacon for skiers willing to earn their turns. Access is easy, close to the Front Range, and avalanche risk is low. A lot of skiers learn the art of backcountry skiing in Rocky Mountain National Park. But according to our guides at Colorado Mountain School, State Forest State Park has better terrain, deeper snow and a fraction of the crowds.

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“I see moose out here quite a bit,” says our lead guide, Mike Soucy. “But I rarely see other skiers.”

Backcountry Bliss From a Yurt

That’s part of the allure of backcountry skiing after all: solitude. Instead of standing in a lift line, you have the chance to see a moose. Instead of following hundreds of tracks through the woods, you have fresh powder at the bottom of every turn. Instead of wrangling a spot at the bar for an après beer, there’s a can of Coors stuck in the snow on the porch of your yurt. 

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The price of admission for all this backcountry bliss? Monster climbs. Instead of lifts, backcountry skiers use special gear—boots and bindings designed to both climb and descend mountains, and “skins” that give skis grip on the climbs—to get to the top of the mountains they want to ski. Climbing is a large part of backcountry skiing, like 80 percent of your time on skis will be consumed by making your way up the mountain. I’m having a hard time coming to grips with that math as we settle in for the night.

“With backcountry skiing, you get to the point where you love the climb,” Morris says. “Or at least you appreciate it.”

We’re in the brand new Seven Utes Yurt, which was built by Colorado Mountain School (CMC) during the summer. We’re one of the first groups to use it as a basecamp for backcountry skiing. It’s large, clean, and sparse. The guides push a few folding card tables together to form a large table for dinner and games, and the center of life is the wood-burning stove. Solar panels provide power to a fridge and some lights, and there’s a propane heater as backup heat. The yurt is open all year long.

In the summer, CMC guides mountain bike trips and teaches mountaineering skills, but this place is built for winter missions. There are four large pots on the wood-burning stove the guides are constantly filling with snow to melt for water. That’s the main job to keep the yurt running: Keep the fire burning and snow in the pots so we’re always warm and hydrated.

After dinner, Morris picks up a guitar, sits by the wood stove and plays songs and tells stories about getting haunted in Chamonix and going too big during his first foray into the Freeride World Tour. He’s psyched that it happens to be Django Reinhardt’s birthday and plays a few of the late, great jazz guitarist’s tunes.

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Most of the time, if you want this kind of backcountry skiing experience, you have to skin for several miles into a hut. But this basecamp is 200 yards from the parking lot. We brought a cooler of beer and a charcuterie board. The logistics are easy, but there’s skiable terrain in almost every direction surrounding the yurt, with big lines dropping off 11,000- and 12,000-foot peaks. The meadows we surfed today were just an appetizer. Tomorrow will be a full day of big climbs and descents.

Big Climbs and Powder Turns

I decide not to take mushrooms and regret it immediately on our second day in the park. We split into three smaller groups, each setting out to explore different mountains. My group heads out for the east face of Seven Utes Mountain (11,478 feet), which requires an initial 2,000-foot climb through evergreens covered in wispy mistletoe. The mountain is densely forested in the lower elevations, but those trees progressively thin out as you climb, giving way to a series of wide-open bowls and narrow chutes that have trapped snow from a stellar season of storms.

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On the way up, our guide, Sarah, explains to us the nuances of snowpack and avalanche danger, digging out the layers of snow on the side of a hill and showing us how each storm packs on top of the previous storm. Climbing through the terrain is its own skill set. I learn to take baby steps on the steepest pitches, then long and slow strides on the gradual slopes. The key is to keep your heart rate at a slow, steady clip. But the kick turn is a bitch. To maneuver switchbacks, you have to plant the inside foot and ski, lean your torso over that ski so your upper body is horizontal to the ground, kick up your back leg, then—and this is the important part—wait for that raised ski to slowly snap back to your heel and bring it next to your planted ski. This is the kick turn. It’s an artful move that requires mobility and patience. Apparently, I lack both of those qualities.

I suffer through the initial big climb and we top out onto a ridge on the edge of Seven Utes summit. It’s a cold, white, treeless landscape, like a picture of the moon. There’s not much visibility from the top of the mountain, but it’s so still and quiet it’s intoxicating. It’s nothing like the peak of a ski resort, typically buzzing with the chatter of lifts and crowds. We eat lunch standing up, layering puffy jackets over our shells to keep warm, and enjoy the silence. From the headwall, there’s a wide-open bowl directly below us, then the skiing breaks up into various couloirs, some more daunting than others. They all eventually give way to thick glades that funnel back to the yurt.

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The guides tell us that a wealthy family with “Big Beer” money once tried to build a ski resort on Seven Utes, but the locals fought the proposed development out of concerns for water quality. I’m sure it would have been a lovely resort, but this primitive experience—the work it requires to access it, the quiet, the camaraderie with the handful of skiers that are lucky enough to experience it—has to be better. Even with all the climbing. No micro-dosing required.

After lunch, we drop over a small cornice and immediately start linking turns through knee-deep powder above the tree line. It’s a relatively mellow slope, and the turns are effortless and carefree, my skis sinking and rising out of the powder with a smooth rhythm that would put a baby to sleep. I follow my guide and ski partner through the bowl and we carve long, sinuous lines in the blank canvas.

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Below the bowl, we have our choice of couloirs. The hero line is the Central Gully, which is wide and steep, but loaded with booby traps in the form of cliffs that require the sort of skills only Morris has, so we opt for a more casual gully, which is steep and narrow, but allows us to keep our skis in the snow. We tackle it one at a time, each skier taking a line just to the right of the previous skier so we all get fresh powder with each turn. Then we dip into the trees and find an even steeper chute that requires jump turns, but the powder is so deep it’s like jumping through marshmallow fluff. At one point, I fall backwards into the fluff and ride a wave of snow down the pitch several feet, giggling the entire time.

Things mellow out after the steep chute and a decision has to be made. We can call it a day and head back to the yurt, or we can put our skins on our skis and make our way back up the mountain for more turns. My legs are toast and another lap would require several hundred feet of climbing. There’s cold beer and a warm fire at the yurt.

Calling it a day is a perfectly valid decision, but I want more. And not just more of the buttery downhill turns. I want more climbing. I want more quiet. More solitude. I want more backcountry.