Outdoors / Snowcat Skiing -- Peak Experience -- Ex-Snowboarders Using Snowcats Make Powder More Accessible And Tweak Sense Of Ski Adventure

To this former ski bum, one of the great unredressed wrongs of our age is how skiing's most exotic adventures either have been rendered as bland as a saltine or have grown out of financial reach of the sport's most hard-core (read: poor) devotees.

While the most deserving can barely scrape together enough for a lift ticket at Alpental, fat cats with fat skis and Bogner suits plunk down thousands for a week of foie gras and helicopter-aided freshies. Life's inequities, it seems, are boundless.

Against this backdrop of bitterness and empty pockets, I stumbled across a blurry brochure for an obscure Idaho outfit called Peak Adventures Snowcat Skiing.

Now this, I thought, sounds exotic and cheap.

A few months later I'm sitting in nervous stillness next to Steve Matthews, watching his beard split into a mountain-man cackle as the plow bites into another VW Beetle-sized drift. He guns the engine and the drift relents, snow spilling over the hood of the snowcat.

Outside, a blizzard has cast a dropcloth over the world, save for the narrow piece of logging road fixed in the headlights. To the right, branches claw at the 'cat's sides. To the left - to the left is nothing. A 1,200-foot slide into a void.

"This ain't no trip to the mall," Steve yells over heater's roar, and it's clear, from his voice, that he's enjoying this.

Though scared to death, I am, too.

I am riding shotgun in a snowcat on a postmodern ski safari,

bushwhacking into North Idaho. I have ventured here in spite of half-serious warnings about lurking bands of Budweiser-fueled militiamen to verify tales of sublime wilderness skiing in the Idaho Panhandle - a land where snow piles so deep that Indians once hunted by grabbing floundering deer and snapping their necks.

North Idaho remains a place of rigor and mystery and single-wide trailer homes, inhabited by a hardscrabble clutch of booze-loving, God-fearing, government-distrusting loggers, miners and their offspring. These sons and daughters of the pioneers wear a "don't tread on me" independent streak on their flannel sleeves and embrace a rugged individualism with both calloused hands.

A ski experience in kindred spirit with North Idaho and its denizens is what you get when you sign on with Peak Adventures, the unvarnished outfit Steve and his wife, Terri, run out of their front yard in Cataldo, 35 miles east of Coeur d'Alene.

From the stooped but serviceable mountains their snowcats ply, to the premium placed on freedom and isolation, to their all-you-can-ski-for-one-low-price credo, the Matthews run a business that's the antithesis of the high-gloss world of fee-based powder skiing. Best of all, it's within a six-hour drive of Seattle.

Your sense that things are different here begins with Steve. An Idaho-raised free spirit with hair grown long in the back, Steve looks more the part of the roughneck logger, which he still works as in the summer, than a former pro snowboarder who made the first snowboard descent of Mount Rainier's Kautz Ice Chute.

He has the quick mind of a college marketing major who long wondered if there was money to be made in the St. Joe Mountains, the 45-mile-long tail of the Bitterroots bending west out of Montana. Though the St. Joes top out at only about 6,400 feet and more resemble the rolling Appalachians than the Rockies, they hold snow forever, he noticed. They're also striped with logging roads - perfect access for snowcat skiing.

When he finally tired of wearing a corporate logo on his back, he and Terri (a sponsored, Bellevue-raised snowboarder) started Peak Adventures in 1993 after buying a few battered 'cats on the cheap and rebuilding them, rivet by rivet, in the evenings after work. Steve, 35, remains chief mechanic, driver, lead guide and avalanche guru. Terri, 30, also guides on each trip and minds the phones for the company, which employs only one other full-time driver. They guide 10-person tours about three times each week during the winter.

This all-in-the-family approach reduces snowcat skiing to the realm of an affordable exotica - $150 a day, or $50-$150 cheaper than most other snowcat operators. "You could pay $300 for a day of cappuccino and leather seats, but I think people want to ski," Steve says with a shrug.

Don't think for a moment that the basement price doesn't buy you ambience; you get plenty - North Idaho style.

Before 7 a.m., 10 groggy skiers meet at the Cataldo Inn across the street from Peak Adventures' "garage" - an ailing tent of tarps draped over two-by-fours. A 25-minute axle-bending drive is followed by a 45-minute shake-and-bake climb in the back of a 1974-vintage 'cat equipped with what look suspiciously like seats from an old school bus.

At 10 a.m. we pile out, antsy to ski, only to find angry winds and clouds as thick as the sausage gravy at the Cataldo Inn. We can't see 5,850-foot St. Joe Baldy today, much less try the screamer lines dropping off its peak. Geography provides a backup plan, however: acres of tasty, wind-sheltered tree skiing in the tamarack and cedar glades on slightly lower Pearson Mountain.

Ritzy snowcat operations that pump thousands of customers down their slopes each winter are masters of "terrain farming," which means you're told to lay your tracks within arm's reach of one another. But with a 25-square-mile permit area that only sees about 500 skiers in a season, the Matthewses have no need to conserve powder.

Steve lets loose a cowboy holler and drops into an area dubbed She Boogies Basin, leaving us to chase his lingering contrail. Logging, and the 1910 burn, which reduced more than than 4,600 square miles of the panhandle to a charcoal briquette, have created spacious tree skiing among the towering second-growth fir and hemlock. We spend the day chasing Steve's whoops through a playground that looks like Steamboat's aspen glades on a Miracle-Gro diet. When we finally stop, lunch is a quick-and-dirty feast of cold cuts and Wonder Bread spread on a snow table.

You won't break any vertical-foot records skiing with Peak Adventures; runs are between 800 and 2,000 vertical feet. But the beauty of skiing with an operation run by two die-hard boarders is that the 'cat keeps heading uphill until the light is gone - no small perk at a latitude where the sun lingers until well after 7 p.m. in April.

At 5:30, a woman turns and asks, "We're doing another run, Steve?"

"Oh, yeah," Steve says matter-of-factly. "If it stays light out, I got gas stashed everywhere."

The clouds only pile deeper, but it's still bright enough for a swan song at 6 p.m. Steve tells us we can ski anywhere, as long as it's down. The woods are spooky but beautiful in the pearly dusk. Broad tamaracks reach for us with branches festooned with moss. Somewhere below growls the snowcat, its headlights throwing spokes of otherworldly light through the trees. Imagine skiing on the set of "The Shining," and you've get the picture.

The storm and the night envelop us. Drifts appear like waves blocking the road down the valley. I watch as the 'cat takes snow over the bow.

"Now this," Steve says, downshifting and squinting into the black shrieking night, "is an adventure."

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Snowcat facts

Some Northwest snowcat operations and their daily fees:

1. Peak Adventures Snowcat Skiing, Cataldo, Idaho. $150. (208) 682-3200.

2. Brundage Ski Cats, McCall, Idaho. $165. (800) 888-7544.

3. Mount Bailey Snowcat Skiing, Diamond Lake, Ore. $175. (800) 446-4555.

4. Cat Skiing Adventures on the Big Mountain, Whitefish, Mont. $40 with valid lift ticket. (406) 862-2909.

5. Mount Hood Meadows, Oregon. $12 per ride, from the top of Cascade Express lift to Super Bowl and Heather Canyon. (503) 337-2222.

- Chris Solomon