Backcountry Skiing -- Copter, Yurt And Skis: Alone At Top -- New Dimension To Backcountry Adventurism

The extended backcountry ski trip has always been the Vacation of the Damned. Never trust anyone who brays about how much he enjoys climbing and skiing all day under the anvil weight of a pack, then crawling into an icy tent and sucking on frozen turkey jerky until sleep arrives.

The Europeans figured out long ago that the civilized way for a resort-coddled butt to ease into a long trip into the bush is by staying in a high-country rifugio, eating well, drinking well and starting each day with a warm fire and dry boots. Here in the New World, the British Columbians and the Coloradans are the most faithful followers of that example, each with their own permanent huts dotting the high alpine.

Despite offering great backcountry skiing, our beloved Cascades don't offer much in the way of off-piste accommodations. There is, however, a little known exception: a lonely hut perched at 6,000 feet on the cusp of the Pasayten Wilderness.

Each winter and spring, North Cascades Heli-Skiing flies skiers to its Mongolian-style yurt north of Mazama and leaves them and a guide for up to four days. The high outpost positions skiers for easy exploration of the sharp ridge tops and mellow basins of the eastern Cascades - and the only thing about you that's chilled when night falls is the wine you've left in the snowbank for apres-ski.

"You can't get adventure like this from a box of Cracker Jack."

I had to allow that Peter was right - if that was Peter who spoke. With the wind atop Tamarack Peak blowing snow at 40 miles an hour, shapes and faces of my fellow companions were approximations.

Five inches of snow had fallen in the few hours since dawn - most of it horizontally - cutting visibility to nothing. Atop the peak, wind-rattled, we wondered whether the helicopter would be able to retrieve us on this, our last day. The alternative was daunting: skiing 25 miles with a full pack, over Harts Pass and back to Mazama.

Adventure, indeed.

Four days before, the Methow Valley's sunny skies smiled over us as we loaded our gear and headed northwest. At Windy Pass the yurt appeared in the chopper's window, a squat thing like a brown circus tent on stilts. We unloaded gear and food, then took one quick heli ride to a nearby peak, before the chopper left the five of us alone to explore thousands of acres of skiing.

Though Washington winters are brutal, the eastern slopes of the Cascades can produce ideal touring and telemarking, particularly in spring. Warmer weather (usually) stabilizes the snowpack and reduces avalanche danger; sunshine is a frequent companion; and the mountains here take on gentler angles and fewer trees, which means easy ascension on skis and more slopes suitable for intermediate skiers. Then there's the beauty of the Cascades - a toothy horizon of saw-edged peaks that rivals the Alps in making gapers of even the most world-weary mountaineers.

Luckily, we soaked up plenty of postcard views that first day, because we only glimpsed the mountains a handful of times after that. (These are, after all, still the Cascades.)

Atop Tamarack Peak on exit day, Randy Sackett pulled out the walkie-talkie and radioed home. Clouds low all the way to Mazama, the guide and co-owner of North Cascades Heli-Skiing, was told. The bird wasn't flying.

Choosing to give the weather some time to change its mind, we adjusted goggles, smiled to our faceless comrades and stitched turns through the 5 inches of unexpected windfall, all the way down to our lodging.

The yurt nestles against pines a few miles northwest of Slate Peak, the highest point cars can drive in Washington in summer. Just outside our door, the Pacific Crest Trail skirts the saddle of Windy Pass and drops into the 516,000-acre Pasayten Wilderness. Tamarack Peak, with its tempting bowl, looms about 1,000 feet to the north.

For a glorified canvas tent with a wood floor, yurts prove surprisingly cozy, and decidedly unpretentious. Socks and shirts dry above a stoked woodstove. Foam beds raised off the floor - enough room for almost a dozen skiers - make cramped sleeping bags bearable, if not pleasant. For guests, Randy at night cooks up un-fancy but rib-sticking dinners like stew and spaghetti.

The skiing, however, is anything but mundane.

Out the front door, a different day's adventure lay in each direction. To the southwest, the map was hatched with X's, marking the former mines of Indiana and Allen basins. This was once Barron, a boomtown of 1,000 miners who looked for gold in the sheared and faulted quartzite. So remote and inaccessible was Barron that supplies had to be dropped by hot-air balloon.

Now the place in winter is simply barren, and those X's marked the spot of soft corn snow atop the smothered mineshafts. We sped down the wide-open runway of a ridge called Airport Flat, then dropped lower, attached climbing skins, and returned to do it again. We saw no one in four days, save two adventurous snowmobilers.

Other days we turned southeast to Buffalo Pass, our skis climbing with the contours of the mountain. There we dropped into the glacier-plowed valleys of the wilderness area, each skier marking the slopes with his own looping S's. Practicing penmanship in Mrs. McCullom's third-grade class was never so entertaining.

Even with a quilt of clouds above, the spring days warmed noticeably as the sun climbed. We chased its arc each day to catch the slopes as they began to soften. When clouds moved in too close to see well, we stopped to eat, or Randy dug a snow pit and talked to us about how to read snow for avalanche danger: looking at temperature gradients, size of snow crystals, how easily the old layers fracture from one another.

Rob and I, the young guys, were still backcountry novices. Peter, Steve and Randy, longtime Methow residents and backcountry skiers, gave welcome tips on the Art of Up. Climbing mountains with skis on your feet, we learned, requires nearly as much thought and technique as skiing down them.

Nights we passed at the yurt's picnic-table-cum-dinner-table, popping Advil, telling war stories and marveling at how well a mug of red-wine-in-a-box complemented a bloated bag of Jiffy Pop. Those evenings blurred together as we lazed in a lactic-acid stupor and pored over maps for the next day's trek, as the propane lamp hissed and the night fell dark and muting as a dropcloth over the world outside.

"I love it up here," Randy confessed one night. Coming from a man who spends his winters getting paid to heli-ski, that's no trite phrase.

I had to agree with him. If some sneer at a yurt trip as "soft adventure," you can have your hard-core.

The weather didn't break all morning, the snow fell in gouts, and after lunch we packed up and began the long ski toward Harts Pass. Randy radioed one of his guides, who met us below the pass and towed us to the top using a snowmobile and a climbing rope. When the weather cleared a bit Randy gathered us in a knot and told everyone to squat down. The helicopter appeared out of the clouds, dropping atop us like something out of "M # A # S # H." Five minutes later we stood in a drizzle in the Methow, anxious for a shower but otherwise muted.

We were all thinking, I'd wager, about how good the skiing was going to be tomorrow.

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IF YOU GO.

Here's a list of some backcountry accommodations in the Northwest. Amenities vary, as do prices and guide services.

1) North Cascades Heli-Skiing in Mazama offers helicopter-aided backcountry ski trips at its yurt at Windy Pass, for downhill skiers and cross-country skiers. A helicopter takes the effort out of getting there - and back. 800-494-4354.

2) Rendezvous Huts in the Methow Valley is a chain of five unadorned backcountry huts above the Methow that are chiefly used by cross-country skiers who take advantage of the groomed trails that run past their front door; telemark skiers and others can find turns on nearby Fawn Peak and beyond. 800-422-3048.

3) Scottish Lakes east of Stevens Pass has seven wooden huts with nice touring in the Chiwaukum Mountains. 800-909-9916 or www.scottishlakes.com.

4) Mount Tahoma Trails Association has three huts and a yurt for use near Mount Rainier - free, with refundable deposit. Most terrain is for cross-country touring, but the highest hut offers decent downhill skiing and telemarking. For information and reservations, send a self-addressed and stamped legal-size envelope to P.O. Box 206 Ashford, WA 98304.

5) Sawtooth Mountain Guides shares operation of three huts in Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains. 208-774-3324.

6) Sun Valley Trekking operates five walled tents and yurts in the Sawtooth Mountains, Smokey Mountains and Boulder Mountains around Sun Valley. Hot tubs or saunas. 208-726-1002.

7) Sun Valley Heli-Ski Guides offers trips to a yurt at 8,700 feet in the Pioneer Mountains. 800-872-3108.

8) Wallowa Alpine Huts has four yurts in the northeast corner of Oregon near the Eagle Cap Wilderness. 800-545-5537.

9) "How to Rent a Fire Lookout in the Pacific Northwest" by Tom Foley and Tish Steinfeld (Wilderness Press) opens intriguing possibilities for backcountry lodging, mostly in Oregon.

10) British Columbia huts abound. Call the Canadian Alpine Club or surf the Web for huts in the Purcells and Bugaboos.

- Chris Solomon