Alpine Skiing / Alpental

"Aw, come on. Give it one chance."

Lisa was bugging me. Again.

"It's THE PASS!" I groaned. "Millions of chest-high kids. Bad hot dogs. Thousand-foot verticals. Green runs, for heaven's sake. Nothin' but green!"

"Trust me," Lisa begged for the hundredth time. "There really is good skiing up there. Give me a single day to show you and I promise, I'll never mention it again."

Finally, I gave in. And I discovered Alpental, the Summit's not so little secret.

Alpental is not Snoqualmie. Different scenery, different terrain, different conditions, much different vertical. Alpental is the yang to the rest of the Summit's yin. It's the Pass' evil twin. It's the place your mother doesn't ski.

And it's fun!

Taking the main chair out of the base, I warmed up on Debbie's Gold, Alpental's main cruiser - wide open, straight down the fall line, smooth as a carpet and steep.

Yeah, it's marked blue. But this half-mile run with its handful of free-fall dips would be black anywhere else. It's the kind of cruiser with just enough excitement to get your juices going.

Then we bounced around the rest of the lower mountain for a while. It's all pretty open and benign. And over by Alpental's shorter base lift, we noodled through the area's alleged beginner terrain.

Well, yes, the beginner area is smooth. It is well groomed and free of surprises. But like everything else here, it's steeper than you'd expect. This is not where you want to take your cousin for his first day on skis.

Meanwhile, Chair 17 beckoned. The map calls this the Edelweiss Chair but I don't think anybody has ever called it anything but Chair 17.

This is Alpental's gateway to adventure.

At the base of Chair 17, on a clear day, you can gaze up I-90 toward Lake Keechelus (the reservoir). It's like you're floating on top of the world. And Chair 17 takes you up even farther, another 1,100 vertical feet to 5,400 feet.

This is high enough so the top of Alpental usually gets snow while the rest of The Summit is getting rain. And it means Alpental has a vertical of 2,200 feet, which is a good chunk more than Stevens' 1,800 feet and close to the in-bounds vertical at Crystal.

The top of Chair 17 is the heart of Alpental. To the skier's right lies Edelweiss Bowl, a relatively benign basin (for Alpental) fed by countless chutes. Beneath the chair is a stair-stepping ridge and below that, more or less under the chair, is a hair-raising drop called The Fan.

It's much steeper than it looks. The snow here softens quickly when the rest of the hill is ice and it holds great powder after storms. "There are days," one windblown local admitted, "when all I do is yo-yo The Fan."

Back up the chair and down the other side is the much-feared Upper International. This is the run that makes Alpental's reputation. But frankly, the worst part is getting in, which often involves free-falling off the edge or taking a gut-wrenching drop down a traverse filled with giant dips.

The bowl is large, wide open, steep and full of powder. Off to the right lies another secret, a run called Adrenaline. The thing about Adrenaline is you can skip the "lose your lunch" part on top, cut just 50 feet or so below that and catch absolutely the best powder on the mountain.

Beyond this, farther to the skier's left, lie several other lines through gullies and trees. And beyond that lies Alpental's other secret: the back country.

If you consider just Alpental's in-bounds area, the resort is tall and skinny. But add the rest of the accessible terrain billowing out into Alpental Valley and you've got ski acreage that runs more than a mile horizontally.

Alpental is much bigger than people think. The in-bounds area is 800 acres, which is actually larger than all of Alyeska Resort up in Anchorage. The out-of-bounds terrain adds another 800 acres, giving Alpental as much ski acreage as many destination resorts.

The outback is a place of steep, ragged cliffs where the rock free-falls in sharply corrugated folds and the spruce trees cling precariously to ledges the size of dinner trays. The terrain is like a giant skateboard park - think Mount Baker with a serious attitude. It rolls and dips and cuts around knobs and trees. It's full of runs with names like Rocks Off, Elevator Shaft, Upper Sucker and Cirque of Leaps.

Yes, there are wide-open pitches - smooth, mellow swaths where you can catch 20 or so serpentine turns in the powder. But you have to twist and wind and climb and drop to reach them.

You can do a run here, then come out again on a line 20 yards from the first and it looks like you're in a totally different place with no sight of where you were before.

And there are cliffs. The land falls on a funky diagonal so that if you try to cut left, you'll inevitably hit a cliff. You must cut continuously right (or do some jumping). And eventually, when you've cut right long enough, you come to the bottom of the valley and hit the traverse that delivers you back to the resort base.

On an outing late last spring, we had just hit this traverse when we heard a voice. It was a figure in well-worn duds, his snowboard buried in powder, humming and muttering to himself in utter contentment. He appeared above us, maybe 80 feet straight up. He waved and turned and levitated down a near vertical drop, touching ground maybe twice to correct direction but otherwise dropping weightlessly in our direction.

Rat Boy, somewhat of a local legend, stopped long enough to ask about general conditions, then was gone.

"That's what we like to see," said Jon Barker, Alpental's snow safety director. "People being concerned enough to ask about conditions, people taking care."

It shows, he added, that Alpental's back-country program is succeeding.

"We run it on the philosophy of trying to maintain the least amount of impact in that area so people can have the most pristine snow," Barker said.

"We don't do any avalanche bombing during the year. The decision to open the back country is based solely on snowpack evaluation and snow settlement," Jon added.

In other words, either the back country is safe (and thus open) or it isn't (thus closed). Yes, there is the occasional gate crasher . . . Alpental calls them poachers. But most people understand that poaching is dangerous and holds up opening the area for everyone else.

Besides checking the snow daily, Alpental runs a back-country registration program. You listen to a safety lecture, get a list of (highly) recommended gear such as an avalanche beeper and shovel, and go on a checkout run with the patrol to learn the lay of the land. Then you get a laminated back-country card. Alpental gave out 780 last season. All for free.

Meanwhile, changes are in the works. By the time lifts open this season, Debbie's Gold will have been replaced with a much-needed high-speed quad and the rental shop will be stocked with the latest gear.

For more information on Alpental, call The Summit at Snoqualmie, 206-236-7277.