Skiing the Mountain, and Only the Mountain

Once upon time, before ski resorts turned into theme parks, people strapped on a pair and skied down the mountain. How they got up the mountain depended largely on how much time, money and energy they had. Finally, as Yogi Berra might say, there’s place you can go to ski like people used to do. It’s called Silverton Mountain, and it’s the subject of an intriguing piece in the travel section of the New York Times. The place was created four years ago, the Times reports when Aaron Brill set out to recreate the so-called “club fields” of New Zealand
— unvarnished ski areas where a snack shack is considered an amenity. Brill zigzagged around the West until, at road’s end six miles beyond a
peeling mining town, he found a whaleback ridge that reaches more than
12,000 feet, gets smothered with 400 inches of snow annually and is
zebra-striped with avalanche chutes. Read the rest and catch the slide show in the New York Times.