Tours Put Off Limits In Reach Resort Owners Try To Put More Fun And Challenge Into Alpine Skiing

The most famous lawsuit in the history of skiing occurred 17 years ago when James Sunday skied on the edge of a narrow connector trail at Vermont’s Stratton Mountain, was crippled in a fall there, then successfully sued the ski area for a million dollars.

After the Sunday suit, and others brought against ski areas for failing to protect skiers from “unsafe” terrain, two things happened: Liability insurance for ski areas skyrocketed, and ski area management doubled its efforts to keep skiers from wandering “out of bounds,” even accidentally.

But this season at Maine’s Sugarloaf, Vermont’s Sugarbush and a number of other areas, skiers can go through the woods to their heart’s content, zooming amid trees and ungroomed natural snow in areas previously off limits.

The resorts hope to reel in out-of-bounds skiers with guided tours of the outback.

“We’re trying to get some of the rush and excitement back into skiing,” says Chip Carey, Sugarloaf’s vice president of marketing.

For $30 in addition to a regular lift ticket, skiers will get a 2-1/2-hour guided tour through the vast acreage beyond the groomed slopes.

What started this trend of bushwack resort skiing was not skiing at all, but snowboarding.

“The industry looked at the growth in boarding and saw lots of action and lots of excitement,” said Sugarbush spokesman Scott Campbell.

In contrast to skiing’s early years, when trails were narrow and twisting, with a minimum of surface grooming, today’s broad white boulevards can become boring.

“We had to ask ourselves why snowboarders have so much fun and are so excited, and the answer is they play on their boards,” Carey said.

Hence, off-trail skiing - through the trees and natural hazards. “It’s skiing the way nature intended,” Campbell said. “What has happened in skiing is that we made it almost too easy, and that took some of the fun and challenge out of it. This back-country skiing gets away from the homogenized product.”

The resorts say nearly all serious injuries occur when accomplished skiers, traveling too fast down a groomed slope, lose control and go off the side of the trail and into the trees.

But skiers who go out of bounds - or off piste - are expected to ski much more slowly and deliberately than they do on groomed slopes. All the same, Sugarbush is recommending that helmets be worn by skiers off trail, and will have its patrolmen and guides wear them.

“Once in the woods, an upper-level skier can get that rush and excitement at less than 10 miles an hour, where on a groomed slope, he’s going 45,” Carey said. “That’s the big difference.”