Cool cats

A three-passenger snowmobile on steroids is putting North Idaho on the cutting edge of backcountry snowcat skiing and snowboarding operations.

“Anybody can get a group of three, so you know exactly who you’re skiing with,” said Shep Snow, the snow conditions expert and partner in the Selkirk Powder Company. “Take your family or get three beginners or three experts and you can customize your trip to the max, ski the terrain you want to ski at the pace that feels right.”

He’s referring to the nimble Sherpa snowmobile, which has a center seat for the driver and guide plus three chair seats in the back for passengers.

This mighty midget is just one of several intriguing options awaiting adventurous skiers willing to explore the steep and deep beyond the front side of Schweitzer Mountain, where the fledgling company is delivering the best snowcat skiing bargain in the Inland Northwest.

At $200 a day per person for the traditional 10-passenger snowcat or $225 a day for the three-passenger Sherpa, the Schweitzer experience is thrifty by snowcat standards and downright cheap compared with a day of heli-skiing.

Yet the nearby amenities of the Schweitzer village offer the options of luxury and convenience.

“Some snowcat services require considerable time accessing the skiing terrain,” Snow said. “Skiing might not start until 10 or 11 a.m. Here, in just seven minutes, you’re out of the commercial environment and into the backcountry.”

Selkirk Powder Company’s off-piste operation is as convenient as Schweitzer’s main lift-assisted slopes. Patrons sign in at the village-based office and hop on the Great Escape high-speed quad chair lift. The company has its snowcats waiting at a small summit lodge a short walk from the top of the lift at 6,400 feet.

“Our operational relationship with Schweitzer is a huge benefit,” Snow said. “The snowcat skiers have access to all the amenities of a world-class resort, the lodging, meals, safety backup and everything.”

Skiers, of course, are mostly interested in the untracked snow.

“We offer fewer tracks per acre than anybody around,” said Ken Barrett, another partner and guide. “You don’t have to be here the day of a storm to find untracked powder. We can find unskied terrain for days or weeks after a storm.

“There’s another snowcat operation in B.C. that boasts of 7,000 acres of terrain but they put 40 skiers and guides out there each day. Our track-to-acre ratio is much better: We have 4,000 acres and we might put 11 skiers out there in a day.”

Snowcat skiers are a lot like heli-skiers, except they tend to be more relaxed and they leave the mountain before spending enough dough to develop a third-world country.

“I didn’t know how to ski powder until I came back here because the only way to learn is to get up here and do it,” said Joy Snow, Shep’s wife, after easily holding her own with a group last week.

“For most skiers, it only takes a couple of runs through uncut powder before they realize, hey, this isn’t so hard,” Shep said.

“The danger is that you can become addicted,” said Barrett. “We had a family last week and the kid gave me a hug when he left and said he didn’t think he’d ever be happy on the front side of the mountain again.”

Nobody loves the back side of Schweitzer more than Chip Kamin, the major investor in Selkirk Powder Company.

From his real estate development business based in Pittsburgh, Kamin branched out to work with developments in Telluride, Colo., and then to Schweitzer. Having skied at prime spots around the world, he had some perspective before schussing into his backcountry skiing investment.

“I started exploring the back of Schweitzer 10 years ago the same way everybody else before me did it,” he said. “I’d ski a wonderful run and then put on skins and climb back out.”

One run at a time, Kamin sniffed out the area’s potential.

“It all added up to something unique,” he said. “I can’t think of any other comparable backcountry snowcat terrain that’s so perfectly associated with a world-class ski area.”

Selkirk Powder Company got a foothold in 1999 by obtaining a permit for guided snowmobile touring operation based at Schweitzer. The snowmobiles enabled them to explore from Schweitzer’s area down into the Idaho state-managed forest.

They found a wealth of open glades and runs created by chain saws and natural forest fires.

Previous Schweitzer owners had compiled a wealth of information in a five-year study on the potential for snowcat skiing. “But nobody had spent enough organized ski time back there to know how it’s all connected,” Kamin said.

“We took advantage of satellite imagery and every other technology we could find. But in the end it was skiing that told us what we had. We took three full seasons to map and GPS all the good lines.”

Unfortunately all of that effort and enthusiasm went largely unappreciated last year during the company’s first full season of operation.

“Like everybody else in the ski industry, we got hammered with the worst winter ever,” Barrett said. “But we still did 30 paid ski days. We actually had lots more opportunity, but we couldn’t convince people to come up through all the bare ground to ski.”

This year, however, the Selkirks are buried in snow – 17 inches of fluffy new snow in just one day last week – and the Selkirk Powder Company is showing clients the good life on runs ranging to nearly 2,000 vertical feet.

Behind the goggles of every skier piling out of the snowcat last week was an eye for a clean line of untouched snow. Every run was different. Every skier and boarder found something sweet.

Moments of fog on the mountain that would have grounded a helicopter simply moved the snowcat skiers into a different line through the trees.

Some of the group piled into the warm snowcat after each run while three others opted for the faster open-air Sherpa.

“Feel the heat coming up from under the seats?” Shep Snow said. “That’s just a bonus. When the skiing’s this good, you don’t really feel the cold.”