Silence isn’t golden. It’s pure white, powdery and endless. No grinding gears of chairlifts, no whining snowmobiles, no lift rides with skiers jabbering on cell phones. Just nature, same as it ever was.
You’re kicking and gliding, you’re in the zone. At 21 degrees, you’re downright hot. Peel off another layer. Stop. Look up at the clear sky, smell the sweet air.
This is the “country” in cross-country skiing–pure-driven, wilderness solitude–and a prime reason why it’s one of the fastest-growing sports in the nation.
Cross-country used to be about braving that wilderness without markers, maps and groomed trails. To get deep into the backcountry, a skier had to carry a pack and be prepared to spend the night in the snow or a rustic hut. Today, the cross-country experience is being tamed, tracked and civilized.
There are more than 350 resorts in the United States and Canada that offer lessons, guides and just about any level of comfort and safety a skier could hope for.
The packaging of serenity is winning new recruits, but is the traditional experience losing its spontaneity and sense of adventure in the process?
Jane Dulaney, who got sick of fracturing various bones in hard-to-reach places doing downhill, is a guide and marketing manager at the Royal Gorge cross-country resort in Soda Springs, Calif., northwest of Lake Tahoe. She says it all boils down to degrees of serenity.
These days for Dulaney, though, the raw and unknown have been replaced by the more predictable backcountry of Royal Gorge, which, with 205 miles of groomed trails, is the largest cross-country ski resort in the world. And when they say resort, they mean it. In the hand-hewn stone lodge, French cuisine and wines are served.
Royal Gorge is the most elaborate response to the growing market for less-crazed mountain playgrounds, lower-impact exercise and the solitude of powdery wilderness.
Gene Foley, chairman of the Cross-Country Ski Association, which promotes skiing on groomed trails, says there are 210 exclusively cross-country resorts in his group. Many are expanding their offerings, from state-of-the art equipment to spa facilities.
Chasing solitude with a bunch of other resort guests doesn’t add up for Lisa Paak, who has been skiing the Southwest for 30 years.
“Resort skiing requires interaction with people,” she says. “If solitude is what you want, you won’t get it at a resort.”
Yet even veteran wilderness hands will admit to the appeal of a less hard-core approach. Doug Kerr, guide and instructor at the Mountaineering School in Yosemite, says some people just “want it a little more sugar-coated. I’ve slept in the snow. But as I get older, I want it a little sugar-coated too.”
That’s a sweet sound to the burgeoning cross-country resort industry, which has modeled itself after the downhill business.
“We try to be as much like a downhill ski resort as possible,” Dulaney says.
But with adult all-day passes topping out at $26 and rental package rates of $18 a day, the cushiest cross-country experience is a lot cheaper than the cheapest downhill outing.
Packaged cross-country skiing doesn’t always have valet service. To get to Yosemite’s Glacier Point, you have to ski a hardy 10-plus miles from Badger Pass, half of them uphill. Badger Pass offers 90 miles of marked trails, 25 of them groomed.
Downhill battle
Although the downhill ski industry has flattened out at around 11 million skiers per year, cross-country, with 3.5 million devotees, is growing. That includes an assist from increasing numbers of snowshoers and no doubt more than a few refugees from the lift lines of overrun downhill resorts.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Kris Karnopp (kkarnopp@tribune.com).
