Backcountry Dinosaurs
Art: Jack Unruh
In the early 1970s, a rag-tag troop of young hippies, draft dodgers and college drop-outs stumbled into the faded mining town of Park City. Traveling from different corners of North America to the unknown high mountain landscape of Utah, new arrivals came for the same reason I did: to ski the lightest, fluffiest snow in the Rocky Mountains. We worked at night, skied six days a week and took one day off to do laundry. My first winter here, I made friends with a small band of characters who dared to do things a little differently.
One snowy January evening, I gave a party in my old miner’s cabin at the base of the Park City Ski Area. A storm raged outside as the fire from a wood burning cook-stove warmed my home. A subtle knock at the kitchen door interrupted the gaiety. Standing outside in the frigid dark, holding a pair of cross-country skis, was my friend Jim Miller, the first owner of White Pine Touring. After casually dusting himself off, he opened his pack and presented me with a bottle of perfectly chilled white wine. Rather than walk or drive that night, he had skied in blinding snow from his home in White Pine Canyon to mine.
Exploring the outer reaches of Park City, as opposed to the designated ski area runs, was half the adventure of living in the mountains.
Longtime Park City resident George Cote remembers honing his backcountry skills and skiing the original, undeveloped runs at Deer Valley in the 1970s. “My first time three-pinning, we hiked up Deer Valley to the Daly Bowls,” he says. “We had just heard about the telemark turn, that it was a more stable turn, so we tried to learn it.”
Cote was one of a handful of daring individuals who early on ventured away from the groomed runs of Park City and Park West, (now The Canyons), toward the uncharted terrain of the backcountry. Some had tested alpine skis, skinned up and mounted with a detachable heel binding, to reach the outer boundaries of the ski areas. But few had tried conquering the steep and deep by turning telemark-style on traditional cross-country equipment.
In fact, it was on one of his earliest alpine excursions to Jupiter Bowl at Park City Ski Area, long before the lift was built, when Cote saw someone on pins for the first time. Hiking out to the West Face on his alpine skis, he saw John Hale and Kenny Soares drifting through the powder, linking elegant telemark turns. “I had never considered the possibility of skiing that kind of terrain on pins before then,” he says in amazement.
It wasn’t long before backcountry skiing caught on with a small group of adventurous athletes. A friend from New England brought a few pairs of wooden skis from northern Maine to the pioneering telemarkers. The skis were only two inches wide and over 210 centimeters long. Cote and his friends practiced skiing the mine dumps off Guardsman Pass and soon were taking quick, short runs in the glades at Park West. Eventually, they skied even higher reaches on their new wooden telemark skis.
“The back of the West is where I had all my good touring,” says Cote.
“As we built up our skills, we hit sections of Driveway, Easy Street and 94 Turns. We skied Square Top on those wooden skis. I still have them,” he adds. “No wonder it took us so long to learn.
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