Last winter Europe was basking in its best snow season since social networks began. My friends' timelines were abuzz with updates and images chronicling the ridiculous amount of snow falling in the Alps. All of which would have been fine if I wasn't heading to the usually snowsure state of Colorado for 10 days, where it was having its "worst" winter for a decade.
It hadn't snowed for two weeks and nothing was forecast for the duration of my stay. Landing under a starry sky in Durango – after a short internal hop from Denver – my planned powder quest was looking like a non-starter. I resolved to keep Wi-Fi off until my return home. Yet, even though not a flake fell, two mornings later I was carving turns in soft, untracked snow under a blazing sun and blue sky without a soul in sight.
The San Juan mountains are a rugged range in the Rockies of south-western Colorado. Its resorts, unlike those that cluster around Denver, boast uncluttered slopes, minimal lift queues and far fewer British visitors. The region is famous for having the highest concentration of fourteeners (14,000ft peaks) in North America. It's popular with skiers and snowboarders seeking fresh snow and many of them are prepared to forgo the ski lifts and hike, ski tour or splitboard to access the finest untouched powder.
Along Route 550, the road between Durango and Silverton, local powder-hounds pick the lines they fancy riding as they drive along the interstate, and their parked cars cluster around favourite starting points. The former 19th-century mining hub of Durango, still atmospherically soundtracked by a steam locomotive (now operated just for tourists to Silverton and back), is a friendly, outdoorsy town, which champions local produce, brews its own beer and boasts canyon vistas straight out of a western. In fact, many westerns have been filmed here and the Rochester Hotel (rochesterhotel.com) in town pays tribute to them with themed rooms and marquee light-framed posters in the hallways.
I spent my first day at nearby Durango Mountain Resort. It's a fun venue with striking views and though it wasn't particularly taxing terrain, it was a good place to get my legs back and my lungs used to the altitude – the town sits at 1,988m, with the resort summit at 3,299m.
To reach the best snow, I hired a guide – Josh from Kling Mountain Guides – who took me to a hire shop to pick up a splitboard for me to try, so we could hike to the powder stashes along the highway.
"So where are we off to," I asked. Josh pointed to a map of frequent avalanche paths in the region. "Oh right," I said, "So we'll avoid them?"
"No," he said. "That's where we'll find the best snow."
Our target was McMillan Peak, a relatively straightforward climb with a rise of 550m from the car, at 3,352m, to the peak, at 3,902m. I was surprised to go from feeling like a waddling duck to a cross-country skier in a relatively short time as we nestled our fat "skis" into some ski touring tracks, which gently took us through a pine forest, past a couple of old mining huts, and then up steeper sections where I experienced the cool Spiderman-stick of my skins.
At the summit a 360-degree panorama of snow-capped peaks spread before us, and while I caught my breath and took on some carbs, Josh pointed out gnarly couloirs he skied with friends on his days off. Our own descent was sublime. The snow might have been old but it was deep and dry in a way you rarely experience in Europe, though I struggled a little with the extra weight of the splitboard. By mid-afternoon, following a couple of short hikes, I wanted nothing more than to lie like a starfish in the snow and kip.
The next day I let a snowcat do the uphill work for me. San Juan Snowcat Skiing operates off the back of Durango Mountain Resort, and claims to be the largest snowcat operation in Colorado, with a 60-square-mile playground at its disposal.
I joined a group of eight to tackle a wind-shaped moonscape called Graysill Mountain. We accessed its 3,505m summit by taking chair one at Durango, followed by a smooth seven-mile drive in a van with snow-tyres and then a two-mile snowcat trip to the top. We managed 10 drops throughout the day, with slight tweaks on that original route, sometimes carving through crusty snow, sometimes flying through nose-deep powder, straight-lining between the trees, and looking out for the occasional comedy wipeout. They call such falls a "yard sale" over here, which made sense once I'd watched a guy painstakingly retrieve two skis, a pair of goggles and a helmet camera dotted around the landscape slope above him. While you'd definitely have needed some off-piste experience for Durango, especially for the deeper sections, the terrain was rarely intimidatingly steep.
My next stop, Silverton Mountain, is an hour's drive down the highway; so you need a hire car out here. It's an expert-only resort, where all runs are at least 35 degrees (30 degrees is considered steep in most ski resorts), are un-groomed, and start with a hike from a solitary two-man chair up to 3,700m, which has no safety bar, and swings like a pendulum in the wind, up to 3,700m. In February, the avalanche risk is so high only skiers with a guide are allowed on the mountain. For the rest of the season you can go it alone, but I joined a guided group anyway, hired an avalanche transceiver, probe and shovel, and signed a waiver reminding me: "You could die here today."
Silverton Mountain was created by husband-and-wife team, Jen and Aaron Brill, in 2002. The pair actually bought the land and the lift themselves, , inspired by the community-owned club ski fields they'd seen in New Zealand, taking advantage of its perma-sunken price – the last mine having closed in the region in 1991 – and the fact that no one was able to build on it as it was on an avalanche path.
It normally snows 10 metres a year in Silverton, and yet it rarely attracts more than 80 skiers or snowboarders a day, so the chances of untracked powder are high. The lack of nearby airports or feasible sites to build one means this is unlikely to change. The resort is only open Thursday to Sunday and from the bravado-heavy chat that takes place in the beer tent/ticket office it's clearly trading well on its "extreme" tag. Professional snowboarder Shaun White had his own secret halfpipe built nearby to train for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, lending more kudos to the area.
Though I would have rather have tackled its bowls and chutes with fresher snow and fresher legs, Silverton still had some great snow stashes and is without doubt one of the most hardcore places I've ever snowboarded. After a fantastic day, we drove back from the lift station to the one-horse town of Silverton, and the Teller House Hotel, which was built in 1896, and still oozes Gilded-Age charm, with its lace curtains, wood panelling and portraits. Walking down Main Street among the brightly coloured shopfronts, swinging saloon doors and clockhouse, the town's gold and silver mining history felt like it happened just days ago.
From Silverton a two-hour drive of dramatic bends, sheer drops, frozen waterfalls and a high mountain pass brought us to American celeb's favourite, Telluride. Here we found fantastic hike-to inbounds terrain, many reached in 1½ hour's walk from a lift. Palmyra Peak, at just over 4,000m, and one and half hour's hike from the lift, was the standout, if your knocking knees can get past the super steep couloir at the start.
Another two hours on from Telluride is Monarch; a very different resort. Small, low-key and affordable, it has a retro, family feel, and one of the oldest ski runs in Colorado – the Gunbarrel which opened in 1939. The tight tree skiing, natural hits and drops, and minimal queues, even on a powder day made for a fun stay. There are also 130 acres of steep, expert-only backcountry terrain in the Mirkwood Basin, which you can either hike to or reach on a snowcat.
Hotels can be found nearer the resort but we stayed in the old railway town of Salida, a 20-minute drive away, and enjoyed the red-brick buildings, thrift shops and real ale-touting gastro bars downtown. From there we completed our loop with a three-and-a-half-hour drive to Denver, where, of course, fat flakes of snow were just starting to fall.
• Visit Colorado (colorado.com) provided accommodation at the Rochester Hotel (rochesterhotel.com) and Teller House Hotel (tellerhouse.com), guiding through Kling Mountain Guides (klingmountainguides.com), San Juan Snowcat Skiing (sanjuanski.com) and Silverton Mountain (silvertonmountain.com), and a return flight with British Airways from Heathrow to Denver (ba.com), and United Airlines from Denver to Durango (united.com). Car hire is available through Hertz (hertz.co.uk)
Sam Haddad is the editor of Cooler, a snowboard magazine for young women, coolermag.com
