The Chicago Tribune has an excellent post on what a back country skiing trip is like. Definitely worth the read.

For the past six days, as we’d skied thousands of vertical feet in often untracked powder, we hadn’t seen a single motor-driven chairlift. In truth, we had more in common with cross-country skiers, but we fancied ourselves as mountaineers. Some of us even used leather boots, which looked like throwbacks to the 1950s.

When we wanted a 2,000-foot descent, we slapped on our climbing skins–known in the vernacular as “backcountry ski lifts”–adjusted our packs and trudged right up the side of the mountains. Then we skied down.