I hate crowds. It doesn’t matter if it’s Las Vegas, Disneyland or Mile High restrooms at halftime, I detest packed places.
That especially holds true on ski slopes. Jammed trails always seem to attract those who race kamikaze-like down the slopes, using the rest of us as human slalom gates. One crowded day at a local ski area, my wife and I both had a nut-job slide over the tails of our skis while we were carving turns down the slope.
To avoid experiences like that, we try to ski where others don’t. The majority of resort skiers and snowboarders stick to groomed trails, spending entire days doing nothing but carving corduroy. To get away from probably 95 percent of the hordes at any given ski area, my wife and I move to the moguls.
Moguls are bumps formed by skiers and snowboarders who pack loose snow into mounds as they carve turns down the slope. The resulting dunes of white are separated by moat-like troughs of varying depth. It doesn’t take long to turn buttercream-smooth snow slopes into bumpy masses as gnarly as whipped meringue.
The common misconception is that skiing moguls is the sole purview of younger, athletic folks with lightning reflexes and perfect knees. That would be true if we skied like Olympian Jeremy Bloom, zipper-lining straight down the fall line, legs pumping faster than pistons in a race car. That’s not how we mere mortals do them.
When my wife and I descend a bump run, we travel slower than Grandma’s Buick through a school zone. Instead of caroming down the troughs, we use the high and low points of individual bumps to control speed as we drift, carve and turn our way downward.
Reading and reacting to the terrain adds a challenge to skiing that we find lacking on the groomers. Because we’re constantly changing position, we find it less tiring than thigh burning down groomers, and slower speeds means it takes longer to reach the bottom, so we spend less time lingering in lift lines.
There are right ways and wrong ways to ski the bumps. Intermediate skiers and snowboarders who want to tackle this type of terrain should start out with a lesson, which can be arranged at nearly any Colorado ski resort. Some feature special, bump-specific clinics. Winter Park offers daylong Bump Jamborees and three-day Mogul Camps. Copper Mountain offers two-day BumpBusters Mogul Camps. For those of a certain maturity, Aspen offers three- and four-day Bumps for Boomers clinics, which conclusively prove that excessive birthdays are not a barrier to mastering moguls.
After learning the techniques, it’s time to practice. One option is to search the resort’s grooming report for intermediate trails the overnight grooming snowcats missed. Better yet, ski areas such as Winter Park, Steamboat, Breckenridge, Beaver Creek and others provide intermediate-level trails and bowls with one side groomed and the other bearing bumps.
As confidence and skill grows, it soon will be time to tackle those bumpy black-diamond trails. The only crowds found there will be in lift lines at the bottom.
Dan Leeth is a writer/ photographer whose travels have taken him around the globe; more at .
