New-School Ski Mountaineers: At Sugarbush, Vt. junior skimos head off piste

A three-mile section of Central Vermont’s Long Trail links Sugarbush’s Castlerock Peak and Mt. Ellen. It’s routinely traveled by backcountry skiers, and today a group of ski mountaineers are lined up to make the tour. But, instead of being kitted out with spandex and race gear, they wear mondo size 17 boots and 140-cm long skis. They are a part of Sugarbush’s Ski Mountaineers program, a development group of 15 kids ages 10 to 17 who meet each weekend to learn backcountry skills.

Six years ago, Brian “Diggity” Daigle and Rick “Rickety” Hale, who’ve collectively been coaching for more than 40 years, approached Sugarbush Resort about of getting kids out of bounds. Their idea stemmed from a program Sugarbush was already running called the Adventure Blazers, started by John Egan, a former Warren Miller athlete and head of Sugarbush’s Adventure Learning Center. In his program, kids ages seven to 17 meet every weekend to ski everything from groomed runs to gladed terrain. The Ski Mountaineers go a step further.

Under cloudy skies, we shuffle northward on the Long Trail in single file. Two twins, Michael and Peter Wade, are right on the tails of Hale’s skis. He leads with a steady pace with Daigle at the rear of the pack. After a couple stops to look into Slide Brook Basin, we arrive to our first crux, a steep, 20-foot constriction. Without much effort, Hale makes it to the top and begins coaching the kids, who, one-by-one, begin to slide backward. “Make sure your risers are up,” he reminds them. “And keep your weight over your skis while using your poles for support. You can all do this!” His encouragement is, at the same time, parent-like and coach-like.

I shuffle my way to the top, step to the side and watch as the rest of the group comes up. “I can’t do it,” says one young girl who’s fallen a couple times. “I’m going to take my skis off.” Hale coaches her back onto her skis, and the kids chime in and start giving her support. It’s slow going, but these are the moments the program was made for. “This kind of stuff really builds the group,” Daigle says. “They are all in it together and the more they work together, the better off they’ll be when they are out here.”

At most ski areas and in some schools, there are Nordic and downhill racing ski programs, but there’s little available for juniors looking to learn about the backcountry. “I think this one was the first of its kind,” Hale says. “But it does seem like people are catching on. Bromley just started a backcountry program a couple seasons ago and there was another that sprung up in Maine at the Carrabassett Valley Ski Academy.”

One reason behind the slow growth of youth backcountry ski programs is a lack of size-appropriate gear. While youth telemark gear exists, the smallest AT boot available is around size 22, and the lowest DIN setting—on the Fritschi Eagle—is four. “In the junior ski mountaineering program, most of the kids have the right gear,” Hale says. “Except the ones whose feet are too small for any AT boots, or they are too light for the lowest DIN setting available for AT bindings. Those kids just sucked it up and skin in alpine bindings.”

Even though the available gear limits who can join the program, there is a clear interest among kids to get into the backcountry. “After one of the skimo races at Mad River a few years ago,” Hale recalls, “some of the kids we coached at Sugarbush kept asking us questions about the backcountry and the gear. So Brian and I talked about it on the ski lift one day, then approached Sugarbush.”

The program is a good fit for Sugarbush with all its accessible backcountry terrain, and Egan was happy to see his program expand. “Rickety and Diggity are really the guys that put this all together,” he says. “They came to me and said they would like to take the Adventure Blazers program further and start teaching the kids real backcountry skills like skinning, building snow caves, snow safety and all that stuff. I am glad to see it’s really working and to see these kids enjoying themselves.”

And the program does a lot more than just teach the kids how to ski and be prepared for the backcountry—it enables them and their families to go off-piste together. “I’ve seen these kids grow and their families take them on hut-to-hut tours,” Egan says. “A lot of parents love the backcountry and the fact that their child can now go with them because of this program really goes a long way.”

Both Daigle and Hale also hope the skills they teach these kids stay with them to keep them safer as they grow older. “More and more people are pushing to get to backcountry terrain before anyone else,” Daigle says. “So there is a lot of potential to get hurt or worse, and I think teaching these kids at a younger age sends them in the right directions.”

By the end of the day, when Hale and Daigle decide to take everyone on one last tour into the Eden Woods, a couple of the kids sit down to put their skins back on, and one falls over in the snow and lays there. “Come on guys, look alive,” Daigle says. “There should be good snow in there and it’s less than a 30-minute skin.”

As clouds roll in and the light starts to fade, we reach the top of Eden. Silence turns to jittery chatter, as the kids know they’re about to ski good snow and head home for the night. One by one they rip off their skins, and Hale and Daigle offer a few tips on skiing powder. Then, they give the final OK, and the kids are off, screeching and laughing through the woods as if school just let out for the summer.

—

This story was first published in the February 2015 issue of Backcountry.