Then there's a crack like a rifle shot. The ground shakes hundreds of yards away, and a huge wall of snow fractures. Swirling like an angry genie, tons of feathery powder roil, churn, and heat up during the downhill plunge before rumbling to a stop. What once was powder now resembles car-sized chunks of rock-hard snow dappled with tree parts.
The muffled silence of the alpine world returns. Remnants of the smoke ring continue to spin. Watching it all from a safe perch, Craig Sterbenz (''Sterby"), the ski area's snow safety director, takes a deep breath of the thin mountain air and turns to me.
''That," he says, ''is why you're not skiing there today."
. . .
In January, I enrolled in a new potpourri of powder snow offerings that roll four adventure skiing scenarios into one itinerary. The Ultimate San Juan Package combines three days at Telluride (helicopter skiing, resort skiing, and guided ''hike-to" skiing), a day of snow cat skiing in Durango, and a day of guided skiing at Silverton Mountain.
None of the components is new. Telluride Helitrax, for example, has been flying skiers to high places for 23 years. The novelty comes in the packaging, which combines comfortable lodging along a 300-mile scenic drive to connect the powder dots in five days at a price roughly 25 percent less than all of the parts would be if purchased separately.
The idea was hatched on a bicycle last June as John Humphries, 35, director of marketing for Helitrax, was halfway up a 12-mile hill en route to work.
''I was looking up at these mountains that have to be the most beautiful in the country and thinking, how can we share this place?" he recalled. ''How can we get people off the standard grid and into a place where they don't think about anything except the moment?"
Spend a few days in the San Juans and you realize he may have a point. In the southwest corner of the state, these are some of the most concentrated tall, young mountains in the Lower 48. Nothing appears weatherbeaten about these peaks.
As I also discovered, the mountains have ultimate say in the San Juan package schedule.
