Playboy's Winter Guide...to the Very Best in Skiing

Skiers, as nearly everybody suspects, are a breed apart. It is well known that snow bunnies and hot doggers alike will put up with just about anything to find that slope of perfect powder, that flash of pure crunch. But why work for your pleasure? There should be a way to improve the odds on finding the good times--a Michelin guide to skiing.

But there are as many different kinds of skiing as there are skiers. It's impossible to argue matters of taste. No mountain can guarantee a peak experience for all comers. If there were a best resort, it wouldn't last long. The slopes would soon resemble Times Square tilted on edge--great if you're into broken-field skiing but not much else. Ski maps--those eightfold paths to enlightenment--help narrow down the choices, but you have to know what you're looking for.

The editors of Playboy asked Morten Lund, author of "The Skier's Bible" and "The Skier's World" and contributing editor of Ski magazine, to come up with criteria that would allow us to make those choices. What North American mountain offers the ultimate pleasure run, combining the thrill of an Alpine descent with the breath-taking scenery of a cross-country jaunt? Where do you find the best powder? Where does someone with a death wish go to confront the void and his own freak-out quotient? Where do the "Have skis, will travel" hot doggers get it on? Where can a beginner begin? If you're the kind of person who worries about such things, where is the best place to have a ski accident? If you don't know when to stop, how do you pursue the Endless Winter? If you're more into scoring than into skiing, what is the best après-ski town and the best après-ski singles scene? May we have the envelopes, please?

The Best Downhill Run

A great ski run is made, not born. The days are long gone when kudos went to the man who cut a trail in a haphazard line down the mountain to produce what looked like the track of a worried rhino trying to find his way out of a canebrake. No applause, either, for the man who merely cuts a superhighway straight down the mountain--no matter how fine the mountain itself may be. Every great ski run has a creative thrust, a fantasy to it, a lilting, rhythmical quality that defies imitation. A trail should be like a musical score, composed with one effect in mind--joy--yet subject to differing interpretations. It should improve with each playing.

The criteria for honors in this category are simple. A candidate should combine surprise, contour, variety, challenge and charm; a trail should have enough pitch to make you ski, enough scenery to make you stop and enough quick shifts to keep you in delightful tension (or attention).

A run should use trees and terrain to vary the scope, to create a sensation of entering and leaving different zones. It has to produce that deep satisfying feeling that comes from a well-made trail cut with a skier's eye, a trail whose banks and turns coalesce in a fine swooping descent, the exact shape of the next stretch half-hidden, half-revealed, fully unraveled only at the instant of execution, sanctioned by the grace of performance demanded in necessary subtle shifts of technique.

Tops for 29 years and still champ is Ruthies Run at Aspen. In 1947, Ruth Brown, wife of the president of the Aspen Skiing Corporation, wearied of fighting the two existing Aspen trails. One, the Roch, dropped rapidly through the woods in a swath barely 20 feet wide at points, wriggling down Aspen Mountain like a snake in pain. The other, the Silver Queen, was designated as intermediate by virtue of being somewhat less torturous. It featured a 60-degree chute in the middle known as Elevator Shaft ("Sometimes you get the elevator and sometimes you get the shaft"). Mrs. Brown offered to buy $5000 worth of corporation stock in her own name if the management would cut something a bit more restful. The result was one of the first big pure-pleasure runs in the U.S., two and a half miles long, 3000 feet down.

Ruthies offers a unique terrain: The top is open, the middle runs between two huge counterslopes and some variations are real thigh shakers. Today the trail includes the original cut, sections of the old Roch and detours through newer runs such as Aztec and Kreuzeck, all connected by an old mining trail called Dago Cut Road. Ruthies has been reshaped so many times it is an archaeological wealth open to the sky--a complex juxtaposition of old and new.

Even in its transformations, Ruthies maintains the sweep and grandeur of its original conception. It can be run as an intermediate or expert descent and, with guidance, by novices. The trails represented in Ruthies could fill a medium-size ski area.

Consider: You start at the top of Ruthies and Aspen number 1A lifts on a wide white back that rolls to the left, giving a marvelous look at Sopris Peak. Coming off the steepening pitch, you swerve right into Little Corkscrew, entering the upper remnant of the old Roch. By now your skis are starting to sing. You plug into Ruthies proper at Zaug Park, sail well over the counter-slope and back again to the small steep wall that drops into the basin. There you let it all hang out. Screaming past the skiers who wait in line at the bottom of Ruthies lift and into the rapidly steepening Spring Pitch (which, like most of Ruthies, has an easy and a rugged side). Spring leads to another choice: the soft way down Strawpile or the hairy way through the chute that formed the bottom of the old Corkscrew of the Roch, a section renowned for causing ski releases in the days before release bindings, usually by the breaking off of the ski in front of the bindings. Take this or another of the steep exits out of Ruthies and you come wailing out of the trees to see the whole of Aspen move into position in front of you, to witness and applaud your final roll into town. Encore!

Honorable Mention

Two very different, remarkable trails challenge Ruthies' claim as the best downhill run. Antelope at Mad River. Vermont, is almost the last full-length example of the old-fashioned new England cut, a true swinging sensuality of an S-turn trail. They don't make 'em like they used to. It's not steep, but there are no intersections to worry about; you just let it go around the blind corners--a veritable mind restorer for two and a half miles and nearly 2000 feet of pure delightful drop. Then, for seconds, there's Rübezahl, an extraordinary seven-miler through the backwoods of Taos, New Mexico, that goes from spruce thicket to wide-open Western glades. Exquisite, as close to satori as you're likely to come in this life.

The Best Powder

There is a certain kind of skier for whom a great mountain is not enough. At best, the mountain is only a beginning, a place for snow to collect. This skier lusts for fresh, unsullied powder snow. He does not lightly suffer his skis to be slid over solid snow but seeks only the surcease of powder sizzling underfoot.

Known as a powder pig, this species is aptly named. Powder pigs would be perfectly happy rooting around all alone in 100 square miles of the stuff. As long as nobody beats him to first track, this kind of skier will gladly forgo human company, sex and drink. Unfortunately, the species has grown to such numbers, you have to give up most of that to get even a crack at first track. Where do you go to best satisfy such a craven desire

Obviously, the pluperfect powder-pig terrain must have snow, lots of it: about 400 inches per annum is the maximum offered by this or any other continent. The snow should stay dry for a suitable length of time, so that none of it goes heavy before being scored with an appropriate symphony of tracks. The whole of the Sierras, being so close to the wet Pacific, understandably does not offer good powder skiing. Either the snow is heavy when it falls--Sierra cement--or it gets heavy quickly thereafter. New snow is not necessarily powder.

Even at the best powder locales, you don't get powder every day or even every week. If you get 50 percent powder skiing, you are doing very nicely.

The terrain ought to be big and it ought to be scenic. A heavy layer of powder in the scrub forests of New Jersey, 250 feet above sea level, just isn't the same trip as a free fall through the white gold above tree line on the continental divide.

There are so many powder pigs on the loose today that even vast mountains in areas such as Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Snowmass-at-Aspen or Sun Valley get cut up completely in a day's time. Skiers spend the second day after a storm sneaking around in the trees, trying to find some unturned flakes. ("I slipped the bus boy an extra $20 at dinner last night. I figure he knows the mountain pretty well. He said that if I turned left at the lightning-struck pine. I'd hit powder.")

Powder pigging comes in two categories, the kind you need a helicopter for and the kind you do from an ordinary lift. The former is more satisfactory (fewer people, bigger terrain) and much, much more expensive.

The best of all, from helicopters, is "Gmoserland," a territory comprised of the Monoshees. Bugaboos and Cariboos in the Selkirk Range of British Columbia. This several hundred square miles of terrain is skied from whirlybirds under the aegis of Hans Gmoser's Canadian Mountain Holidays out of Banff, Alberta. A circle drawn through the locations of the three Canadian Mountain Holidays helipads circumscribes the world's largest and most professionally operated powder-pigging locale.

The maître de, Hans Gmoser, has a troop of trained guides and three big helicopters under contract all winter long. Granted, the helicopter is a noisy beast, the antithesis of the quiet necessary for the proper worship of pure powder. Nevertheless, once the snapping, crackling bird has flown, you are left alone on the top of serenity--valleys, bowls, dales, ridges--as far as your eye can see. Only a handful of skiers, and all that un-tracked powder.

Streaming your way down through it, beating up great wings of snow like some gleaming bird with a special secret of flight, sailing in this billowing, yielding wash of white will almost make you forget that it's costing you $100 a day, including air fare.

The number-one site for powder pigging from a lift has to be Snowbird, the first resort designed specifically to take advantage of powder, its attractions and its challenge. Set in the high end of Little Cottonwood Canyon outside Salt Lake City, Snowbird and its environs get more powder (at least 50 percent more than Colorado, on the average) than any powder-pig pasture in the world, period. This alone would justify the existence of Snowbird. But Dick Bass, owner and chief honcho, has added a superlative tram lift and a set of very comfortable high-rise condominiums and hotels that blend very nicely with the tall surroundings. The scenics are only a little less spectacular than at Gmoserland; the ride up is quieter and less hairy. Bass (President Ford's skiing friend who rented him his house at Vail, remember?) was so fascinated by the powder scene that he forgot to do very much for the ordinary skier, the bread and butter of any ski resort. His attempt to correct his oversight with some good old solid intermediate, packed-down terrain has been stymied by the ecologists at the moment. To tide him over, he is negotiating for support from another skier, the shah of Iran; it is understood, of course, that the deal does not give the shah the right to first track.

Snowbird is big. After the powder on the slopes of Peruvian Gulch and Gad Valley is skied off, the steep terrain off Gad Two chair will still have plenty of fresh stuff in among the great Wasatch evergreens. Tooling down through a steep cleft in the pines off Gad Two, exceedingly rapturous screamlike sounds are allowed.

Honorable Mention

The runner-up for this category is Snowbird's staid older sister, a mile down the road in Little Cottonwood: Alta. The lodges there are simple, the powder as deep and the runs, although shorter, do have their own special charm. If you're still hungry for powder, consider a run down the famous Sun Valley bowls in Idaho stretching down from the ridge of Baldy, each of which contains a generous brimful of the white stuff after a good storm.

The most Gloriously frightening run

The expert skier finds no terrain difficult, in and of itself, simply because it is steep. What makes a terrain difficult is the trail cutting, which can add artificial difficulties; i.e., sadomasochistic masterpieces, guaranteed horror shows. A truly scary run has an aspect so chilling it reaches down past the rational defenses of the mind and into the pit of the stomach to distort even a superlative technique.

Two factors contribute to this kind of trail. The first is "exposure"--the plain visible drop out there between your ski tips that goes way, way down (sometimes described as looking through a gun sight at frozen hell). The second factor is malice--the obstacles created in trail cutting. Old-fashioned peril, in other words.

The winner of the exposure category is that old fearsome favorite, Tuckerman's Headwall in New Hampshire.

High on the side of Mount Washington is a huge scooped-out section known technically as a cirque. This is Tuckerman's Ravine, a bowl that could easily hold a couple of hundred thousand amphitheater seats. Tuckerman's draws a walk-up crowd of 300 to 500 skiers a weekend during the spring when the snow has stabilized enough to keep avalanches at bay. (The sides of its wall are so steep that the snow cascades off it all winter.) The Tuckerman truckers are there to watch or participate in the test of skiing the Headwall, the highest and steepest section. Getting there is half the trial. You start out at the floor of the ravine and climb a half-mile of wall that gets progressively steeper. At the top, you can reach out and touch the wall without bending over as you kick hole after hole in the snow for your boots, making sure that your toe is snugly in one hole before you start to kick out the next. Look how your heel hangs out over space. On second thought, don't.

Now you are at the top. Turn around. The descent goes over a blind roll hitting 80 degrees of steepness, before sloping back (rather quickly) to 60. Consider that in a ski resort, anything over 22 degrees is classed expert, and then consider yourself making a tentative turn on the lip of the wall as it falls away beneath your skis, revealing a 1000-foot vertical drop almost straight to the bottom, where the watchers are stationed like waiting ants. Ready? Don't worry. Sky divers reach a terminal velocity of only about 150 mph in free fall. You won't even come close.

The second category, freaking out because of the trail's malice: When a skier takes steepness for granted, there is only one parameter that bothers him or her, and that is narrowness. On a wide slope, the good skier can kill off his speed; he will jet across the hill briefly in a supple avalement sitback, gaining momentum and a chance to start the coming turn braking smoothly. On a trail too narrow for a jet turn, he has to bite the bullet and go.

The winner in this category is the old and nasty Fall Line at Mad River, Vermont.

Fall Line is not long--about half to three quarters of a mile (nobody has ever really measured it)--but, since you can lose it completely in a few feet, the length of the trail is not a criterion here. There are steeper trails and narrower ones, but Mad River has the dubious glory of boasting the only one with quite such a combination of come-on and crunch.

Fall Line is extremely narrow, about 20 feet, twisting all the way down, running uncompromisingly over embankments, through dips, with cunning switchback turns and then--oops!--no turn where you thought there was going to be one. You can't outguess it. Dixi Nohl, head of the ski school at Mad River, says, "You have to turn where the trail does; it skis you rather than you skiing it. In the turns, it not only cuts sharply but falls away as it does, plus giving you a couple of bumps and maybe a tree or two in the middle. You don't have a chance to stop and think for even a fraction of a second."

The trail was cut back in the days when Roland Palmedo, the founder of Mad River, was trying to get away from the decadence that was setting in at Stowe, where trails were being widened to 25 feet, and so on. "The Fall Line was cut to have a glade character," Roland once said, "with large trees that have to be circumvented by alternate routes." (You hit the tree, dummy.)

Next, you encounter what Palmedo calls "a fine exercise in picking a line and in precise turning." In other words, a very narrow section with evergreen branches brushing both elbows simultaneously and a scurrilous succession of pitches and rolls around corners. Then you cut slantwise across a 30-degree slope of the Creamery. Finally, you see daylight out on Squirrel Trail. The prospect of returning to the real world gives you just enough strength to eke by a gauntlet of cleverly placed trees--a last-minute test of your reflexes.

You made it.

The best way to die with your skis on

If this is really your wish--and why not?--it's hang gliding two to one.

This is a somewhat sinister spin-off of the sport, in that it has less to do with skiing than with sublimating your megalomania. Nevertheless, it fills the criteria of an ideal mode of ski dying in that it guarantees you a fighting chance to survive any given season, yet gives you a reasonably good chance to exercise your suicidal tendencies successfully in the course of, say, three of four seasons.

With due respect to hang gliders, however, the sport is based on the somewhat retarded conception that, given a wing of sufficient breadth and length, a skier can quite easily get up enough speed on the straightaway to cause the wing to lift him into the air. It's almost idiotic in its simplicity, in other words. And it's unbelievable in its immediate result: Instead of traveling sanely through the snow, where man belongs, the skier is lifted into a universe where he is barely fit to compete with the clumsiest turkey buzzard or gooney bird.

The best hot-dogging terrain

And now let us shift from the skiers who are actually trying to kill themselves to those who only look like they are trying to do themselves in. The exhibitionists. The daredevils. The hang-loose hot doggers. Hot dogging has gone from a kind of wild-eyed mogul-smashing sort of skiing to a quite structured three-event sport playing to capacity crowds across the country. Therefore, the best hot-dogging (continued on page 248) Skiing Guide(continued from page 110) terrain has to have three different kinds of ski slopes within a reasonable distance of one another. First, it calls for a highly visible mogul slope (full of bumps, that is), served by a reasonably short lift, so the mogul bashers can go up and down, up and down, doing their thing with frequent rests between demonstrations to the captive audience on the lift. Second, you need a good smooth hill, without moguls, for the graceful figure-skating, or ballet, aspect of hot dogging--the turns with one ski lifted, skis crossed, complete 360-degree turns, etc. Of course, it should be highly visible from a lift. (What is a hot dog without an audience? Like one hand clapping.) Finally, for the aerial acrobatics that cap the art of hot dogging, there ought to be some natural drops and rolls that can be used for take-offs into the wild blue yonder. (It's called getting air and what the hot dog wants is to get more air so he can perform even more stupendous, death-eliciting flips.)

Number-one hot-dog terrain by these criteria lies above Midvail off the number-one gondola at Vail, Colorado. Here the spectacular bumps of "Look, Ma" erupt right under the number-three chair and the long easy slopes of Upper Swingsville slide under the top of chair number four. A skier coming down into either Zot or Ramshorn can be seen by everybody on the slopes or behind the restaurant windows at Midvail--if they're looking, and they usually are. Between Zot and Ramshorn, the spectacular Vail Cliffs have prompted a lot of good aerialists (and a lot of not-so-good ones) to shoot into space and split or spin. Ironically, Vail has banned formal hot-dog meets as incompatible with its Presidential image; the ski patrol will clamp down on any hot dogging that's too obvious. (Zen koan number two: If hot dogging isn't obvious, can it still be called hot dogging?)

Today, most ski schools worth their snow have beginners' hot-dog classes. Give it a try. The first time you make a complete 360 turn, swiveling like a dervish, you'll feel like Gene Kelly on skis. From there, it's only a short drop to a helicopter turn off the nearest cliff.

The Best Bunny Slope

In the bad old days, a beginners' hill was more of a hazing site than a teaching ground. The original beginners' hill at Mad River, for instance, is now the slalom practice hill. But an ideal beginners' hill is an inclined plane, white and wide and as flat from side to side as a lawn (except for a gentle swell of contour now and then to please the eye). The slope has to be perfectly maintained, machined every day to a consistency not too hard and not too soft. Snow-making guns should be available to add the necessary ingredient when the weather fails to cooperate. The hill should be segregated from the traffic of more expert terrain to keep the hot dogs away, yet it should be within skiing distance of larger hills, so that it's not an isolation ward.

The ideal hill should not be so crowded that there is an embarrassment of collisions. It should not be too deserted--misery likes company. It is heartening to see others making sitz stripes and bathtubs in the snow. The hill should not be too long or it will tire tender legs and cause falls. Not too steep, of course. About a five- or ten-degree tilt, reasonably steady, so that the beginner can really get a taste for the effect of gravity. The top of the slope should be closed off from the main mountain, so that it seems like its own world rather than an infinitesimal part of the total slope. It needs chair lifts, plenty of them, and the chairs should move slowly (about half the risk on a ski slope lies in getting on and off the lift). The number of lifts, the shortness of the lift lines and the amount of ski time a beginner can put in are what make a beginner molt his ugly style and become a beautiful intermediate.

The hands-down winner: Snowshed, the beginners' slope at Killington, Vermont. Snowshed has the steady grade, the complete enclosure, the meticulous machining, the proper length (about a quarter of a mile), plus three slow chair lifts on one small hill. Success is Snowshed's accolade. Killington makes more money on these three lifts than on the others--a couple of dozen more--combined. Snowshed has also been the backbone of the Killington Ski School, which is the most successful in the nation.

Snowshed is carefully primped every morning before a skier sets eyes on it. Not only do snow-making guns cover the skiing surface to eliminate the unsightly ice spots (for which Eastern skiing is justly famous) but should a single tuft of brown grass show through, it is gunned under hastily before it can emit bad vibes. Then the snow-grooming machines swirl about like fussy housekeepers, tidying up here and there. When the first dewy-eyed snow bunny arrives, clutching skis to breast, Snowshed is a picture-postcard incline of creamy-smooth whiteness. Tedium to us champs, but heaven to a novice standing trembling like a newborn fawn.

Honorable Mention

Runners-up to the beginners'-hill title: Mole Hill at Northstar, Lake Tahoe, California. Here they don't groom their slopes, they microplane them. If they see one little bump, pop! It's gone. Next best: the beginners' slope at Sugarloaf, Maine. This is its own world, serene, slow and steadily dropping right down to the Sugarloaf Inn at the base, where there's always a hot toddy for a cold bottom.

The Bone-Breakingest Slope

This is a sort of ambiguous category, with a double meaning, at least: First, where are you likely to have a bad accident? Second, if you do have one, what resort has the most competent and speedy help waiting to succor you?

The average bad accident is a spiral leg break; most other baddies are freaks. But a spiral leg break can happen to almost anyone, any time, and it's as much fun as recovering from the plague. Where an ordinary break may heal in three months, a good spiral can take nine.

The leg-break potential of any particular location depends on the following factors: the number of beginner and intermediate skiers per square yard during an average minute of the day; the number of trails funneling into the same general vicinity and the flatness of the slope. The flatter it is, the harder you hit the ground and the more likely it is that a ski tip will stick in and stay there as your body does a couple of revolutions, thereby ensuring a good spiral fracture.

The acme of agony is at Midvail, on Vail Mountain, nearly the same location as the great hot-dog terrain. (And you thought it would be some exotic steep chute in the Rockies!) At Midvail, the necessary factors conspire to produce a statistical giant among high-risk locales. If all the tibias sundered there were left lying around, the mountain would resemble an elephants' graveyard or a mixing bowl of broken bones.

This is not to say that the over-all statistics are worse at Vail than at any other resort. Far from it. Vail's accident rate is low. It's just that the resort happens to have a single high-impact area, so to speak. Fortunately, it happens that you will probably get the best postaccident care at Vail. The Vail patrol is rigorously trained--not only in strapping you down onto the toboggan for the ride to the big cast party at the bottom but also in resuscitative techniques to combat coronary failure. (Now that older skiers are going longer and stronger, thanks to modern equipment--five-foot skis--and intensive trail grooming, a coronary is often a concomitant of a bone crunch.) And then there is Vail's new and complete clinic right there at the bottom, staffed by some of the best bone specialists in the country. (Doctors are no fools, and doctors who ski are even less so.)

Honorable Mention

Runners-up for speedy assistance are Aspen and Sun Valley, which also have hospital facilities handy. Most other resorts have facilities farther away, necessitating a longer ride. To those who think that a broken leg doesn't hurt, a resort doctor says, "Are you kidding? It hurts like hell!" He, for one, always carries painkiller pills whenever he skis. The ski patrol is not allowed to dispense painkiller. Ergo, the nearer the facilities, the better.

The Best Spring Skiing

Come late winter and your connection with the snow god becomes unreliable, the flakes begin to falter. And just as you were getting good! What's needed is a good spring maintenance program, a place with an ambience that is strictly highseason, full of bustle and vitality--not the dragged-out feeling many mountains get in spring. The weather should be cool but not unpleasant, the sun ubiquitous (your tan should bear comparison with any Caribbean-earned variety), the snow gossamer (starting out from under the skis like clouds), and there should be a central place where you will be sure to meet those other hard-core skiers whose ears are deaf to calls such as "Surf's up!" and "Tennis, anyone?" Surf who? Tennis what?

Surprise: The Sierras, not the Rockies, win this one. Down at the bottom of the range, just north of several other natural wonders, such as the Mojave Desert, the Highest Point in the Contiguous States (Mount Whitney), the Lowest in the Western Hemisphere (Death Valley) and the Oldest Living Trees (bristlecone pine), is Mammoth, no less of an outré phenomenon, an 11,000-foot saddle peak standing all by itself, just hip deep in snow, all the way down its 2300 feet of vertical, until early July.

While Mammoth's great white ridge fills the sky, the road will be filled with cars spinning the dust of the Mojave off their hubcaps. The burnished wood of the great glass Bauhausian Mammoth Inn will be sounding with the boots of instructors and patrolmen arriving from all over the country, their bosoms filled with elation at having escaped that last snow bunny back in Aspen, Alta or Sun Valley. Now, by God, they are going to ski.

You'll see half the hard-core skiers from the Rockies by the time you have made it to the breakfast table; you'll catch the rest on lifts one through ten or on the gondola that overlooks an ocean of white set at 25 degrees to the sky. If you haven't met a friend by then, you will have a last chance out at Warm Springs, where you paddle around in a stream, alternately caressed by hot and cold running water.

If you are an Eastern skier, all this may make you want to break down and cry a little. But, as they say, if God had intended New Englanders to ski, He would have given them a winter or placed Plymouth Rock in Boulder, Colorado.

The Best Summer Skiing

We have to cheat in this category. Since our summer is really winter in the Southern Hemisphere, our choice of Portillo, Chile, may not be strictly kosher. But if you want to spend the Fourth of July knee-deep in snow, there's just no comparison. Walking through J.F.K. Airport with a pair of skis over your shoulder in the middle of a New York heat wave may seem like an act against nature, but you can live with it, especially if you have company. First, catch the Braniff flight to Santiago. It's called the Ski Plane, an airborne brother to the former fabled Vermont ski train. If you've ever ridden the rails from Manhattan to Stowe with a crowd of gregarious, snow-crazed skiers, you'll know what to expect from the Braniff flight. Everyone on board may be glued to a copy of Piers Paul Read's Alive (the story of the rugby team that survived a crash in the Andes by feeding on the flesh of their frozen companions).

From Santiago, it's only a two-hour drive to Portillo, situated in a glacier-carved saddle about halfway up the Andes, in the shadow of Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere. You pull into the parking lot of the Gran Hotel Portillo, a yellow structure that reminds you of a college dormitory. Once you're inside, the image is dispelled. For one thing, there are no posters of Ché Guevara. (Chile has a right-wing military dictatorship, remember?) For another, you'll get the kind of service you read about. Chileans are simpatico, which means they smile benignly while you struggle with your high school Spanish. Next, stash your bags, buckle your boots and hit the slopes. The mountain has some easy terrain on which to warm up, as well as two of the most famous chutes in the world--Roca Jack and Garganta. They are steep but wide-open--if you lose it, you can always pull out and traverse into Argentina. There is so much snow that the ski patrol often closes the steep parts for fear of avalanche. Everyone then skis the beginners' hill: When there hasn't been snow for a while, a mogul field forms on the upper slopes of the plateau, but don't worry. Everyone in Portillo skis on long skis. The moguls are long, gentle swells, not the maniacal land mines carved by the short, hot skis. (Short Skis Suck, Long Skis Truck--a bumper sticker seen at Sun Valley.) It's just like the good old days.

Chances are you can go through life and never see such good skiing as at Portillo. It takes some seriousness of purpose to drop $1000 for air fare and two weeks' lodging. Most of the skiers who show up are pretty damn good, or they get that way after a few lessons from the excellent ski school. Also, in August, the hotel plays host to several international ski teams. Imagine yourself on the set of Downhill Racer and you'll get an idea of what it's like. The guys look like Robert Redford and the girls will stop your heart.

The Best Apres-Ski Life

The quintessential après-ski life is cosmopolitan; you have to have a broad spectrum of dining, dancing, shopping, café sitting, a soupcon of cabaret entertainment, some hard and soft rock and, most of all, a varied and alert hometown crew in residence, able and willing to serve not only as instructors and shop owners and dancing partners but also as interpreters of the local mores. If there's a Wednesday-night skinny-dip, you want to know about it, right?

By these standards, there are probably five great après-ski towns in the world. The bad news: Only one of the five is in the U. S. The good news: It is the best.

Meet Aspen, Colorado: girls, guys, gaiety, glamor, art, even a few resident intellectuals, bars funky and bars Victorian. The home population of Aspen is around 10,000, placing it in a class with St. Moritz, Kitzbühel, Garmisch and Chamonix. What Aspen lacks in cuisine and service it makes up in vitality and complexity; its several layers of population include artists, singers, potters, millionaires (two dozen or so), educators, film makers, girls who can outski you, guys who can outski anyone. In all, a thoroughgoing, sophisticated, self-sustaining culture, the Big Apple of skiing.

The Best Apres-Ski Scoring

If you are more interested in scoring than in skiing, if you possess a certain lack of choosiness and a slavish insistence on coupling as de rigueur for a successful skiing experience, then the Valley of the Inns, Vermont, gets the brass ring. This is not the close and cozy world of Sun Valley or the snow-paved streets of Vail but a more extensive strip site, lying at roadside near Mount Snow, Bromley, Stratton, Magic, Okemo, Haystack and Carinthia. Among these seven resorts, cheek to cheek on neighboring mountainsides, lies a concentration of hostelries and bistros not exceeded elsewhere in the world for the number of singles seeking a roll in the quilt. This territory is the equivalent of the swinging bars of New York's Upper East Side, even though the draw is also from Bridgeport, Hartford, Springfield and Albany. All that is needed is a scintilla of charisma or maybe just a good tight set of jeans; it's a schuss all the way.