What an absurd concept - skiing in summer. The idea was foreign to me until I finally had the good sense to get a backcountry setup together and take an avalanche safety class, but I’ve found that northwest Montana has plenty of ski runs to offer well into the hot months.

On multiple occasions, I’ve found myself at the top of a beautiful peak with a healthy snow pack below me and more than once my ski buddy, Darren Johnson, and I have said something like, “This is what it’s all about,” before disappearing into steep, open bowls of snow.

Backcountry skiing starts with equipment. Some of it is for safety and some to help the ambitious skier access the high, snowy terrain.

Safety

We’ll start with safety, as anyone interested in venturing outside the protected boundaries of a controlled ski resort should. There are three necessary pieces of equipment - an avalanche transceiver (beacon), a probe and a shovel.

Don’t ski alone, or these items won’t prove very useful. From the time you put yourself into backcountry terrain until the end of the day, skiers should keep each other in view and ski the slopes one at a time.

In the event your ski buddy is buried in an avalanche, his or her transceiver puts out a signal. The other skier or skiers switch their transceivers to “search mode” and try to safely zero-in within 20 meters or so of the skier under snow so the transceiver detects the buried skier’s signal.

When the search is narrowed to the closest distance, the probe, a long metal pointed device which quickly snaps together, is used to poke into the snow and feel out the buried skier.

Then the shovel can be used to unbury the fallen comrade.

Such a horrifying ordeal is a matter of efficiency and good search technique can be the difference between life and death.

Careful observation of the snow, weather, terrain and backcountry avalanche reports by local organizations are the best tools for skiers who wish to avoid a search.

And knowing when to call it a day is crucial - everyone on the mountain has to be safe and on the same page.

Johnson and I have been fortunate enough to avoid any catastrophes so far.

Equipment

Accessing the slopes we want to ski requires a good deal of hiking. We use alpine touring setups to do the deed where snow covers the ground.

A touring setup consists of a binding that takes all downhill boots like most people use to ski in resorts or touring boots, but allows you to free your heel and hike on your skis and then re-secure it for skiing. Skins are what really make the process efficient. One end of a ski skin is attached by a sticky, lasting glue to the bottom of a ski and the other grips the snow with an angled, plush fabric allowing the skier to hike up steep slopes when touring and slide forward on downhill slopes to save energy. They can be quickly attached or removed from skis as necessary throughout a day of touring.

Touring boots, which Johnson and I both have, are lighter versions of downhill boots which makes the journey easier - they are not required, but a big advantage if you have them. Generally, a skier loses a little stability with touring gear, but it makes backcountry travel a dream.

Tele-skiers are just skins away from a light-weight hike. Packing your skis on a backpack and booting it is also an option.

Snowboard touring setups called splitboards are available and can also be fit with skins. In summer, even those of us with touring setups are often in for a little boot packing where the summer sun has left holes in the snowy trails.

If you are traveling by foot, snow shoes are a good way to go, especially in deep, loose snow.

It took me awhile to get the right gear - lots of Internet Craig’s List bargain shopping - but when I finally did it made for one wild early summer.

Here is an account of a couple voyages Johnson and I have taken in the last few weeks:

Two Medicine Lake, East Glacier National Park

Unguided, and on our own, finding the steep snow sheets you can see from the road toward Two Medicine Lake from East Glacier is no gimme.

But outside of the car on a random turnoff a couple miles before the lake, we geared up next to a creek we thought might lead us up the mouth of the snowy basin we were trying to hit.

Grizzly bears were a worry. I had seen nine black bears in the previous week and we didn’t have any bear spray. But since skis sometimes take a guy into dense foliage at high speeds, it was nice not to worry about puncturing one of the mutant-mace canisters to release all over ourselves.

We had followed the creek bed for a while when Johnson, the superior navigator (not a hard prize to win over Sir Lost-A-Lot over here), decided to cut right. It took us through some bushes, trees, fallen logs and anything else that could slow us down - or pop open a can of bear spray. But in not long, we were in a clearing where the snow laid thick next to a rock slide and up toward the general area we were aiming for.

A steep skin up through a bowl littered with trees and we were found ourselves overlooking Two Medicine Lake and the beautiful spires of the East Glacier mountains.

After quite a bit of figuring out where we wanted to be, some boot packing on the real steep stuff, we headed up on a flat rockslide ledge. Next to us was a herd of bighorn sheep. We were able to ski most of the way back to the car and I am happy to say - did not run into any grizzly bears.

Cold Lakes, Mission Mountain Wilderness

Since I moved to Polson, I have dreamed of skiing in the Missions. Those jagged peaks begged me to do it all winter, but it wasn’t until the last day of May when I finally took the skis into the mysterious wilderness. Johnson had been studying maps. A forest firefighter in the Swans, he had herd of several roads that lead deep into the Missions from the east side.

On a Sunday morning, we took off from Bigfork, map outstretched across the dash of his truck with just little brown lines to follow - hopefully to snow.

After a couple of paths further south didn’t pan out, we backtracked to the one called “Cold Lake Road” - there’s lots of backtracking in backcountry skiing, I’ve found - which inserted us at the base of dense forest where a snowy path left from the trailhead. Although the path only slightly resembled a trail, patchy and vaguely distinguishable against the greater wilderness, another car was parked there and footsteps made their way into the foliage.

We went for it. The stubborn snow stopped following the footsteps that possibly marked the trail, but stayed on course with a creek. So we followed the blown out tributary, figuring it went to the lakes. It did, but it took its time. We followed the snow, which switched back and forth every few feet around trees and occasionally across the creek. It was tedious.

Eventually, we found the trail again, followed the footsteps and ended up at the Cold Lakes. What we didn’t know, and were about to find out, was we actually found the further of the two first lakes. We could see the snow fields on the opposite side and plotted our route. We would wrap back around the side closest to the trailhead “between” the “two” frozen bodies of water and head up the steep terrain on the other side.

When we tried to skin between the two lakes, we discovered they were in fact, connected - by one frigid, thigh-deep, 20-foot-wide stream. It was to be a long skin around the smaller lake or a wade. We looked at each other.

A few minutes later, there we were, perched in unbelievable pain, boots off, shorts rolled up, and skis on our shoulders, on the first log we could escape to mid-creek.

There was a lot of screaming in the Missions that day. We sucked it up and made it across and vowed to never, ever, do that again.

We made it to the top and the view was something to behold. We skied a big zigzag on fairly hard-packed snow along the cliffed-out ledges above the lake until we found ourselves near the “Miserable” creek crossing once again. On the way back we stayed to right of the lakes, and skied some snow and a lot of logs, rocks, trees and bushes - what Johnson referred to as combat skiing - almost all the way back to the car.

Backcountry skiing requires a lot of work and comes with a little pain, but for the adventuresome, it opens up a whole new world of scenery and excitement.