i know it is illegal to duck a rope to exit the boundary of a ski area, except for at a designated exit gate. is it illegal if you go out a legitimate exit gate, and then duck a rope to come back into the ski area. any info regarding this is pretty hard to find on the internet.
backcountry gates are set by the national forest, not the ski patrol. Therefore policies are different in each county. Technically you must reenter through a gate but this rule may be more overlooked than your exit point. Just dont be stupid and reenter at apoint that has a lot of traffic/visibility or just ask your local patrol
so I was thinking about this issue yesterday. At Monarch you can leave through a gate which are in terrible locations, basically low enough that it was hardly worth the lift ride up to leave through a gate because you have to skin again anyway. Then you can not re-enter the resort at all. What I have been told is that it is now a $1000 fine to duck a rope in Colorado (State Law). All of this is bullshit and I would like to send some letters to Monarch about their policy. I just got back from Nelson, BC where at Whitewater you can tour anywhere using the lift...they even have one ride tickets. I realize that liability laws may be different in Canada but if Jackson can do it why not my hill?
So does anyone know if aside from National Forest permitting issues are there other reasons that resorts can not open their boundaries? What I am really asking is do insurance companies make this policy cost prohibative for smaller areas? Why can't we have the skull and cross bones signs and gates at the top of runs? I am ignoring the fact that my ski resort might be scared of the liability issues regardless of how their insurance might view it. Any ideas....?
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that is what i thought about only reentering at a gate, but what about just reentering the ski area at an unroped boundary. there are places in steamboat that you can exit through a gate and then reenter the ski area where there is no rope at the boundary, you technically aren't using a gate to reenter, but you are not ducking a rope to get across the boundary either.
the reason i ask this is a few years ago some friends of mine came to town and we exited at the forest service gate beside the east face gate. we were going to ski a long gradual gladed pitch that leads back to another gate right beside the morningside lift. i was under the impression that we were in the right as long as we didn't duck a rope. a ski patroller saw us on the other side of the rope while he was skiing inbounds. he started yelling at us to get back inbounds. said he was going to take everyone's tickets. once we all came back and ducked the rope right in front of the patroller to get inbounds, he let us off with a warning. my friends blamed me for getting them in trouble, and still bring it up every time i ski with them. i tell them that the only rule we broke was the one the patroller made us break by ducking the rope to come back in. they still think the patroller was right and that i am wrong.
SNOWMASS (AP) - Rescuers from the Pitkin County Sheriff's office pulled a 42-year-old snowboarder out of deep snow in an out-of-bounds area near Snowmass.
A news release said deputies and the Snowmass Ski Patrol found the man, whose name was not released, in a deep ravine early Sunday morning
Moral: Don't get stuck.
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from what I've been told by my boss's the way the law is written in colorado says if a boundary rope is adjacent to public lands than you can exit that rope whenever you want, but when you re-enter it must be through a gate. This can get tricky though because alot of boundaries are with private property and that's definitely a no no, also from what I've been told the summit area mountains have their boundary ropes set up 10 feet within the boundary so when you duck that rope you're entering a closed area within the ski are boundary wich can result in up to a $1,000.00 fine. As for reentering where there is no rope I'd imagine as long as you were cool to anyone who was upset with you for doing so and treated them with respect and explained that there was no rope and you thaought it was okay they'd probably give you the low down on that specific area and it'd be okay as long as you don't get aggro on them.
you would think that here in colorado with so many people who ski at ski areas that use the back country exits, that this would be an easy thing to figure out. there has to be some rules, and someone out there must know and understand the rules. it seems that even the ski patrollers at the ski areas don't even understand the rules. ski areas are very vague on the exit signs and also on the trail maps. they say you may only exit at a designated gate, but nothing is said about where to reenter. since the ski areas put this much in writing, i can't see that you would be allowed to duck a rope to exit the ski area even if the boundary was on forest service property.
my understanding is that you can not "lap" the backcountry using the lifts. At least that is what I have been told at Monarch. So that is why gates are so low, you basically have to skin back up in order to ski the adjacent backcountry. My question is, name that last time that a ski area was successfully sued by someone when they were sufficently warned and basically were operating on an assumed risk type of sceanrio? It just does not seem like that happens and so it seems like ski areas just don't want the extra hassle...with the exception of places like Jackson that seem to cater to their hard core base.
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