My Favorite Ski Spot Is Lame, But We Call it the Fun Zone

We Call it the Fun Zone

This introduction originally appeared in the 2025 Photo Annual print issue of POWDER Magazine. The magazine can still shipped directly to your front door.

It’s a quick-hit little backcountry area I like to ski after the kids head off to school. My friends refer to it as DT’s Fun Zone. I prefer to call it Dr. Smith’s (may or may not be a pseudonym), in reverence to a local physician whose neighborhood abuts this area, and who has been skiing here longer and more frequently than I have. I can usually tell when tracks are his because they’ll veer off into private land, while the rest of us cut back toward the Forest Service parking lot. Oftentimes, they are also the only tracks I see.

I won’t divulge the location, except that it’s right off a well-known road somewhere north of Sundance Resort and south of Beaver Mountain. The secrecy is out of respect for the good doctor, and the unwritten custom that you don’t out someone else’s backcountry stash. Though I’ve never met Dr. Smith, and though I’ve been skiing here for more than a decade, and though this is public land accessible from a public parking lot and visible from the road, I still feel like a guest here.

In reality, though, I could probably drop a pin and text it to you, and you still wouldn’t track it up. Nobody does. Even the skiers who park in the same parking lot generally forsake the Fun Zone for steeper, more visible lines across the street. Most people within our small backcountry community think the Fun Zone is kinda lame.

They’re not wrong. For one, it’s not very steep. The pitch maxes out at 31 degrees, and that’s only for maybe 20 feet after the slope rolls over. Aside from the very flat, very top section, it’s all in the trees, so no one is able to marvel at your tracks as they drive by. It’s short, only about an hour and a half car to car. You have to put your skins back on at the bottom, at least if you want to get the full 90 minutes and 1500 vertical feet. Nearby lines have “more bang for the buck,” or so I’ve been told.

Yet that lameness is exactly why I love skiing here. The lack of pitch means I can bust out a solo lap without worrying about my wife being widowed by an avalanche. The trees keep the snow sheltered from the sun, as well as the eyes of passersby. The hour and a half round trip is less than the approach to some other local areas, meaning I can hit the Fun Zone on days when I otherwise might not have time to ski. I personally prefer a peaceful skin back to the parking lot over an awkward hitchhike. And sure, I have experienced some marginal skiing here. But I’ve never had a bad day.

There’s something liberating in embracing lameness—or at least the perception of lameness. In a lot of ways it’s better than anonymity. It’s nice to have a secret no one knows about...until word gets around. It’s even better to have something lovely that no one else wants anything to do with. The Fun Zone is like the heroine from a 90s high school rom-com before she sheds the glasses and lets down her hair. Freddie Prinze Jr. can have the glory lines across the street; I’m fine right here with the girl from band camp.

This is the Photo Annual, and as such, there will be some beautiful representations of skiing’s most aspirational moments—of bluebird blower powder days, clean landings and epic descents. But we’ve also made sure to hold onto some of the lame: the mid-winter bump run when it hasn’t snowed in weeks; night skiing off a rope tow; the flat-light dust-on-crust day that turns out to be way better than anyone expected; connecting patches of snow in the spring by straightlining over the grass. A gate at the end of the road with a simple sign that says Ski Hill, and behind it lies someone’s reason to buckle their boots in the morning. We do this not to be inclusive or authentic or accessible, but because sometimes it’s these moments when skiing is most grounded, that it is also at its best.

This introduction originally appeared in the 2025 Photo Annual print issue of POWDER Magazine. The magazine can still shipped directly to your front door.