For the more experienced skier, Telluride offers a wide variety of Expert and Hike-to terrain that rival any in the country. Hiking anywhere between 20 minutes to an hour, find yourself peering over the edge of completely untracked turns with more than 2,000 vertical feet of skiable terrain.

It’s a windless, cloudless day. You unload the Revelation Bowl Lift (Chair #15) and with your ski buddies in tow, head through the “expert” gate, just beyond the ski patrol shack. It’s a quick traverse in, careful to avoid the scattered rocks peeking through, and within seconds you’re standing atop the steep, wide open, powder-filled chute known as Gold Hill #1. Picking your line (of which there are many), you sink into the pillowy snow, letting speed and gravity do their thing while you carve countless GS turns. Legs burning, you stop at the entrance to the pas du chevre (goat path, to the layperson) where your party regroups and makes its way across the egress above the cliff band, using the affixed rope to facilitate the process. Then another descent into the creamy lower aprons (The Fans) and a fast cat-track return to the Gold Hill Lift (Chair #14). One-thousand-four-hundred-seventy-five vertical feet, right from the lifts, and more than enough time to make another lap.

That’s Telluride these days. The amount of expert terrain that’s opened in the past few years is literally, astounding. Gold Hill #1 is merely the first in a string of 10 chutes found along the precipitous Gold Hill Ridge. While not open all the time, the Gold Hill Chutes provide challenging hike-to terrain, without having to hike too far. Chutes 2-5 were unleashed last season and are a brief 15-20-minute hike up the Gold Hill access road; Chutes 6-10 reside further along the ridge, past the new bridge and staircase that were also introduced last season, and empty into Palmyra Basin below Palmyra Peak.

Speaking of Palmyra Peak, the 13,320-foot rugged mountain provides in-bounds terrain that rivals any resort in North America, and even nips the heels of those found in the Alps. It’s a decent hike (anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours), so be prepared, but you’ll feel you truly earned your turns as you drop into the 2,000-vertical-foot north face right off the summit. (On the way to Palmyra Peak is Black Iron Bowl, which hosts a generous handful of steep shots in an under-30-minute hike.)

Additionally, there are two backcountry access points from the Telluride Ski Area—one on the Gold Hill Ridge with runs that spill into Bear Creek, the other on the Prospect Ridge with access into the Alta Lakes area. Only extremely skilled and experienced skiers and snowboarders, with the proper backcountry equipment, should consider exploring the areas beyond the backcountry gates as the terrain is not controlled, patrolled, contains cliffs and numerous other unmarked hazards, requires route finding, and is avalanche prone.