Take a long winter in Colorado

Our ski guide is perplexed. One minute he had been advising the three of us about the need to stay together while skiing the trees at Steamboat and the next it is just him and me left. "What happened to the others?" he asks. "It's a powder day," I reply. "Back home, there are no such things as loyalty or friends on a powder day." An overnight blizzard had coated the mountains of northern Colorado in 20cm of fresh, light and fluffy powder snow, producing the kind of conditions that even the locals are raving about. My colleagues also have an added incentive prompting their departure because we've signed up for a deal called First Tracks, where for an extra US$29 (Dh106) on top of the lift ticket, we get to join a select few allowed on the mountain an hour before the official opening time. With our hour head-start drawing to a close, the others have disappeared, unwilling to cede so much as a nanosecond of potential ski time to the cause of group cohesion. In truth, the only reason why I'm still with our guide is because I'm the slowest. All this seems to mystify our guide, a veteran Steamboat snowboarding instructor named Tom Barr and who is inevitably and inescapably known as T-Barr. I explain that my two colleagues are from New Zealand, a place where the prospect of fresh powder prompts an Oklahoma-style land rush as soon as a skifield opens. By lunchtime, there would be barely a square metre of snow left untracked. It's no wonder T-Barr is baffled by this. Even when Steamboat's lifts open for everyone at 9am, the skifield is so big - 165 named trails on 1,200 hectares - that crowding is never an issue. All this is emblematic of how it takes a while to adjust to the different scale involved in skiing in the US, where supersizing applies as much to the resorts as to the food. The Rockies, the higher and drier mountains far from the maritime-influenced resorts on the eastern and western seaboards, are another step up again. The altitude is the first thing to strike us sea-level-dwellers, who find ourselves panting and puffing as we struggle to adjust to the rarified air near the 3,221m summit of the ski area. It also takes a while to adjust to the presence of trees, with groves of lodgepole pines and aspen reaching right up to the highest parts of the skifield. This is one of the aspects of skiing for which Steamboat is justly proud but which, as someone who almost always skis above the treeline, I approach with trepidation. The last time I'd skied trees was when I spent a winter in Indian Kashmir back in the late 1980s, where the trees can be skied with confidence because every summer anything bigger than a twig is gathered by the villagers for winter firewood. But ever since then, I've harboured a deep-seated fear of tree skiing in any other environment, always imagining that eventually my skis will go under a fallen branch hidden in the powder, with very bad consequences for my lower legs. But once again, this is just another sign that I haven't fully adjusted to skiing in the Rockies. Steamboat averages about 8.5 metres of snow a year and at this moment, we are advised, there is about a three-metre base of snow in the trees. The highest any bit of deadfall reaches above the ground is about 1.5 metres which means the trees can be skied with confidence. It turns out the danger - and the reason why T-Barr was advising us to ski together - comes from a hazard I haven't even anticipated. Around the pine trees, it's common for a pocket of air to form but be hidden by a thin layer of new snow. Ski too close and you can break through and fall up to eight metres down to the ground, a source of fatalities in the past. Armed with a healthy respect for such hazards, tree skiing still becomes my favourite aspect of skiing at Steamboat. Shielded from the sun and unable to be groomed, the snow tends to stay in better condition for longer and I'm still finding untracked powder days after the last snowfall.