(Gazette file photo)

Interesting story from the Denver Post on the rise in popularity in backcountry skiing. It's full of very timely avalanche warnings, considering that four people have died in slides this winter in Colorado.

Skiing Colorado's backcountry is a bracing escape worth preparing for

Here in Ski Country, USA, the resorts run thick. But Colorado's mountain vastness contains a lot more runs than those greens and black diamonds in Steamboat Springs and Crested Butte.

And increasingly, skiers are trekking into the alpine wilds for untouched powder and evergreen solitude. The backcountry segment of the ski industry is growing fast, spurred along by the invention of AT (alpine touring) gear that lets skiers make turns the same way they do on groomed ski slopes — with their heels attached to the sticks.

"It's a significant trend," said Kelly Davis, research director for Ski Industries Association in McLean, Va. "What I'm seeing is a lot of people want to get their feet wet, so to speak, with backcountry, and more and more are trying AT in lift-service sidecountry (taking lifts to the tops of mountains at resorts, but skiing down through wild, ungroomed areas)."

But for every backcountry convert, there are hundreds — thousands? — of resort skiers who like the idea of backcountry, but shrink from it, haunted by this thought: I would prefer not dying prematurely due to suffocation after being caught in an avalanche and buried alive in 15 feet of snow.