Resort Touring While Lifts Are Running?

On Saturday at Crystal I saw a guy on AT skis (not a patroller) skinning up a run (well past mid-mtn). I know resorts don't care about touring while they closed, but does anyone have experience touring while the lifts are running? I'd always thought resorts really didn't like this (liability, rescue, etc) but?

i have allways wondered about getting up hemi (mt baker ski area) from the bottom of chair 8 on skins too. has anyone done that? i dont really want to buy a lift ticket to ride chair 8 once...

I think it depends on the individual patrollers. I've done it while my kids were lift skiing (skinned up on the very edge of runs, or just inside the trees) at Alpental and Stevens during operating hours, and patrollers on AT gear have skied over and said hi, have a nice day, please stay away from the middle of the run. I tried it at Whistler last year after a day of lift skiing, and they pretty much had a coronary, talking about liability this and liability that (and I thought you couldn't sue anybody in Canada) . . . this was after I had mentioned taking a couple of laps on my light gear to Bernie, the head of the Whistler patrol and a confirmed Dynafit guy, the afternoon before, who said it sounded OK to him, just stay well off to the side (he wasn't working the day I did it, though). I got around it by repeatedly skinning from the gondola base to the upper Blackcomb parking lot on the pedestrian trail - just for an aerobic workout, anyway.

I've gone up with a group at Crystal to get into Bear Gap. We stayed on the edge of the trail, of course. The ski patrollers were OK with it, although if I remember correctly, they asked us to sign out.<br>

<br>I can't comment on what the Ski Patrol thinks about it but I have seen even snowshoers plodding uphill beneath Chair 8 at Baker. Seems like it's okay with the obvious precautions..

I know Alpental's had an issue in the past with people starting from Lot 4 and using the winter/spring route to Source Lake, Tooth Basin etc., which also happens to be the return route out of the Alpental lift serviced backcountry (at least as far as the Great Scott spillout/Source Lake). Arguably that's not even within their permit area, since it's defined backcountry, I'm not sure of the real status.<br><br>At first I thought Alpental was kind of full of it to try and enforce any kind of restriction like that given the long history of use of that route by non-lift-skiers, but after going in there again as a lift-served I can see their justification in this case. The problem there is the lift serviced BC users are trying to preserve speed on the way out and are totally not expecting oncoming traffic, and there's high potential for head-ons. Visibility is tight, and lots of the users are NOT skiers but are snowboarders or postholers making a thorough mess of what should be a nice packed down traverse out for the paying customers. It's already hard enough to make that traverse on a snowboard without clipping out a bunch of times.<br><br>It's not particularly hard to use the summer trail instead, except that it's sometimes Lot 1 that fills up first and you end up in the lower lot. A little more av exposure too while passing under Phantom Slide, but it's not like the trail is taking you anywhere safer in the long run ... <br><br>On another note, it was a Baker area snocat that assisted with the extraction for Baker av#1, this before the lifts opened and anyone had signed the implicit contact of buying a ticket from Baker. I sure hope this kind of thing won't open any kind of liability or rescue policy can of worms. To my mind, rescuing people in danger, no matter where, should be an any-ship-at-sea situation that lawyers should just stay the hell out of.