Curious About Uphill Skiing? This Map Shows You Where To Do It at Ski Resorts

Despite a recent boom in popularity, backcountry skiing—and, by extension, ski touring—can still seem daunting for newcomers.

The learning curve is steep and can be expensive, with a truckload of gear and avalanche-safety knowledge to wade through before you get to the good stuff: skiing untouched snow.

With the launch of a new map documenting places for inbound ski touring, though, Giray Dadali and Rob Aseltine want to make the transition (no pun intended) from downhill skier to uphill skier smoother. 

They also hope the map serves as a resource for diehards who just want exercise, a place for uncomplicated pre-work laps, or to save the cash that might otherwise go towards a lift ticket. 

The resource lives on the website of the company Dadali co-founded, Daymaker Touring, compiling hundreds of ski resorts across North America and listing their uphill policies. It includes filters that narrow the search, like cost and hours, both of which vary from resort to resort.

To the uninitiated, ski touring inside a resort largely removes avalanche risk, as long as it’s during the operating season. While you need to be in reasonable shape and all the other risks of skiing still apply, resorts mitigate the avalanche problem on a daily basis. That makes them great spots to uphill ski without the added challenge of safely navigating backcountry terrain.

For Daymaker and Dadali, the map is a natural fit. His company sells touring adapters that slot into alpine bindings and let skiers walk uphill, making it one of several places nascent tourers might get started. 

Dadali, a professional skier and mechanical engineer, first conceived the product as a way for hard-charging skiers like him to swap setups at will and use their burlier alpine bindings in the backcountry.

Since then, Daymaker released a model that specifically targets this crowd—the Tekdapter—but Dadali found that the first design, the Daymaker Classic, became a hit with people simply trying out ski touring to see if they liked it. Because both designs work with existing bindings, they don’t require buying an entirely new backcountry setup.

“We’re this gateway entry point of: we can help you get into the sport of ski touring,” Dadali said.

So is the map. Aseltine, a snowsports marketer and longtime friend of Dadali, helped build it and said that if Daymaker is going to help create new ski tourers, it has a responsibility to show them the ski areas where they can try it out. The two highlighted uphill skiing at a resort as a safe, progressive step towards the backcountry. This way, when newcomers eventually take an avalanche course, they already know how climbing skins and touring bindings work.

Part of the goal is separating backcountry skiing and uphill skiing. One involves taking classes, routinely checking avalanche forecasts, and staying on top of the snowpack. The other is a way to get up the mountain, whether you’re at a resort or not.

“They’re two totally different things,” Dadali said. “The skill set that you learn in uphill skiing is applied to backcountry skiing, but you can go out and uphill ski without entering the backcountry, and we can make it less scary to go do that, to go just ski tour.”

Ultimately, though, the digital selection of uphill policies applies to anyone, for whatever reason, scouting out an inbound session. You can find it here. 

“We thought, let’s build this for every single person and every possibility so they can fit ski touring into their life,” said Dadali.

The 2026/27 print issue of POWDER Magazine is here. Click here to have a copy shipped to your front door. Copies can also be found on newsstands at major retailers like Barnes & Noble, Target, Walmart, and more.

Related: A Skier’s Honest Review of Jim Morrison’s New Film ‘Everest: The Other Side’