… After 15 years of riding lifts, digging sleds out, and dealing with weekend crowds, I made the decision to try a season of lift-aided hiking. This meant utilizing resorts to gain altitude and access to terrain that I could hike to within 30 to 90 minutes. It turned out to be the best season of my life.
Walking the Wasatch, as we call it, allows the type of riding most people are after at some point in their season: no crowds and fresh, untracked powder. The large concentration of resorts near Salt Lake City provides a smorgasbord of backcountry terrain, which is an excellent way to experience the solitude and roots of Utah snowboarding.
Resorts like Brighton, Solitude, Snowbird, The Canyons, Snowbasin, Powder Mountain and northern Utah’s Beaver Mountain provide great backcountry access. Each has its own access rules and regulations, so the best bet is to call the resort’s snow report before choosing where to go. The bottom line is once you’re out of the resort area, you’re on your own.
Big and Little Cottonwood canyons—the location of Brighton, Solitude and Snowbird—offer some of the easiest backcountry access to some of the choicest terrain in the Wasatch. The Park City area also has some resort access backcountry at The Canyons. Utah’s northern mountains—Snowbasin, Powder Mountain and Beaver Mountain—offer amazing in- and out-of-bounds riding as well. No matter what resort you use to access nearby backcountry, you’re opening up a wickedly addicting experience well worth the price of admission.…

—From Richard Cheski’s Walking the Wasatch