One of the most rewarding experiences at Mary Jane isn’t the bumps or the steeps or the trees, all of which Jane is famous for—it’s Dropping the Gate, which combines all three features in a delicious and exhilarating run that makes even the hitchhike back to the resort OK.

Dropping the Gate at Jane means skiing out of bounds—discouraged at every resort, even at Mary Jane, with threats of a thousand-dollar fine. Also, ducking rope is scary as hell (says the guy who almost died two decades ago doing just that).

But there’s one area at Jane where ducking rope is allowed, and sort of even encouraged.

My buddies and I left Golden at 6:35 a.m. on a Saturday, a full half-hour later than we had intended. One of the dudes had had a rare late-night date with his wife and was shaking out the cobwebs. It took us an hour to just get to the bottom of Floyd Hill, but the traffic cleared up after that, and we made it to the bottom parking lot at Jane in 1h:45mins  total time. The driver claimed that there’s ALWAYS a parking spot in the bottom lot; I shook my head but said nothing.

Not only was there parking, but there were families with camping stoves cooking pancake breakfasts for their kids, replete with hot cocoa. I handed over my Father-of-the-Year trophy and cracked a beer to wash down the granola as I struggled with my boots.

There was no new snow, since I had jinxed the end of January with a column about how great conditions were. You could hear the grind of dust-on-crust on the lift up. For the effort put into our ski day, I was a smidge on the bumming side of life.

“Let’s drop the gate,” said a buddy after a gritty run off Panorama (the area off Pano was once accessed by a very slow two-person chairlift that scared tourists away. A few years ago, they mowed down many, many trees and inserted a high-speed six-pack chair. I now refer to this area as “Disney World” because there are so many tourists).

Honestly, dropping the Gate scares me. Last time I did it a couple years ago, I was with the same dudes, and I didn’t fare so well. I sucked up that fear, bottled it, and croaked: “Yeah, let’s drop the Gate.”

You have to ride the ridgeline tight to get to the Gate from Panorama. The Gate used to be obscured, but now it is in clear sight. I find that it is extremely helpful to have people in your group who have done this before. If you go too far right once you drop the Gate, you’ll end up much further down I-40 than you ever wanted.

The run is fantastic, though. We looped twice, and both times were fresh powder runs, knee-deep, on a day where powder was located exactly nowhere else on the mountain. It’s steep and thick with trees but with the occasional open area. Half-a-foot of fresh powder gives one the feeling they are floating through the trees, Peter Pan style, off to Neverland.

But you don’t end up in Neverland, you end up on I-40. Stop and pick those people up, y’all. Those people is me; those people may one day be you. Stick that gloved thumb out and catch a ride back to the base—it’s all worth it. My buddies let me know that if we weren’t so handsome and trustworthy-looking, there is a bus that occasionally comes by the Mary Jane entrance, so that’s the safety net.

Dropping the Gate remains one of the best ways to experience backcountry skiing without having to invest in all that expensive avalanche gear and training. The best part: there ain’t no tourists.

Next time you’re at MJ, buddy up, suck in the fear, and Drop the Gate.