SKI TOURING Cross-country skiers are gliding from lodge to lodge, sometimes with no company but a few moose.
By MARILYN WELLEMEYER RESEARCH ASSOCIATE Sarah E. Morgenthau

(FORTUNE Magazine) – With the temperature at 22 degrees, Dawn Flakne, 26, a computer engineer, set out one sunny December morning from the Gunflint Lodge, near the Minnesota-Ontario border, to explore Minnesota's Superior National Forest on cross-country skis. For a week she skied alone along the well-marked Banadad Trail and its tributaries, covering up to 12 miles a day and staying each night at a lodge or hut. The snow was three feet deep, but the trail had been groomed. She skirted lakes that were not yet solidly frozen and skied along a 1,967-foot ridge. On that first day, near sparkling Gunflint Lake, she glimpsed a mother moose with calf. As the days passed she saw a lot more moose and got within 20 yards of a bull. ''I was snapping pictures like crazy,'' she recalls. Lodge to lodge, inn to inn, or hut to hut, ski touring is available in cross-country ski areas from the Sierras to the Alps. In North America cross-country skiing is moving deeper into the wilderness, but with more creature comforts. Ski area operators, resort owners, and innkeepers have added many services for cross-country skiers. They maintain trails, rent equipment, and provide instruction, guides, maps, and itineraries tailored to a person's ability and desires. Some skiers prefer to stay in one hostelry and tour the surrounding trails. Others, like Dawn Flakne, want to move on day by day. Flakne, who works for Allied-Signal's UOP division in Des Plaines, Illinois, arranged her tour with Minnesota's Lodge to Lodge Ski Through Association, an organization of lodge operators. She paid $70 a night, all meals and services included (800-328-3325). She spent one night in a midtrail hut just outside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, where structures of any kind are forbidden. The hut is a circular tent with a wood floor, modeled on a Mongolian yurt. There is an outhouse, and two of the hut operators, Barbara and Ted Young, who live nearby on Young's Island, cut a hole in the ice on a lake for fresh water. They prepare and serve a steaming Mongolian firepot dinner of assorted meats and vegetables, and provide cots with sleeping bags. Since Flakne was traveling alone, Barbara Young stayed with her overnight. The rustic lodges, each operated by a different owner, offer private rooms or cabins, hot showers, stick-to-the-ribs breakfasts and dinners taken family style with the owners, and a pack lunch for the trail. Each lodge lays out an itinerary for the day and shuttles guests' cars with baggage by road to the next overnight stop. If skiers are late in reaching the next lodge, the operators will start a search -- an important service in the wilderness, especially for a skier alone. | While Flakne has made similar cross-country trips in the Midwest and felt comfortable going it alone, not all skiing experts approve. By the time her trip ended, she was skiing in sub-zero temperatures. Cross-country skiers suffer fewer injuries than downhillers -- one injury per day per thousand vs. two to three injuries for downhill skiers. But cross-country enthusiasts can be at greater risk of hypothermia, a dangerous drop in body temperature. A sprained ankle in the wilderness could result in death before help arrives. ''The fun of cross-country skiing is the rhythm of its motion and the phenomenally beautiful places it gets you to in winter,'' says Thomas A. Barron, 33, president of the Prospect Group Inc., a venture capital company in New York City, who has skied cross country in many places, including Maine and Yosemite. An expert who learned the sport as a youngster in Colorado and has taught many friends, Barron finds four out of five adults can master the technique, which some skiers compare to sliding across a floor in bedroom slippers. Beginners can practice the rhythmic shoulder, arm, and leg motions on a tracked trail with instruction at a ski center before attempting long-distance inn-to-inn or backwoods touring. Directories of major cross-country areas in the U.S. appear in Cross Country Skier magazine and in Ski X-C, an annual issued by Backpacker magazine. The Professional Ski Instructors of America Inc. recently brought out a manual, Cross-Country Skiing Right, by William Hall (Harper & Row, $12.95). In New England, dozens of centers give instruction and rent equipment. For an easy start the Woodstock Ski Touring Center (802-457-2114), associated with Rockresorts' Woodstock Inn and Resort in the foothills of Vermont's Green Mountains, offers lessons and half-day tours, from golf course terrain to gentle forested slopes. At its center in Pinkham Notch, New Hampshire, the Appalachian Mountain Club offers a workshop in introductory ski touring. It is given on four weekends in January and February for $40, plus lodging and meals at the center for $30.50 a day (603-466-2727). Inn-to-inn skiing, long a fixture in rural New England, is enhanced this season by the marking of the first 50 miles of Vermont's Catamount Trail, a 280-mile passage planned to run through the Green Mountains from Massachusetts to Quebec. For even novice cross-country skiers, the Churchill House Inn in Brandon, Vermont (802-247-3300), organizes the Catamount Excursion, a weekly | self-guided tour with north-to-south skiing over parts of the trail. The six-night tour, with stops at five traditional New England inns for dinner, bed, and breakfast, costs $465 per person, double occupancy. Groups can organize their own inn-to-inn tours in New Hampshire with the help of the Jackson Ski Touring Foundation (603-383-9355), a nonprofit organization in the village of Jackson, New Hampshire. The foundation maintains the largest cross- country trail system in the Northeast, 91 miles. It provides a list of lodgings and advises on itineraries. In Aspen, Colorado, the Tenth Mountain Trail Association (303-925-5775), named for the Tenth Mountain Division's ski troops who trained in the area during World War II, has just opened its third hut, which completes the lodging for half of an 80-mile trail that will link Aspen and Vail. Not for beginners, skiing in this back country requires heavy packs while breaking trail in deep snow at elevations of 8,000 to 11,000 feet. But one of the stops, the Diamond J Guest Ranch, boasts a sauna and a Jacuzzi. William F. Russell, 60, chairman of Russell Aives Mills Ltd., sweater manufacturers in Deer Park, New York, skied part of the trail last year. In March he will lead an Appalachian Mountain Club group on a five-day tour, using professional guides, a necessity on this trail. EUROPE'S SKI TOURING adventures vary from rugged to refined. In Norway hut- to-hut wilderness touring for experienced intermediate or advanced skiers is available in the Hardangervidda region through Worldwide Nordic USA of Hayward, Wisconsin (715-634-3794). This year's price for an 11-day tour with six days of skiing: $1,199, including air fare from New York. Village-to-village skiing features gentler pleasures. Mountain Travel of Albany, California (800-227-2384), offers two ten-day trips in January with seven days of skiing in the Jura mountains of Switzerland, along the French border. Skiers spend five hours a day on prepared trails of moderate challenge, covering about ten miles. They stop at inns for lunch, while their baggage is transported to simple hotels featuring hot baths and five-course dinners. Cost, excluding air fare: $990 per person in double rooms. In Austria's Steiermark region, Butterfield & Robinson of Toronto (416-864-1354) offers two ten-day trips in February with seven days of skiing accompanied by an instructor and one or two guides. Instead of taking prepared trails, participants will ski along rivers and over meadows. Skiers stay at small guest houses, some centuries old. Cost, excluding air fare: $1,195 per person in double rooms. Trips end with a celebration in Salzburg. That has the sound of Gemutlichkeit.