Boarding a flight to Denver for my first backcountry ski trip, I still had plenty of questions despite all the studying and training I’d done: How do people identify terrain risk in the field? Would I encounter slopes I couldn’t ski? Could an app really help demystify the art of winter route planning? Even so, I was ecstatic—the trip felt like the culmination of two years of reading, practicing, and manifesting. OnX Backcountry answered most of those questions through a demo of the app’s impressive features.

Mariah Maynes