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“Whoa, there, pardners”, hollered Andy, an old hand Jackson Hole ski instructor, at the little disappearing figures of my son and his seven-year-old cousin, “Hey, cowboys! You’re heading for the back country!”

I watched in amazement as Ned led Milo, who had been skiing less than a week, straight off the nursery slopes into a thicket of lodge-pole pines. All I could hear as they hurtled through the woods along a rollercoaster of bumps and hairpin bends known as the ‘Animal Track’ was a series of disembodied yeeeehaaaahs.

This was not how I remember learning to ski; or the one miserable encounter my children had had with an Ecole de Ski in Europe. “They’ve got a lot of go and no whoa”, laughed Andy approvingly. “They’re just helmets on skis.”

Andy’s job, as he saw it, was less about instructing, more about keeping up with the enthusiasm. “It’s like herding fire-flies”, he said. “Kids their age don’t want to be taught, they just want to ski. It’s not like teaching first-time adults – kids have very little fear, a very low boredom threshold, and a need for speed. And as much hot cocoa and cookies as you can throw at ‘em.”

At first glance Jackson Hole might not seem the most likely place to introduce your precious little ones to downhill. Known simply as ‘The Big One’ (the top elevation is 10,450 feet, making a vertical drop of over 4,000ft - the longest continuous run in the States), only 10% of Jackson’s terrain is comprised of green runs for beginners, and 50% is black. There’s plenty of beautifully manicured ‘flattering groomer’ but the Jackson ethos is definitely off-piste.

‘No guts, no glory’ is the motto here and the 2,500 skiable acreage of the resort includes innumerable chutes, bowls, faces and couloirs with legends of die-hards and desperadoes and near-death experiences attached to them. It is most famous for Corbet’s Couloir, a narrow vertical drop of 500ft between two cliffs - a magnet for the mad, bad and dangerous – which doesn’t stop it being an official double-black run when there’s enough snow for it to be open.

But the test of true grit does not end there. Thanks to Jackson’s unusual ‘open-gate boundary policy’ there’s another 3,000 acres of back country on the doorstep beckoning. After a good night’s snowfall, you can see dozens of tiny figures threading their way underneath the orange boundary rope and caution signs, trudging up to the snow-peaks, skis on their backs, for that ultimate thrill of untracked ‘pow’.

It’s enough to put the fear of god into a lily-livered greenhorn like myself. But it’s precisely this wild west, no-holds-barred, live-or-die frontier attitude that resonates so perfectly with children. They have a natural urge for thrills and adventure, for pushing boundaries – it’s how they learn to test themselves after all – yet it’s rare to find opportunities nowadays in our ever-cautious, risk-eliminating world, when they are really allowed to let go. Ski resorts everywhere are succumbing to the pressures of safety paranoia, parental anxiety and potential litigation.

Yet in Jackson Hole control freakery is still something to be resisted, an enemy of the pioneer spirit of the early settlers whose names are commemorated in every feature of the landscape. You can feel that sense of overwhelming liberation when you stand on Rendezvous Mountain at the top of the tram, with the great expanses of national forest and wilderness park filled with elk and moose and bear and wolves stretching before you in all directions. It’s a feeling endorsed by the amount of people on the slopes – on an average day in Jackson Hole there are only 1,750 skiers in 2,500 acres of terrain – so in many ways it is far safer, especially for children, than more crowded resorts in Europe. And there are no punch-ups in the lift-line. In fact, there rarely is a lift-line to speak of.

By the end of two weeks Milo and his nine-year-old sister Arabella, neither of whom had ever skied before, had conquered the entire mountain, black runs and all, and five-year-old Lettie was skiing the blues. There was no looking back. Talk among the cousins in the evenings was an animated resume of cowboys and injuries – about who had had a ‘yard sale’ that day, distributing their skis, poles and ski-wear all over the slopes; who got ‘flushed down the bowl’; who skied Thunder bumps or did the Daily Drop; who ‘got air’, who floundered in the ‘pow-pow’. It was the same conversation that every dyed-in-the-wool ski-bum in every saloon bar and hot-tub in Jackson would be having, be they 19 or 69. In Jackson Hole, youth, thankfully, is a permanent state of mind. As it says on the sign that greets you at Jackson Hole airport – ‘God Bless Wyoming, and Keep it Wild!’

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