Loveland, Colorado, is one of those homegrown ski hills you can’t help but love.  An hour west of Denver along Interstate 70, Loveland isn’t part of a conglomerate pass and it doesn’t have a fancy base lodge or massive village. You’re here for the skiing and the skiing along. (And with a summit elevation of 13,010 feet on the Continental Divide, the skiing is vast and glorious, if you know where to look and you don’t mind wind or hiking out the ridge.) This is the kind of place where you don’t have to make plans to ski with your friends: Just show up at Chair 1 on a powder day and find everyone in the non-existent line.

They still check lift tickets the old-fashioned way and the warming huts around the mountain look more like Alps-style huts with fireplaces and wooden bench seats than any mid-mountain mega-lodge you’ll find elsewhere in Colorado.

Darcee and Eben Mond have been skiing Loveland for decades now, and in 2009, they founded the Loveland Freeride Team, which has grown into one of the coolest youth freeride programs in Colorado’s Front Range. They teach kids everything from scouting big-mountain lines to backcountry safety—and they make it approachable for everyone.

This short film about the program was made by skier/filmmaker Ingrid Krahling, a film student at the Dener School of the Arts and a Loveland Freeride Team athlete.

For more, check out a tour of Eben and Darcee Mond's handbuilt backcountry hut or get to know the Loveland rat pack.