Sand blasters

No lift tickets, no lines, no special gear, no snow.

Just strap on skis, clamber up a big dune and cut wide, lazy turns.

Sand skiing is half as fast as snow skiing but can be just as addictive, says Petr Janata. “If you love to ski powder, being on sand is the next best thing.” If the sand is deep but soft, you’ll have a very slow ride. If it’s wind-blown and compacted or, better yet, a little slick after a rain, “it’s so fast you’ll need your edges to slow down.”

Janata, a neuroscience researcher at Dartmouth College, first hit the snowless slopes in 1997 when the “desperation of living in Chicago” forced him out to Warren Dunes on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan. A few weeks after dreaming about making tracks on sand, he strapped his Bigfoots to his hiking boots, headed back to the dunes and pointed down.

Last year Janata skied big sand in Qatar decked out in shorts, a T-shirt and knee-high gaiters.

“It was the first time I ever had a chauffeured sand-skiing experience,” he says. “It was kind of interesting to be in a car, point to a dune and then see if we could get to the top of it. I’d ski it, then he’d drive down and I’d get back in the car and we’d go find another one.”

Michael Fry of Poway, Calif., leads sand-skiing jaunts for the ski section of the Sierra Club’s San Diego chapter. He uses standard cross-country skis with boots, poles, gaiters and gloves at the Algodones Dunes near Brawley, Calif. “It kind of wears out your feet because you’re pushing off like you normally do in cross-country skiing,” he says. “Instead of glissading 3 or 4 feet, you come to a stop.”

Meanwhile, Dubai, Namibia and Tottori, Japan, are touting their skiable sandboxes. Mt. Kaolino in Hirschau, Germany, draws sand skiers and sandboarders -- and has a chair lift and its own sand-skiing club.

Janata believes that, whether on sand or snow, skiing should share the same aesthetic vibe. “At a real ski area, everything is very scenic and you’re skiing through beautiful countryside,” he says. “In Qatar, it was more about just going down the dunes.”

-- Mary Forgione