What’s in a name? A lot, to a steer-wrestling, Texan trial lawyer browsing British Columbia’s bustling supermarket of powder. A catchy moniker, Powder Cowboy Catskiing, and some eye-popping website images were enough to lure Dallas attorney Tim Hartley and his two pals north to try cat skiing in the snowy folds of the Rocky Mountains between Fernie and Cranbrook (nicknamed the "Powder Highway" by savvy marketers). The sport attempts to bring the rarefied, untouched snow of heli-skiing to those with a bit more time and a tad less cash on their hands. Ride up mountain in a glorified heated bus on tank tracks, accompanied by guides. Click into bindings, point skis downhill and fill face with powder. Repeat these steps.

"I gotta admit, the name got me," Hartley says, as we huddle in the truck-size, snowmobile-like snowcat on a January morning. Frost cakes the windows, transforming our vehicle into a portable igloo. After half an hour, the machine lurches to a halt at the top of Bonnie’s Bowl. Guide Natalie Renner cracks open the door and our group, including the Texans and a father-and-two-sons trio from Edmonton, bails out into the mountain air.

After buttoning up powder skirts and buckling boots, Renner instructs us to stay to the right of her tracks, then pushes off with a smile, disappearing over a camel bump of snow into the basin. A few of us pause to lust over vertiginous pencil couloirs striping the southwestern flanks of the Lizard Range across the valley.

"You’d be crazy to ski that," says Hartley, a guy who once leapt into corrals with 250-kilogram steers just for fun. Yet moments later Hartley drops in, wrestling his big frame through shin-deep, billowing powder. After a few dozen turns, the bowl funnels into a fairytale forest of perfectly spaced snow-ghost trees. In 15 minutes we’re already regrouping at the pick-up zone. By day’s end, with roughly 4,000 metres of powder notched on our saddles, we reconvene back at the ranch, legs predictably rubbery. Evening sun casts the mountains in a tangerine glow, while a half-dozen horses stand resolutely in valley-bottom shade. Inside the lodge, the stone hearth crackles reassuringly and Hartley sinks into a couch, beer in hand, beneath the frozen gaze of a bull elk mount. Here on the Powder Highway, there’s just enough Wild West flavour to tug at the heartstrings of a rodeo-riding Texan and his new Albertan friends.