Bluebird skies left Snowbasin looking resplendent a day after a storm dropped 22 inches of snow, creating a striking backdrop for selling the resort and Ogden to dozens of companies promoting products of their own Tuesday at the Outdoor Retail Winter Market's 5th annual Backcountry Base Camp.

"We've gotten rave reviews," said Snowbasin ski patroller Mike Poborsky after leading a morning tour to stashes just outside resort boundaries, overjoyed that colleague Tim Duffy had guided a group that included ski mountaineer Lou Dawson, the first person to ski all 54 of Colorado's 14,000-foot mountains.

Talented backcountry skiers were everywhere, eager to try out the new skis, boots and bindings of industry kingpins, such as Salomon, Atomic and Black Diamond, or of relative newcomers, such as Ogden's Goode Ski Technologies.

Working side-by-side with his wife, Dawn, company founder Dave Goode beamed about having the camp in his backyard, a local training ground for developing lightweight carbon-fiber skis - a natural extension of his firm's earlier endeavors with water skis and ski poles.

"Shows like this really help us get exposure," said Goode, showing off a pair of autographed carbon-fiber Goode skis that Canadian Greg Hill used to climb and ski 50,286 vertical feet in just under 24 hours.

Although prominent, ski equipment represented just part of the show.

The terrain around the old Snowbasin base facility was cordoned off into sections for testing snowshoes produced by a half-dozen companies, sleds and a "freestyle mini-luge" known as a spiffy, and doing searches with avalanche beacons.

Salt Lake City-based Easton Technical Products was using the base camp to introduce its fledgling line of snowshoes, which deviate from the standard one-piece frame by having two aluminum halves connected with a flexible plastic connector.

Product manager Chris Pietrzak touted the two-piece structure's enhanced ability to adjust internally to uneven terrain or varied densities of snow, rather than distributing the out-of-balance stress into knees or ankles. "Over time that can wear on you," he noted.

Pietrzak also emphasized to listeners that 80 percent of the snowshoe can be recycled, an environmental orientation expanded by the company's commitment to buy shares of wind power on behalf of every snowshoe purchaser. Being "green" is an increasingly important theme among the Outdoor Retailer crowd.

But so is just plain having fun.

And around the base camp Tuesday, few people were having more fun than Kevin Gagnon, operations manager of Silverton, Colo.-based Mountain Boy Sledworks.

He turned heads as he steered his company's steerable toboggan between tents in the runoff area of the sledding hill, skillfully avoiding everyone strolling through. It was nothing, Gagnon said, adding he couldn't wait until day's end when he could take the molded plywood sled way up on the mountain and point it downhill.

"We have our radar gun so we can time ourselves," he pointed out. "If we can hit 70 miles per hour, that will be good, something to talk about."

mikeg@sltrib.com