IT WAS A WEIRD TIME for a ski trip, to say the least.

By the start of 2007, tensions between the U.S. and Iran had reached levels not seen since the 1979 toppling of the shah and the subsequent hostage crisis. In December, the United States arrested several Iranian citizens under suspicion of aiding in attacks on Iraqi security forces. Then, not long before I left on my trip, U.S. officials presented evidence that Iran had been funneling arms to Shiite militants in Iraq. Iran, of course, was outraged, especially after Iraq's president said they were in the country at his request.

Meanwhile, Iran continued to defy United Nations orders that it halt the enrichment of uranium, claiming that the country's intentions at its nuclear facilities—which the Bush administration might well destroy as a parting gift—are only to pursue the peaceful development of cheap power. Guided since June 2005 by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—a rabble-rouser known for bon mots like "Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury"—Iran has been especially aggressive since the U.S. took out the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, cementing the nation's status as the region's dominant Islamic power.

But I couldn't resist visiting. For years, I'd heard whispers about Iran's impressive mountains and abundant snow. What finally snagged me was the anomaly of it all—the idea that a U.S.-style snow-sports culture exists in a country that officially bans hand holding by unmarried couples. Was the skiing-and-boarding scene just a ghost of the shah's Westward-leaning reign? Or was Iran's massive young population testing new boundaries of liberalization?

I wouldn't have gotten anywhere near the place if not for Farshad, who secured my visa and made all the arrangements—a process that took months. He's a cofounder of Iranian Mountain Guides, a startup that appears to be the country's first backcountry-skiing-and-mountaineering outfit. He picked me up at the airport in his old, faded-blue Jeep Wagoneer.

"Let me tell you about some laws," Farshad said as we drove away from Mehrabad Airport. "You must not talk to women or take photographs. You must not photograph soldiers. You must not speak politics on the street." He paused. "I don't like this way of things, but this is how it is."

Farshad is a short, sinewy man of 43. He's been skiing for seven years and climbing in the Alborz since he was a kid. One of his favorite places is Damavand, a dormant volcano that, at 18,605 feet, is the tallest peak in Iran. He's climbed it some 60 times and skied it more than ten. If weather permits, he'll take curious visitors just about anywhere in Iran's vast and untouched backcountry, but I was more interested in seeing who was hanging around at the resorts.

The day after skiing Tochal, we head over to the Iran Ski Federation, a government-run sports body housed in a drab two-story building in northeast Tehran. The federation's officials are clearly nervous about having an American journalist in their midst, and only after ferocious closed-door negotiating with Farshad do they agree to field my questions.

Farshad and I take our seats facing a pair of desks. At one sits Payan Nazar, the federation's public relations manager. His uncle runs the ski school at Tochal. At the other is federation official Bahram Saveh Shemshaki, son of the organization's president, Issa Saveh Shemshaki, a famous Iranian skier. Bahram's cousin Alidad is currently the country's top-ranked alpine specialist, which is not exactly like skiing for Austria. At the Turin Olympics, he finished 29 seconds back in the giant slalom.

Bahram is a stylish guy with wire-rim glasses and a black shirt open to his chest. He tells me that residents of the ski town of Shemshak, where he grew up—hence his last name—have been skiing for 75 years. Some basic use of skis for transportation has been going on in the Alborz range for hundreds of years, but the downhill sport as we know it arrived around 1930, when German miners introduced the peculiar pastime to locals. Only a tiny percentage of Iranians ski—mostly people who live in mountain villages or the posh sections of Tehran—and the presence of ski tourists from elsewhere is almost nil.

The federation, Bahram explains, exists to oversee Iran's ski "zones" (resorts) and also to support national-team members in snowboard, alpine, cross-country, and grass skiing, a bizarre and dangerous summertime offshoot. This year, the federation added boardercross to the quiver and for the first time sent a halfpipe rider to an international competition—the Asian Games, in Changchun, China—despite the fact that there's not a single terrain park, let alone a halfpipe, in all of Iran.

"Snowboarding is new," Bahram says. "A lot of people like to test it. But I think it will go back to alpine."

If that sounds familiar—like the grumbling you'd hear from skiing purists at Taos or Mad River Glen—you're about right. For the older generation, Iranian snow sports froze stylistically in 1979, when the takeover by Islamic fundamentalists all but outlawed fun. What was left to hang on, barely, was a Euro-inspired skiing infrastructure put in place by the last shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, a passionate skier who encouraged development of the major resorts.

Little has been added since: Only one of the big resorts has built so much as a new lift in the intervening decades. It's hard to say how close skiing came to going extinct, but government policy, then as now, was one of grumpy toleration for a frivolous Western activity. Popular rumor has it that ski resorts were shuttered after the rise of the mullahs, but that's mostly myth. Tochal was shut down for 20 years, but the two biggest areas, Dizin and Shemshak, stayed open.

They did so only by a series of miracles, and thanks to the dedication and bravery of people who worked there. Veterans of that scene still tell wild stories about the period following the revolution, when religious zealots stormed the gates, shook the support towers, and literally stoned gondolas while a few bold (or crazy) skiers ascended.