The 20-minute wait for the creaky, ancient cable car is worth it once we're atop the eastern ridge at Dizin. We clip in and drop over the lip of a wide groomer that draws all the traffic—just a few feet off the trail, the powder is knee-deep and untracked. From one end of Dizin to the other there's virgin snow. We stop at the midstation and hop a second Poma to the top, where Farshad leads us on a long traverse to the east around a bend in the mountain. You can drop off at any point and find your own powder field. The snow is as good as anything I've experienced in Utah or British Columbia—soft and fluffy, none of it shallower than my boots. On a snowboard, it's like heaven.

In a long and snaking gondola line, I meet yet another Ali, a teenager from Tehran who is also intrigued by my board. He's dressed in head-to-toe Burton, with a Shaun White jacket that's been available only since last winter. This indicates he's traveled, which he has—to Italy last year. He loved the discos.

"American girls!" he says. "Nice!" We run out of words that we both understand and exchange an awkward high-five. "You call me in Tehran," he says, scrawling a number in my notebook. "I will show you some parties! Maybe some beautiful girls!"

The sun is high in the sky, and it feels like Tahoe: Dudes recline on their snowboards, posturing for girls wearing enough makeup to go clubbing. (Though there are no legal clubs to go to.) Looking at the terrain, it's hard not to believe that this place, in theory, has the potential to be world-class. In the pie-eyed days of the shah, there was talk of connecting Dizin and Tochal by gondola, and today nearly everyone seems to hold out hope for improvement. None of the skiers I meet is more passionate about this than Behrouz Kalhor, an international racer from the seventies who remains one of Iran's most famous skiers.

Even at 47, Behrouz still skis every day of the season. He tells me that, in the early seventies, an official from the International Ski Federation, the sport's governing body, came to Dizin and took it all in. "He said," Behrouz recalls, "that this is one of the best pistes in the world."