Let us imagine for a moment that you are a skier in search of epic turns and big adventure. You board a 737 that climbs into the pinking western sky. You sit smugly with your tomato juice and your complimentary Economist as your airplane arcs over the world-class slopes of Vail and Keystone and the Wasatch legends of Alta and Snowbird before descending into LAX. There, you board a fatter plane and head out over the blue Pacific.

Eleven hours later you arrive in South Korea, your mind cobwebby with jetlag. Still, you are excited. Now before you is the chance to plunder the slopes of a land that is 70 percent mountains yet remains terra incognita to Western skiers.

If you did this, you could say that you are an open-minded world traveler. You could say that you have an unslakable thirst for the undiscovered steep-and-deep—that you're a Magellan among powderhounds.

You'd be what the Koreans call pah-bo. Loosely translated, it means you are a damned fool.