VALI ASR AVENUE, IN CENTRAL TEHRAN, is a bustling hub of sports retail. There are soccer shops and bike shops, shops that sell wrestling apparel and those that offer only hats, including a few auto-racing caps with beer logos—which is funny, because it's been illegal to consume alcohol in Iran since 1979. You'll also find shops full of skis and snowboards imported from Europe. Look closely and you'll even spot some American gear.

The ski equipment makes sense once you gaze north, straight uphill, as Vali Asr broadens and climbs 2,000 feet toward the base of a white-topped mountain that looms above Tehran's deservedly notorious smog: 13,005-foot Mount Tochal.

If you squint at the lower regions of this steeply pitched peak, you'll see a gondola stop, the start of a seven-station ferry that takes skiers to the top of one of the world's highest ski areas—located here, within the municipal boundary of the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran, archnemesis of the United States, circa now.

Tochal is just one mountain in a towering, 560-mile-long range known as the Alborz, which divides northern Iran's vast salt desert from the lush hillsides fronting the Caspian Sea. I've come during the wet spring of 2007 to snowboard several resorts in the range, starting at Tochal. Three days after arriving in Tehran, I make the trip up for the first time.

The gondola's base sits amid a cluster of rickety amusement rides and tea shops. Few people are kicking around the dusty, snowless courtyard, but one young Iranian snowboarder spies my Burton board and waves. He's wearing big sunglasses and has his helmet clipped to a pair of cargo pants. He would blend in seamlessly at Big Bear.

"Bur-ton," he calls out, in heavily accented English. "Where you are from?"

"America."

"A-mer-i-ca?!" he replies, his tone somewhere between a question and a shriek. "We are your enemy, no?"

I'm not sure how to answer that. Technically, yes—our governments hate each other. Personally, no—I'm here as a curious tourist in search of friendly faces.

He shares the news with a lift operator, whose eyes bulge. "NBA?" he says, doing a quick mental scan of his English dictionary. "Ma-gic John-son! Sha-keel Oh-neal!" There's a pause. "Mi-kel Jor-dan!" He erupts in laughter.

I cram into a six-seat Poma cabin with my guide, Farshad Kahlili, having just passed under a sign that reads, in English, TRUST US AND ENJOY THE NATURE. It's a peculiar message, but apt. At various times during the nearly 45-minute ascent to 12,073 feet, the 29-year-old cabin dangles 100 feet over boulders and craggy rocks. It looks like the upper regions of Squaw or Snowbird—gnarly, steep, fun.

Unfortunately, Farshad informs me, most of these areas are off-limits for much of the winter because the snow is poor. What's open is way up top, in a large, shallow bowl served by a pair of lifts.

When we disembark, snow is blowing sideways. All the inbounds terrain is intermediate and, this being Friday (the Muslim sabbath), the place is abuzz with affluent, stylishly attired Iranian teenagers who are, for the most part, very bad at skiing and snowboarding. Women in Iran aren't supposed to show their hair in public, but they do up here. I see a few scarves, and at one point I think I see two women skiing in full chadors, but otherwise the women show little concern for containing their locks.

Later, on one of the chairs, I talk to a teenager named Ali, a 16-year-old from Tehran who says he's been snowboarding "one year only." I am "maybe the tenth" American he's ever met, he adds, just as the lift sputters to a stop, a not uncommon occurrence. Unlike the boarder down below—who, like nearly everyone I'll meet in Iran, was both befuddled and thrilled by the sudden appearance of an American—Ali seems unsurprised. He's mostly interested in how high I can jump.

And then, as kids around the world are wont to do, Ali starts bouncing in the chair. Violently. Above and behind us, young people cheer and screech. Soon, chairs are moving like plastic bobbers on a stormy lake. One girl, her streaked hair completely uncovered, keeps blowing a whistle, as if a snowy rave is about to ensue. No one is fazed.

It doesn't take long to exhaust the terrain. That afternoon, on my final descent of the day, I run into a woman I met earlier, Foutuhe Shahrad, a friend of Farshad's who scoots around on pastel, eighties-era skis. She's taking a breather by a lift tower.

"You like the skiing?" she asks sweetly.

Very much, I reply. "Maybe you will go back to America and tell everyone how nice it is in Iran," she says. "Tell them please not to start a war with us."