VAIL, Colo. -- Dallas Stars coach Ken Hitchcock brought his team to this mountain resort town in hopes of getting players to bond with each other while training for their exhibition opener against the Colorado Avalanche.

Since Saturday, the defending NHL Western Conference champion Stars have run medicine ball relays on LionsHead Skier Bridge, scaled and descended mountainsides and blended into the town's nightlife.

Hitchcock said he believes the unique training can play an important in the Stars' success.

"The way to bring your team together is by putting it in situations where they have to meld or bond," Hitchcock said Tuesday at Dobson Arena.

"Here I see 10, 12, 15 guys going for supper together. I see young players hanging with older players. I see older players playing golf with younger players, and guys going fishing ... you're not going to find that back in Dallas."

Right wing Brett Hull said the surroundings were awe-inspiring.

"It's so beautiful here," said Hull, who helped defeat the Avalanche in the Western Conference finals with several goals. "When we go out on the golf course after we finish working out, you just look around you, and it's just breathtaking."

	Mike Modano and the Stars have left the big city to train under the mountains of Colorado.

Unlike the Avalanche, who are training in Denver and mostly going their separate ways when the day's workouts are over, the Stars are living and working together in a condominium complex.

In Dallas, "we can tell players, 'well, stick together.' But if you've got 30 different cars and people that live a long ways away, they're not going to stick together," Hitchcock said. "This forces everybody to be on the same page, and forces everybody to act and behave as a group."

The Stars planned to finish their stay in Vail on Thursday and bus to Denver to take on the Avalanche at the Pepsi Center in the teams' first exhibition game of the season.

Hitchcock said his team, which lost to New Jersey in the Stanley Cup Finals, is hungrier than last year when it entered camp as the world champ.

While the Avalanche have been a favorite among many pundits to win it all this season, the Stars are seen by some as an aging team on the downside of a good run.

Hitchcock doesn't agree with the skeptics, and pointed out that Dallas has been the best team in the West for the last two years.

"They keep talking and talking and talking about shoulda's, coulda's, woulda's," Hitchcock said of the Avalanche. "To me, it was just two great teams going at it."