Travel

Between Heaven and Heli

About 50 years ago, an Austrian skier had the wacky idea of accessing British Columbia’s best terrain with a helicopter. Ski resorts have seemed puny ever since.

By: Gary Graham; Photograph: Randy Lincks/Corbis
Published: March 2008   [ Updated: Feb 12, 2009 - 11:37:56 AM ]

We first heard about the dead guy from our driver as he shuttled us from Calgary, Alberta, past the glaciated rock faces of Banff and the frozen Lake Louise, to the remote mining town of Revelstoke, British Columbia.

The snowboarder died in an avalanche a few days before, doing exactly what we’d traveled 2,500 miles to try: heli-boarding. The trip was a brainstorm of my friend Josh, who had been riding just two seasons but had recently tackled Iran’s 13,005-foot Mount Tochal. He and I talked my brother, John, a bank vice president, into taking the trip with us, on the grounds that he’d be a father soon, and then his wife would veto such adventures. John hadn’t been on a snowboard in five years, but this was just like riding a bike, right? As for me, I’ve been boarding for more than a decade, but I was still a bit apprehensive. Looming outside town were the snaggletoothed Selkirk and Monashee ranges of interior British Columbia, full of cliffs, crevasses, tree wells, and unstable, snowslide-prone slopes…and the best snowboarding we might ever encounter.

We had just set down our luggage after 14 hours of travel when we were told to get ready for avalanche class. No drinks. No dinner. Avalanche-awareness class. Our hosts drove us to a nearby snowpack with a few other newly arrived greenhorns. If the purpose of the training wasn’t enough to fire up anxiety levels, passing the scientific-looking Canadian Avalanche Center helped. On everyone’s minds, of course, was one simple question: What happened to the dead guy? Finally, somebody got brave enough to broach the topic. It turned out that the deceased was with a different heli operator (a noticeable sigh of relief filled the van), and though he was caught in an icy barrage, he was buried under only a few feet of snow—normally a survivable situation. But he had made the decision to wear a helmet. The slide was so powerful that it packed enough snow into his headgear that his chin strap choked him to death. We all cringed…and discarded our helmets.

Our van stopped in a clearing in the woods. While one guide unloaded beacons, probes, and shovels, the other guide hid transponders beneath the surrounding snowpack. Immediately, the session of snow physics began. Avalanches flow like water (or rather, like class-five rapids with weighty, razor-sharp ice chunks mixed in), and the best way to survive one is to “swim” upward through the river of snow. It’s something that’s easier to do when skiing because skis detach on their own. Snowboards, on the other hand, don’t break away, so they often pull riders down into the frozen torrent­. ( Awesome, I thought.) If we found ourselves drowning, we were told there’s only one thing to do: Cup a hand over your airway to create a pocket of air before the slide stops. Because once a falling glacial mass stops, the snow sets instantly and is as solid as concrete. If dug out within 15 minutes, we’d have a 90 percent chance of surviving. After that crucial window, victims’ odds plummet. So it would be up to our fellow amateur boarders to dig us out. Our instructors taught the survival course with such seriousness that I was pretty much convinced someone would be buried that weekend. Then, a more sobering thought: If that person was me, my life might hinge on how fast the rotund French Canadian on my left could shovel while I reposed—right side up? upside down?—in a frozen tomb.

We helicoptered out of Revelstoke in the morning, passing over the northern Columbia River Valley with views of the Monashees, Selkirks, Rockies….It looked as if all of Colorado’s 14,000-footers had come to vacation in one place. Our outfitter, Canadian Mountain Holidays (canadianmountainholidays.com), is the world’s largest heli operation and has exclusive operating permits for an area the size of Switzerland. The whole sport, in fact, started in the Bugaboo range, just south of us, where, in 1965, the founder of CMH, an Austrian named Hans Gmoser, had the unorthodox idea of accessing British Columbia’s rugged, high-altitude woods with a helicopter. Soon thereafter, Gmoser tamed the Monashees, where we had just landed on Blanket Peak, a 10,000-foot snow-covered alpine mountain. We piled out of our Bell 212 helicopter, the civilian version of the Huey, and into a crouching position beneath the rotating blades. The chopper lifted off above us with snow piling off the machine’s skids, then disappeared into a cloudless blue Canadian sky. That’s when we noticed the steepness of the pitch. It’s the kind of realization that makes you wish you had packed—along with your Chapstick, camera, and sunscreen—a few Klonopin. The peak dropped off at such an angle all around that it was impossible to tell which way was down.

“This run,” said our guide, Mikey Aucoin, “is called Geronimo.”

We nervous neophytes weren’t the only ones with cause for concern. Aucoin, who also runs ski-mountaineering trips through the Revelstoke Powder Connection, was responsible for our safety, and all he had to rate our skills was our word. Either way, push had come to shove, and our warm-up run—2,600 vertical feet of untouched treeless powder—lay before us. That’s the parameter heli enthusiasts use to judge nearly everything: vertical feet. After a rider reaches his first 100,000 with CMH, he’s awarded a pin to display on his ski jacket. When someone breaks a million, CMH gifts a custom ski suit embroidered with the accomplishment. Each night at the lodge, guys shoot tales back and forth about vertical feet the way fishermen swap tarpon tales. The run in front of us, Geronimo, had the entire rise of an average Colorado resort.