The Draw of Skiing by Helicopter

The helicopter descends, its landing so delicate that from the inside it feels like we’re still hovering. Five of us shuffle out into the snow, clonking ski boots and helmets against the doorframe, then yanking backpacks out of the helicopter’s back storage cubby while rotors still whir overhead. Flopping down on the pile of packs, we crouch until the helicopter lifts away, a sprightly exit followed by a face slap of frozen rotor wash.

Then we stand to look at the untouched powder in front of us. Canadian peaks unfold like bumps on bubble wrap, one after another after another, far into the horizon. There’s not a single ski track in sight.

There’s a reason why, when they make ski movies, they use helicopters to pick up elite athletes and deliver them to the top of unspoiled mountainsides. Heli-skiing is the sport on steroids.

I’m outside of Terrace, British Columbia, with a 20-year-old outfit called Northern Escape Heli-Skiing, practicing a kind of skiing that promises all the best parts of the sport—untracked powder, basically—without any of the lift lines or crowds. We’re about halfway up the vertical expanse of BC, just inland from where Alaska’s finger pokes down along the Canadian coast. Here, the mountains look as though they come with a recording of the Olympic Fanfare and Bob Costas welcoming us to the Winter Games.

“It’s one of the deepest, most reliable snowpacks on the planet,” says John Forrest, founder of the company; Northern Escape can operate about four weeks longer every year than the cluster of operators located in southeastern BC, where skier Hans Gmoser more or less invented the sport when he founded a company called CMH in 1963. Down there this season, Northern Escape staff tell me, Revelstoke-area guides “have been bored for two weeks,” their operations on hold while too-warm El Niño rain hit their slopes. Up here, the skies are blue and the high-elevation snowfields and glacier slopes are plenty covered. With the help of Augusta A119 Koala helicopters, we are chauffeured to a dozen different peaks over four days, descending over 40,000 vertical feet of snow.

It sounds extreme, which is to say it sounds dangerous. The elephant in the heli-skiing room was particularly unmissable during my early-February trip with Northern Escape. Less than two weeks prior, one of its subcontracted helicopters crashed in these same mountains, killing the pilot, a guide, and two clients.

Helicopter crashes aren’t unheard of but are not particularly common; the Vancouver Sun reported that the incident was just the fourth BC case of flight-related fatalities in 60 years of flights. Still, I hold my breath the first time the helicopter takes off, and I tense at the inevitable bumps and shimmies. Mostly I’m amazed at how pilot Evan Huisson maneuvers the Koala better than I can parallel-park a sedan.

The real danger, then, is the snow itself. We all wear avalanche transceivers, or beacons, to locate a buried skier, and Northern Escape requires airbag packs that inflate via ripcord during an avalanche.

A Simon Fraser University study found that from the 1970s to the 2010s, the risk of heli and snowcat skiers dying in an avalanche went down by a factor of 8.2, mostly thanks to advancements in forecasting and rescue procedures. While we clients eat breakfast every day, guides and pilots hold a conference call about conditions and decide which terrain is off-limits, before anyone so much as puts on ski boots.

And then there’s the environmental question. “The dichotomy of heli-skiing and fossil fuel use versus…being good to the environment doesn’t pass me by easily,” says Forrest. He believes Northern Escape is the first heliskiing company to go carbon neutral, and it’s moving to electric trucks and vans and installing a lodge inverter system that uses retired car batteries. He says the greening process isn’t solely about buying offsets, or what he calls “just paying for your sins.” 

Corrina Stafford, executive administrator of HeliCat Canada, an association of 40 backcountry outfits, says that sustainability is on everyone’s radar. Besides looking to reduce a helicopter’s idling time, various operators have found ways to manage waste and fuel their buildings with renewable energy. Rethinking that diesel-chugging metal bird isn’t off the table, either. “Really interestingly, there is a company working on an electric helicopter,” she says.

For all the glamour of untracked powder and an in-house masseuse, Northern Escape is located outside the industrial city of Terrace, a timber hub on the Skeena River. The town sits at less than 300 feet above sea level, with sawmills and a bioenergy plant, tire stores and a gas station with an attached tackle shop. But the Skeena Mountains and the Kitmat Ranges, subsets of the Coast Range, rise to the west and north. “Godawful ugly town but a beautiful area,” I overhear. Heli-ski lodges are often outposts reachable only by air, but Northern Escape’s Yellow Cedar Lodge sits a short drive from town.

There are two hot tubs on the second-floor deck and a hangout room with a casual clubhouse feel, though the company’s other, remote properties are sleek and modern. Clients swap stories of other outfits; eastern BC has shorter laps, I hear, and “Alaska is like baccarat” with its terrible odds for good weather. Here, when it storms Northern Escape can load clients into snowcats, an on-ground backup that still delivers backcountry runs.

The physicality of the experience takes me by surprise, and by day three I’m eager to shell out for a massage before dinner. Even accustomed to long ski days, I’m wiped by the sprint of loading and unloading, the need to be efficient while the rotor blades turn, the kneeling and standing up in soft snow.

Even the snow demands muscle; it’s a dreamy white but often has a light wind crust; my legs ache with the effort to swing powder skis on terrain not steep enough to give much help from gravity. Laps go faster than an express chairlift on an uncrowded day at Crystal Mountain.

But it’s worth it for what we eventually find: honest-to-goodness powder. Protected from the winds that can solidify the snow surface, this alpine basin has collected meters of the light stuff.

We gasp and whoop in our airy turns, and the snow sounds like fine sugar grains pouring out of a burlap bag. I may not resemble an extreme sports star, but when I find time to catch my breath, it feels like I’ve found a genie who specializes in the niche desires of powder skiers and been granted my first wish.