The Bugaboos from the air looking SW. Bugaboo Lodge is just out of the frame near the toe of Bugaboo Glacier in the deep valley at the bottom left of the photo. CMH ARCHIVES.
2
We wanted to inhale and breathe life again . . . We were rebelling against an existence full of distorted values, against an existence where a man is judged by the size of his living room, by the amount of chromium in his car. But here we were ourselves again; simple and pure. We were ready to trust each other, help each other and give to each other our everything.
This mountain to us is not a sports arena. To us it is a symbol of truth and a symbol of life as it should be. This mountain teaches us that we should endure hardships and not drift along the easy way, which always leads down.
— Hans Gmoser
bug•a•boo (BUHG uh boo) n. 1. An object of obsessive, usually exaggerated, fear or anxiety.
— Oxford dictionary
Time has a way of transforming what was once feared and worthless into something loved and valued. There is a little dead-end valley at the eastern edge of the Columbia Mountains where mining once proved to be an enterprise of such complete failure that one miner described the place as a “veritable bugaboo.” The name was the only thing that stuck; the present day Bugaboos are one of the most revered mountain features on the planet for hikers, climbers, photographers and, of course, skiers.
The Bugaboo Spires are an anomaly of alpine beauty. They are made of granite, the stone that comprises most of the famous rock spires of the world, from the Himalaya to Patagonia, Yosemite to the Alps. It resists the carving power of glaciers better than most rock, so it tends to form smoother faces, as if the ice were a giant knife in the hand of a master sculptor cleaving great slices from the mountains to leave great cathedrals of stone. In the surrounding mountains, the glaciers shaped the softer sedimentary rocks as well, but left more rugged faces as if the carving force of the glacier were in the hands of a drunk with a bulldozer.
The Bugaboos from the air looking SW. Bugaboo Lodge is just out of the frame near the toe of Bugaboo Glacier in the deep valley at the bottom left of the photo. CMH ARCHIVES.
In all directions, thick forest and a morass of sedimentary rubble hide the spires from view. Hunters, loggers and miners all had their day attempting to pull something worthwhile from the area around the spires, and the difficult access prevented the place from becoming a tourist destination. Loggers had somewhat better luck harvesting the thick timber in the area, but the next enterprise in the valley transformed mountain recreation and uncovered the real treasure hiding in the snow-covered forest and across the extensive glaciers below the spires.
To allow loggers to process timber before transporting it down the long road to the Columbia River, a rudimentary sawmill camp had been built below Bugaboo Glacier. The plywood shacks with rough interiors were deserted during the winter, and situated as they were, within a day’s ski of the Bugaboo Spires, they were ideal to serve as base camp for ski adventures. The sawmill camp was the first of a series of serendipitous coincidences that ultimately allowed remote heli-skiing to develop.
The potential for mountain adventure in the area was first realized when the spires drew the attention of mountaineers, including the climbing visionary Conrad Kain. After leading first ascents up more and more difficult peaks, he found himself in the Bugaboos facing climbing challenges at the cutting edge of the world standard of the day. In summarizing his experiences in the area, he wrote: “This summer came to an end with a trip to the Howser and Bugaboo spires, and it was in this group that we made an ascent as interesting and as difficult as any I have encountered in the Alps.”
The Bell B-1 and Bugaboo Spire. CMH ARCHIVES.
Today this concentration of inspiring and difficult summits is known worldwide as one of the finest climbing destinations on the planet, and each year the standards of alpine rock climbing are pushed higher on the steep faces, smooth rock and cleanly cleaved cracks of Bugaboo, Howser, Snowpatch and Pigeon spires. A logging road in the bottom of the valley makes it the most accessible alpine rock-climbing area in North America and the place for aspiring Canadian and American climbers to prepare for the world’s most remote and difficult climbs.
Places like the legendary Mont Blanc massif in the Alps have similar climbing opportunities, but as a ski destination the Bugaboos became known worldwide as a place to have an experience unlike anything else on earth. The tectonic intrusion that pushed the granite into the sky also lifted the surrounding area into a high plateau, creating deep valleys on all sides and ski runs that begin within snowball-throwing distance of the surreal rock walls and go for miles down rolling steep glaciers into uninhabited valleys.
A second and perhaps more important coincidence was that the mid-sixties were blessed with big winters producing deep and stable snowpacks. Avalanche transceivers for finding buried avalanche victims were yet to be invented. Snow science was an oxymoron. Guides were more competitive with each other than the professional guide teams today, and they skied anything a helicopter could put them on top of. A different snowpack would almost certainly have meant a tragedy that would have crushed the fledgling industry. The unusually stable snowpack allowed every week, from the first one in 1965 until the booming popularity of heli-skiing in the early seventies, to be a festival of deep-powder skiing without serious avalanche incidents, ensuring nothing but rave reviews from all who experienced it.
Considering everything, it’s hard to explain the development of Bugaboos skiing without considering a little magic. It began with Brooks and Ann Dodge, who convinced their ski club to join them on a rowdy adventure to the wilderness of British Columbia, and handed Hans Gmoser his first heli-ski week on a silver platter: a prepaid group with no refund no matter what happened. The adventure began in Banff, where Hans directed the group to don ski clothes before piling into the two Volkswagen station wagons for the drive to the Columbia Valley. Fortune smiled on the innovators and the first week of heli-skiing in the Columbias was seven days of perfect powder under bluebird skies. Enga Thompson, one of the skiers that first week, remembers the snow being “that effortless kind of powder where the skis just go wherever you look.”
Those first flights into the spires, the small, slow Bell 47 helicopter pivoting back and forth beneath its rotor with the glass fuselage giving unobstructed views of the snow-cloaked spires, must have been an otherworldly experience and a glimpse into the future of skiing. Even the long wait on top while the two-passenger machine ferried the rest of the group up was a dream. It was worth the price of admission even without the skiing: to be transported effortlessly into the heart of the mountains – while the trails are buried in metres of snow, roads are impassable drifts, and trees are cloaked in ghoulish snow blankets – and left to stand as the only humans in a place where civilization did not exist. The group only skied a run or two each day, but it was more helicopter-accessed skiing than had ever been done before, on dizzyingly long runs that had never been skied – and no one was counting yet anyway.
Brooks Dodge found exactly what he had been looking for and word spread like wildfire as the interest in skiing the Bugaboos increased exponentially. The experience was more fascinating than any ski holiday ever sold, in part because each person who signed up for a week of skiing in the Bugaboos had a treat unlike anyone else’s experience, and in part because it offered a mountain adventure to people who would never have had one without the helicopter to take them there. Just as every snowflake is different, every week of heli-skiing is different; the depth and texture of the snow, the runs chosen by the guides, the individual lines chosen by the skiers, and the congeniality and family relationships with the staff at the lodges gave every skier an experience unique to their time in the Bugaboos. To be able to offer a product whereby the buyer gets something no one else can have was an easy sell and cast a powerful spell over nearly everyone who tried it.
It was this elixir, seven days of skier’s heaven, that Bugaboos skiing offered. People would arrive after travelling halfway around the world expecting the ultimate ski experience, only to have even those lofty expectations thoroughly surpassed with a quality of skiing and mountain living they had never dreamed could exist. And it happened in such remoteness that all the distractions of life ceased to matter. Isolation and exceeded expectations combined to make this an experience far more powerful than just using a helicopter for a ski lift.
Chasing shadows in the sixties. BRUNO ENGLER.
It has been called ”a nirvana that can be bought,” but it was more than that – the price of admission also included the ability to ski, adding a ski team’s athletic bond between participants that could never be found at the most expensive resort where anyone with enough cash can participate. It’s the kind of experience often described as “beyond words,” though some have come close. Kathryn Livingston wrote in Town & Country:
Indeed, the adventure is dream realization of the highest order. The sensations eclipse superlatives. Weaving through the white wilderness resembles moon flights in that you have a sense of being out of this world, on some other plateau of existence, and in touch with eternities. It’s the combination of the helicopter, the intensity of the action, and the knowledge that you are carving your tracks into virgin snow where sometimes no human has ever been before sends you into flights of ecstasy. As the sinisterly nice little James-Bondish helicopter swoops you up the valley and serves as a chair lift to take you from peak to peak, excitement begins. Your heart skips a beat and your abdomen seems to leap as the chopper courses its way between sky-piercing granite spires, disappears into snow clouds, and suddenly tilts for touchdown on a patch of snow no larger than a living room to discharge you and your skis. Here starts the fantastic downhill voyage: skiing a run that might take three-quarters of an hour and take you from drops so steep you can’t see the tips of your skis to stretches atop millennia-old glaciers and end in smooth, mild sunny vales punctuated by loops around pine trees. Bugaboo skiing is an experience that stands out like a bright gem to enrich a person’s life.
It was the kind of skiing that backcountry skiers had been experiencing for years, but the helicopter made it accessible to an entirely new group of skiers. While the helicopter removed the difficulty and the rewards of working against gravity to get to the top on a muscle-powered ski tour, the beginning of heli-skiing was as tough a week as has ever been sold as a recreation excursion. The clientele came for the hardship and trials of the backcountry and the cost was $275, all-inclusive, round-trip from Calgary. The helicopter was a novel addition to the adventure, not a way around it. Hans remembers, “They were a pretty tough lot back then.”
And they had to be. After a long journey from home, the final leg of the trip was a snowmachine-powered midnight ski from Spillimacheen for 43 twisting, drifted kilometres to reach the sawmill camp. Hans had hired Lloyd “Kiwi” Gallagher for the job of getting people from Spillimacheen to the Bugaboo lodge. The bluff New Zealander was just the kind of worker and partner Hans needed. He explains his role with a smirk: “I was a mechanic by trade and Hans saw I had a strong back, a weak mind and a warped sense of humour – he knew I’d make a good guide.” In the beginning, Kiwi’s sole job was to get skiers to the camp, no matter what it took. “We would drive as far as we could, get stuck, and from there walk, ski and skidoo in to the lodge.”
The original heli-ski system: the Nodwell and the Bell B-1. CMH ARCHIVES.
The snowmobile had trouble pulling a group of skiers in deep snow, so Kiwi bought a little tank-like Nodwell snow machine from the Norquay ski area. Riding along, usually standing, packed in the short bed of the Nodwell on the road to the lodge, was the first taste of the unusual experience of Bugaboo skiing. If there wasn’t enough room in the back of the Nodwell, there was a tow rope attached to the machine. Before jet lag would have a chance to set in, you’re on your skis, holding on to the tow rope, being pulled through the darkness, trying to maintain your balance without getting too distracted by the ghostly winter forest on either side of the road. Jean Stuart, who lived in Brisco and for years helped with CMH logistics, remembers being towed to the lodge: “At first it seemed there was no way you could hang on that long. Then your body starts to relax and it’s okay.”
You arrived at ski nirvana as you should: on your skis, to find the lights of the cookhouse twinkling, the smell of the wood stove heavy in the air. Peeling your numb hands from the towrope, you walked into the rustic shelter at 3 a.m. to be greeted by a warm meal. You’d sit down to eat on a bench made from branches nailed across tree stumps at a table built with rough-cut trees. A few hours later you’d board the helicopter for your first flight into the spires.
Bugaboo Glacier and Houndstooth in the sixties. HANS GMOSER.
The concept was simple: fly from the lodge to a safe landing zone, or drop-off, above a good ski run, land the helicopter, and everyone climbs out while the guide unloads the skis. Then, once everyone is ready, follow the guide down an immense mountain face through untracked snow to a second safe landing zone, or pickup, at the bottom of the valley, where the helicopter waits for everyone to board and the skis to be loaded. Repeat as many times as possible.
Today, the helicopter can handle 11 skiers at a time, and in the main CMH areas four such groups are on the mountain, supported by one helicopter flying almost non-stop to keep up with 44 skiers pounding as many fresh turns as their legs can handle. But in 1965 only two skiers could fit in the Bell 47 at the same time, so it took half a dozen trips to get everyone to the top. Women and children were flown last so they wouldn’t have to wait as long in the wind and cold of the drop-off point. On a good day, the group would ski two big runs, one in the morning and one after lunch, for a weekly tally of 15,000 metres – a total frequently reached by today’s heli-skiers in a single day.
The first group of commercial heli-skiers in the Bugaboos: April 1965. HANS GMOSER.
It was untamed mountain terrain and snow conditions and there were no expectations, so the groups skied everything from the finest powder to the most hideous breakable crust Mother Nature could concoct. It was April, so often the conditions from summit to valley were variable. And it was all skied on long, skinny boards in 210–220 cm lengths later known as “misery sticks.”
“I don’t know why we never thought about wider skis,” muses Sepp Renner, one of the early Bugaboos guides. “We wanted extra flotation, so we used longer skis. Sometimes you ignore the obvious (wider skis), eh?”
Skiers on Wallace, a run no longer skied due to glacial recession. HANS GMOSER.
It helped that most of the glaciers went a lot farther then and had fewer broken sections of icefalls, séracs and crevasses. The glacial recession we are seeing today is not a subtle change. Joe Jones, one of the first heli-skiers, remembers the “Bugaboo Glacier probably went twice as far.” As the glaciers have receded, their surfaces have deteriorated to a point where many sections that used to be safe to ski with abandon are now tricky, dangerous or impossible to navigate even with a rope and technical climbing equipment. A number of classic runs will never be skied again.
In the beginning, though, the snow was deep and stable, no one had ever done anything like heli-skiing before and there were no limits – so the guides and guests went out and found some. Every run started as high as they could land and went all the way to the valley bottom. Sepp Renner remembers, “We never even considered a high pickup.” Jones recalls once skiing Baystreet, a run now infamous for the deadliest avalanche in CMH history, from a summit landing so tiny that Hans crawled under the nose of the helicopter to get to the ski basket on the other side of the machine.
Early CMH guides. BRUNO ENGLER.
Thierry Cardon, a philosopher of mountain sport and one of CMH’s most experienced guides, known for his sharp intellect and for skiing alone with a cigarette dangling casually from his mouth, explains the contrast between then and now: “The runs we skied in the early days were sometimes totally different than today. There has been a mental shift in the way we use terrain. When I first lead guided, I tried to give people an Haute Route with a helicopter.”
It was about summits, big features, new terrain, long runs and adventure. There was an attitude of “let’s see if we can get down this.” The powder was not an end in itself as it is today, but rather a euphoric addition to a mountain odyssey.
To minimize helicopter time for the first few years, the guides chose the last run of the day to deposit the skiers on one of the logging roads near the lodge and to ski or be pulled by the Nodwell back to the camp. The last run was often the worst, with the fewest options. The sun had had plenty of time to melt the surface and the ensuing shadows froze it into a skier’s nightmare – breakable crust. To handle the worst breakable crust, an awkward manoeuvre called the kick turn is used. Compared to the smooth, rhythmic motion of turning skis with momentum, the kick turn is like bowling while wearing a straitjacket: one ski at a time is lifted and awkwardly pointed in the opposite direction, all the while tangling in ski poles, the snow, tree branches and anything and anyone else within the radius of the skis’ length. Jones remembers a day when he counted 150 kick turns on the last run of the day in bad conditions.
A textbook example of breakable crust. MARC PICHÉ.
For guests, it was an adventure from the moment you stepped off the plane until you dragged your weary legs back on a week later. Success was not assured. Hard work and exploring the unknown were guaranteed. Terrain was encountered every week that had never been skied before.
Everyone involved – guests, guides and staff alike – worked hard to make the exotic adventure happen. Hans wrote of the project: “It seems to be all work and there is nothing wrong with work. I believe the more you like to work, the more enjoyment you will get out of everything you do.”
Bob Geber was a rock climber from Bavaria who, like many European guides, came to Canada to work for Hans for “just one year.” He remembers the typical day in the Bugaboos:
We’d get up at 6 a.m. and the cabins would be freezing. There’d be frost on our sleeping bags. We’d build a fire and walk to the stream to get water in the dark. We cut steps in the snow to get to the stream but the steps would get icy. I remember busting my ass on those steps. Then we’d start fires in the wash shack and the cabins so people could get out of bed. We’d make breakfast, carry more firewood, set the tables and have breakfast ready at eight o’clock. Then we’d wash the dishes and have the first group ready to fly at nine. To begin with we had one cook, four guides and Jim Davies the pilot. That was it. After a storm we’d shovel the roof and the pathways. And it stormed a lot. At that time, guiding was the fun part – work was what happened after the skiing.
Jim Davies, the first heli-ski pilot. CMH ARCHIVES.
For no one did the experience just end when the ski boots came off. In the evening, singing and dancing were the name of the game. People brought their own instruments, and since CMH didn’t have a liquor licence, people also packed booze. They would take their bottles of choice into the kitchen while cleaning up and then party until Hans sent everyone to bed at ten o’clock.
The crew of guides, cook, pilot and mechanic slept on the floor in the kitchen building, leaving the cabins for the skiers. The sawmill cabins were the very definition of rustic. A pot-bellied stove and bunk beds were the extent of the furnishings and the two outhouses were popular buildings. Skiers had to supply their own sleeping bags – very warm ones. The other popular building was the sauna, built like the rest of the camp with simple stick-frame plywood construction. Open rafters gave the skiers a place to perch in the hottest part of the sauna. Kiwi remembers one occasion when the men had been sitting in the rafters when the women came in giggling and naked, unaware of the boys just above. The lads in the rafters turned red from sweat and mirth until one of them burst out laughing and sent everyone into hysterics.
The lifestyle of the sawmill camp didn’t last long. For three seasons it was a base camp for a group of people who knew they were involved in something unique in sport and time. Besides, they would have slept in holes in the ground if it meant they could ski the Bugaboos.
When Hans saw how people responded to this new experience of helicopter ski touring, and the way the numbers of skiers were growing exponentially each winter, he realized different lodging needed to be built but he was uncomfortable with any environmental impact of development in his beloved mountains. To help with his decisions, he fell back on a resource that proved to be the key to the success of his business: the perspective of his guests. He brought a group ski touring into the Bugaboos before the lodge was built, and while passing a knoll in the bottom of the valley, he pulled one of the skiers aside. It was Enga Thompson, an American in love with everything Hans held dear about the mountains and a veteran of half a dozen ski touring weeks with CMH.
Thompson remembers the day with pride at being chosen by Hans to provide counsel on this huge decision in his life. “Hans lagged behind the rest of the group for a while and then said, ‘Come over here for a minute, there is something I have to show you.’”
Hans broke trail into an opening with a spectacular view of Houndstooth and Bugaboo Spires piercing both the sky above and the steep Bugaboo glacier below. Old-growth forest framed the peaks and completed an alpine vista of rarely matched artistic balance and natural splendour. He turned to Thompson and said solemnly, “I could buy this piece of Crown land and build a lodge for helicopter ski touring. What do you think?”
Thompson understood why Hans chose her to answer this crucial question. She explains: “He knew how much I loved the mountains. We had so much in common in the fascination of the wild. He just wanted my opinion.”
Hans Gmoser camped at the base of Bugaboo Glacier during his first ski exploration of the Bugaboos. CMH ARCHIVES.
Hans was a committed environmentalist before, as he put it, “there ever was such a word.” His old friend and eventual competitor Mike Wiegele remembers Hans on early ski tours demanding minimalism and low-impact mountaineering. “There had to be hardship or it just wasn’t worth it for Hans,” Wiegele remembers. “He was a purist environmentalist even in (the early sixties).”
Years later, with a helicopter at his disposal and the tight schedule of a successful businessman, Hans would sometimes ski the 50 kilometres in to the Bugaboo lodge rather than be the only reason for a flight.
As usual, Hans chose his counsel carefully. Even when Thompson participated in the first week of heli-skiing with Brooks Dodge in April of 1965, a free trip as a gesture of thanks from the ever-thoughtful Hans Gmoser, she found it didn’t quite suit her approach to the mountains. She forever preferred ski touring, although she felt heli-skiing was “remarkably glamorous” and remembers it as being akin to “landing on, and then skiing off, the top of an ice cream cone.”
It is likely Hans felt Thompson would consider the prospect without being distracted by the novelty of the helicopter, and sought her advice because of her selfless perspective of utter respect for the mountain environment. She recalls the discussion through the haze of 43 years and a plane crash that left her with a wooden leg and a tenacious but patchy memory: “I don’t remember talking about the noise of the helicopter. I do remember talking about the small impact of the lodge compared to a ski resort with lifts, roads and all that. I was overjoyed!”
Philippe Delesalle and Hans Gmoser planning the Adamants Lodge, 1989. CMH ARCHIVES.
Thompson’s perspective may well have been a deciding factor for Hans. He told a group in Aspen, Colorado, in 1973: “I must admit that I wasn’t concerned about intruding into the wilderness. In fact, I felt this was an ideal way to show a lot more people these mountains and let them ski there. There was a minimum of permanent fixtures: only a lodge and storage facilities in the valley; all we would leave behind on the mountain were ski tracks.”
With Thompson’s blessing the idea passed Hans’s litmus test of minimizing impact on the natural world, and so Hans decided to build the lodge. The government issued CMH a lease to use the land for skiing for one year. Paying for it was another thing entirely, but again Hans turned to his guests. By offering them “skiers’ loans” paid back with 6 per cent interest and a ski trip for every $5,000, enough money was raised to nearly pay for the construction. The Calgary investment firm of Barlow & Mackenzie thought the project was interesting enough to pick up the rest of the bill. Some skiers put in so much money that they were unable to use all of their ski trips, and their sons and daughters cashed in on the investment. It wasn’t just wealthy people who anted up, either. Joe and Anne Jones borrowed $5,000 from their life insurance policy to invest in CMH. The enterprise was a business paid for by its customers and built almost entirely on feedback from its customers.
For the construction, Hans needed someone with an understanding of the mountains and the demands they would put on a structure, someone who could be trusted to build something effective and beautiful. It had to be designed to withstand heavy snowfall and be built quickly during the short summer while the road was free of snow. He turned to his old adventure partner, Philippe Delesalle, who by this point was well into a successful career as an architect. Delesalle remembers the moment with a chuckle and a shake of his head: “Hans just said, ‘Philippe, give me a lodge’ and then left on one of his promotions or something, with no direction whatsoever.” Added the architect, “He knew when he asked me that I would not give him an Austrian lodge or a French lodge, but a Canadian one.”
Delesalle designed the lodge with the simple ideal “to live above the snow, looking out at the mountains.”
After everything the two had been through, from hunger on the icefields traverse to hypoxia on Mt. Logan, and Delesalle’s expertise in things Hans knew little about, Hans put his lodge design entirely in Delesalle’s hands. But when Hans was presented with plans that included indoor toilets, he balked. “What’s wrong with using an outhouse?” Delesalle remembers Hans arguing.
With some trouble, Delesalle and the rest of the team eventually convinced Hans of the benefits of indoor plumbing. “We told him the kind of people who are going to come heli-skiing are not going to like using an outhouse – and eventually he agreed.”
The Bugaboo lodge opened in February of 1968 and changed the name of the game. It wasn’t fancy, but it was the only heli-ski lodge on the planet. Leo remembers, “When we started, luxury was the furthest thing from our minds. We thought what we were selling was outside. We had eight people sleeping in a room, snoring and farting, but we always had good food.”
Lynne Seidler, who eventually married Grillmair, had got the job as cook after being interviewed by Gmoser right from his hospital bed after his crevasse fall. She was one of the first cooks in the Bugaboos and an energetic woman who helped create a die-hard work ethic in the business. Lynne remembers those first accommodations as being “army style”: “There were eight bunks per room with rough cedar walls. We’d get horrible splinters making the beds, so we started wearing leather gloves to make beds. The refrigerator was a well-insulated room painted silver on the inside.”
Most of the food was brought in during the fall, before the road was drifted closed, so everything was canned or dried. The selection was a far cry from the culinary excellence of modern lodges, where chefs and bakers have access to fresh ingredients every week and are able to craft meals of a complexity and aesthetic quality that would be impossible without frequent resupply. As cook, Lynne was in charge of making the supply appetizing without wasting anything. “Everything was canned except a case of apples and oranges brought in each week.”
By then the sport was being called heli-skiing, and the idea of using the helicopter to connect ski tours had been scratched in favour of the burning interest in skiing as much fresh powder as the best helicopter of the day could access. Fortunately, helicopter technology was advancing rapidly and almost perfectly in sync with the yearly increase in the sport’s popularity. Rudi Gertsch, one of the original CMH guides, and current owner of Purcell Helicopter Skiing out of Golden, British Columbia, says it was the state of the helicopter industry at the time that made the whole idea feasible: “The price of the helicopter is what made it all possible to begin with. It cost $55 per day to hire a helicopter, plus fuel, which was cheap, too.”
Hans Gmoser rock climbing in the Bugaboos. CMH ARCHIVES.
Today, CMH has a dozen different areas, three private lodges for groups of 11, and nine larger lodges where 30 to 40 skiers can be found living their ski fantasy. Every area has between 150 and 350 named runs and the sheer numbers of ski tracks on the mountainsides are enough to reduce avalanche hazard by breaking up dangerous slabs of snow before they build to an unstable mass. While the ownership of CMH has changed several times, and other adventurous entrepreneurs have carved out pieces of the region’s idyllic terrain for helicopter, snowcat and ski touring operations, the thrill of skiing in the Columbias is the same as it was that April in 1965 when the first heli-ski group caught an effortless ride to the top.
Kitt Redhead, a 27-year-old assistant ski guide in 2007, described skiing in the Columbias as being “like swimming in a lake your whole life, and then having someone take you to the ocean!”
Roko Koell, one of the most influential modern guides, has a way of explaining things like no one else: “In this business happiness is like peeing your pants; everyone sees it but only you feel the warmth.”
The magic of the remote alpine lodge in the Columbias is far more than just access to the finest skiing on the planet. Hans was quoted in enRoute magazine in 1978 as saying: “The gratifying thing is that when you put a group of people together in a place like the Bugaboo lodge, for instance, there are no social barriers. They are all on the same level. They come here for one reason – to ski deep snow, to ski in wild country that is otherwise inaccessible, to be thrilled by the vistas that the helicopter offers them.”
David Barry, the current CEO of CMH, has noticed the same phenomenon today: “People’s badges and stripes of life don’t matter when they walk through the door of the lodge. It’s really refreshing for them. It’s this weird, egalitarian, sexy culture where we can do things we don’t experience in everyday life.”
Approaching the Bugaboo spires during the first ski exploration of the area. HANS GMOSER.
Hans saw this appeal clearly, and did everything he could to make it a chance to get away from everyday life for everyone, from the rich and famous to the worker who saved for years to live his skiing dream. More than one guide remembers Hans giving them specific instructions when royalty or well-known people were in the lodge to watch out for other skiers hounding the icon about their fame, and to politely distract them with the wonders of the mountains, a conversation about skiing, or anything to keep everyone on a holiday. This isn’t hard to do; deep in the wilderness on an epic powder day, it is the most natural thing in the world to treat royalty as a fellow powder hound. When the King of Spain, Juan Carlos, was visiting, he was in an off-balance position during the heli-huddle, the intimate crouch everyone assumes while the helicopter is landing just a metre away, and one of the staff who was skiing that day saw an opportunity to give him a little extra face shot. She reached over and pushed his head into the snow. The King came up laughing, spitting snow, and loving the fact that someone had played with him. On the other end of the spectrum, a mailman from New York had saved money for years to take a once in a lifetime trip to the legendary Bugaboos. On the second day, he crashed and broke his leg. Leo Grillmair, understanding the man’s heartbreak, invited him back free of charge to try again after his leg healed.
While changes in guest needs and business culture eventually introduced private rooms, wireless Internet and other comforts far from the eight-person bunk rooms of the original Bugaboo lodge, the feeling and experience have remained much the same. Keeping people together after the skiing is part of the magic. Hans was acutely aware of this and went to great lengths to avoid the hotel syndrome where everyone drifts to their rooms when the activity is over. No televisions and no telephones in the bedrooms keeps everyone in the living area of the lodge making friends and telling stories a little longer. Hans was such a believer in the shared experience that, for a while, he enforced a rule of no light bulbs stronger than 40 watts in the bedrooms so that people would be less inclined to disappear to their rooms and read a book.
It worked, this Hans Gmoser school of mountain adventure – an experience built on participation. Every moment, from the first morning bell until you pull yourself away from the warmth of the fireplace at night, is involved in some way with the skiing experience. “This is the best thing about CMH,” says guide Roko Koell. “When it is mid-week (on a seven-day ski trip) people forget what day of the week it is; this is the key.”
Groups that meet as strangers become lifelong friends and for decades later they book weeks together to relive the experience with the same group of people. So potent is this spell of the remote heli-ski area with the intimate lodge atmosphere that Bob Geber, currently the longest-standing CMH guide, says, “If a guest asks me about a new area, we always encourage it because we know they’ll come back. They almost always do. This is the best.”
Providing the complete mountain experience of the remote lodges is a complicated project. “It’s about giving 130 per cent service to the guests in mountain style,” explains Bobbie Burns area manager Bruce Howatt. “It’s not a five-star overdone style, but like if you brought friends to your house.”
Working for CMH then was – and according to many current staff, still is – just as much if not more of a life-changing experience as being a guest. When Fran Gallagher, who worked in the office in Banff, first travelled to the Bugaboos to gain some understanding of what she was selling, she had minimal ski experience and didn’t know how to conserve energy on the towrope behind the Nodwell snow machine. In the middle of the trip, she noticed movement in her peripheral vision. She looked over to see a huge moose running next to her. The creature’s unusual and awkward double-jointed gait, which allows moose to move better than other large animals in deep snow, gave its legs a wind-milling appearance as it churned alongside her. While demonstrating the moment during the 40th anniversary celebration of Canadian heli-skiing at the Bugaboo lodge in 2005, her head was thrown back by the speed of the snowmobile and held at an awkward sideways angle, and her eyes were the size of ski pole baskets. The moment was ingrained in her memory as if it happened yesterday.
Within a few years, the popularity of skiing in the Bugaboos forced a crucial decision: whether to expand the Bugaboos operation or open another area somewhere else. With the Bugaboo skiers utilizing one small corner of the Purcell Range, and the Purcells just one of four huge ranges that make up the Columbia and Cariboo mountains, it would have been short-sighted to arrange accommodations for enough people to make moguls in the Bugaboos while there were oceans of untouched snow in other parts of the range. By then, it was clear that the commodity of most value was fresh snow, not the quirky name or the dramatic spires, so it was an easy decision to grow into another area where new peaks could be explored, leaving the fresh snow to just 44 skiers. This influenced the eventual tenure system for allocating commercial ski terrain and became the model for CMH heli-skiing: When demand exceeds capacity, open an entirely different area. Keep it intimate. Keep everyone skiing fresh snow.
With no television, phone or internet, and 40W bulbs in their rooms, early heli-ski guests enjoyed one another’s company. Today, the demand for connectivity has brought internet and modern communication into the lodges, but the scene is still much the same. CMH ARCHIVES.
In the beginning, this was easy to do. The interior of British Columbia was desperately in need of tourism, so much so that in Wilmer, a small town south of the Bugaboos, one entrepreneur took photos of apples tied to the branches of pine trees and sent them to Britain in an advertising campaign to tempt tourists to the orchards of the Purcells.
The Columbias and the Cariboos were wide open, and every community welcomed commerce. Finding another sawmill camp in a skiing epicentre was not likely to happen, but the growing popularity of heli-skiing required a move. Hans’s ideal was to find a place to build another lodge, but the business couldn’t yet afford the construction and more skiers wanted the experience than the Bugaboos could accommodate.
Valemount is a town of a thousand people nestled between the Cariboo and Monashee mountains, 120 kilometres west of Jasper. The town was just big enough to have a motel, the Sarak, and half a dozen other businesses. It was an ideal location where a lot of great ski terrain could be explored until another remote lodge could be built.
The culture was that of a rugged logging town where the bar scene made the modern skier’s bar antics look like teatime at grandma’s house. “We saw some awful fights,” remembers Kiwi Gallagher. “The skiers stayed out of it, but it was great storytelling material for them – powder skiing in backwoods BC and watching these wild loggers knock each other out.”
In the spring of 1969, CMH began skiing in the Cariboos. With this move, Hans’s management responsibilities meant he couldn’t just stay in the Bugaboos. Leo took over management of the Bugaboos and CMH started its own competition. Now skiers had a choice of areas to heli-ski, and the terrain of the Cariboos, while lacking the granite cathedrals of the spires, offered a wider variety of ski terrain and more options for skiing when conditions were poor.
At the same time, another skier was doing the groundwork to open his own heli-ski business. Hans Gmoser and Mike Wiegele had met on a bus to Banff. Wiegele was fresh from Austria and, with poor English at the time, was on the lookout for anyone who might speak German. He recalls, “You could pick out the Austrian skier pretty quick.”
Hans’s down jacket and ski pants stood out against the heavy winter parkas on the rest of the passengers. Wiegele approached Hans and they became fast friends. Like any two young ski bums, they went skiing. They convalesced and rehabilitated from broken legs together. Wiegele’s background in ski racing and Hans’s in mountaineering made them a capable team in the mountains. Hans was best man at Wiegele’s wedding, and when Hans and Margaret got married, Wiegele was the usher. They had adventures together: climbing in the Bugaboos, ski film projects, ski touring in Little Yoho, with Jim Davies’s plane on the Cariboos’ Canoe Glacier with ski legend Jim McKonkey, and numerous attempts at a ski traverse from Panorama to Rogers Pass.
In the mid-sixties, Wiegele worked as a ski instructor at Lake Louise, but he had dreams of building a ski area and running his own operation. He explains: “I was tired of management who didn’t know the difference between a rock and a snowflake. I was looking for independence. Opportunity.”
Mike heli-skied for the first time with Hans in the Bugaboos, and as a natural entrepreneur, it didn’t take him long to scratch his dream of lift towers in favour of rotor blades. At the same time, CMH was outgrowing the Bugaboos.
Wiegele started his business in 1970, barely a year after CMH first offered Cariboos heli-skiing. Both operations were based out of the Sarak Motel. A standoff of Western-movie proportions unfolded around the Sarak. Considering how much terrain there was to choose from, the conflict reached the ridiculous.
An article appeared in a German newspaper stating Wiegele’s was the first heli-ski business, infuriating Hans and prompting other articles in response. According to Wiegele, Hans originally said he wasn’t interested in skiing in the Cariboos. When Wiegele was at the printers’ one day to order his first brochure and saw the CMH brochure advertising Cariboo skiing he was furious. Mike felt this was a breach of their close friendship, and the atmosphere in Valemount grew tense and fraught with machismo to the extreme. Both men were protecting their interests, but their friendship was a casualty.
Wiegele remembers everyone behaving “like a bunch of teenagers.” He laughs frequently while recounting the memory: “We’d have people get ready as fast as possible. You could see their (CMH’s) rotor going, you could see our rotor going, and I’d be telling the pilot Fly! Fly! He’d be telling me to shut up and let the machine warm up.” While the conflict is legendary in the ski industry, the two operators also helped each other. There were no long-range radios at the time, so the other’s helicopter was the first on the scene if there was a need for assistance.
Guests arrived with reservations for a seat with CMH, only to be recruited away by Wiegele. Heated words were exchanged on numerous occasions, but the conflict always stopped short of violence. Guides forgot backpacks in their haste to get the helicopter into the air. Helicopters took shortcuts to get to a landing more quickly, and once, two helicopters approached the same landing from either side of a ridge. At the last instant before a collision, the pilots managed to pull away in different directions and avoid a deadly and potentially industry-destroying crash. Skiers would arrive at the top of a run to find it tracked out by the competition. There was no regulation of heli-skiing, and things escalated to a point where both Hans and Mike were writing letters to the government asking for intervention. It was a dangerous time of young egos and wild mountains, but luckily no accidents occurred as a direct result of the conflict.
The guides managed to maintain a keen professionalism even within the lawless business that had zero government regulation at the time. To this day, what is good for one heli-ski operator is good for the others and vice versa. Realizing this, Martin Heuberger, one of Wiegele’s lead guides who eventually moved back to Austria and today sells CMH trips as a ski travel agent, and Hermann Frank, one of the CMH guides and the area manager at the time, met behind their bosses’ backs to plan the day to avoid conflict and maximize skiing quality. Even with such cooperation, it was difficult to share plans, because nothing was named in the unexplored wilderness of the Cariboos. And when the guides tried to use names, each team had different names for the same mountain feature or the same names for different features. Jeff Boyd, a guide and doctor, suggested the groups share their maps to ease the communication issue and facilitate rescues.
The lumbering machine of government was too slow to remedy the situation, as area-based tenures – government permits issued to a single heli-ski operator to use a particular sector of the mountains – weren’t issued until the early eighties, so the guides had to sort it out themselves. Sepp Renner recalls the scene as relatively amicable: “During the day there was tension, but at night at the bar we all got along. It was me and Hermann Frank who convinced Mike to go to Blue River.”
In 1973 Wiegele decided he liked the look of the Monashee and Cariboo mountains on either side of Blue River, a short drive south of Valemount. “I hired a plane to fly over Blue River,” he recalled, “and when I saw the mountains from the air, it was like a book opening up in front of me.” Wiegele moved out of Valemount and never looked back. In 1974 CMH completed the Cariboo lodge, 18 kilometres up the Canoe River from town.
By this point, the friendship between Hans and Mike had been changed forever. While Wiegele carved out a huge tenure in the Cariboos and Monashees, developed ski guiding in Blue River and created his own ski guide training program, the Canadian Ski Guide Association, Hans developed the profession of mountain guiding in North America, forging relationships among the various guide services, international guiding standards committees and land managers, and helped create the association now called Helicat Canada to give helicopter and cat-skiing operations a common voice. Even today, with Canada’s commonly accepted stature in the International Federation of Mountain Guide Associations (IFMGA) as the international leader in ski guiding, Wiegele maintains a fierce independence and prefers to keep a comfortable distance from the rest of the Canadian skiing industry while managing the second biggest heli-ski outfit in the country from an expansive log heli-ski village in Blue River. Regarding the rift between the two industry leaders, Wiegele explains, “We were always friends, but we were just too proud to express it.”
Even in the end, their paths were closely parallel. They both are inductees in the Canadian Skiing Hall of Fame, and within two months after Hans’s fatal bicycle crash in 2006, Wiegele was riding his bike down the road from Mt. Robson when he ran into a boulder and tumbled headlong at high speed into a talus field, narrowly missing jagged boulders and escaping with his life and a couple of broken ribs. In describing the near miss he says, “If I had fallen just a little to one side or the other . . . ” and his voice trails off into silence.
Two CMH guides started the next heli-ski operations. In 1974 Rudi Gertsch and Peter Schlunegger, schoolmates from Wengen in Switzerland and two of the original Bugaboos guides, decided they wanted to open a heli-ski business of their own. For a year, they worked together in Revelstoke before Gertsch moved to Golden.
The sudden appearance of competition was a hard thing for Hans to stomach after years of being the unrivalled king of the Columbias. Near Revelstoke, Bob Geber was running CMH operations in the same area where Schlunegger was running his groups. Geber remembers the time, laughing: “Peter would go flag a landing with his flags and I’d go pull them and put in CMH flags. Then Peter would go pull our flags and put in his own again. There was a time when I had claimed the biggest heli-ski tenure ever, but eventually we agreed to share it.”
All four operators were jockeying for position in the mountains. “We got to this point where we had all pushed really hard,” remembers Gertsch. “So we all sat down and said, ‘We’re all guides.’ Somebody has to do something.”
It was the beginning of what became the countrywide association of Helicat Canada, but for the first meeting Hans refused to attend. Gertsch explains, “He thought we were all ganging up on him. For the second meeting I tried really hard to convince Hans it was a good thing. He came. In those days we weren’t competitors – we were guides.”
Gertsch had gotten married in 1972 and was tired of working away from home. He explains his reason for opening a new business as part family needs and part a change in the business: “I tried to convince Hans there were places we could do heli-skiing and stay in town, but Hans was convinced of the value of staying and skiing for a whole week from a remote lodge. The CMH shareholders were putting pressure on us. They wanted more numbers and wanted us to ski with bigger groups. At one point, Hans got tired of them pressuring him to ski with bigger groups, so he hired a Sikorsky and took 36 shareholders skiing in the same group. It was chaos. After that, they let him keep the small groups.”
Putting more skiers in each lodge would have used up the fresh snow too quickly and decreased the intimate atmosphere of the lodges, but the shareholders wanted more business to get return on their investment, so the pressure was on to expand into different areas. With profit a requirement, and four heli-ski operators in lively competition, the age of innocence of heli-skiing was officially over. Gertsch explains it simply: “The shareholders changed it. Hans had no choice.”
An avalanche fatality in 1974 accentuated the change. The lofty black and white spires of the Bugaboos and “that effortless kind of powder where the skis just go wherever you look” remain the same, but the magical years of heli-skiing with total abandon in an endless mountain range were over.