Every square millimetre of the surface of your body can feel the snow flowing past. TOPHER DONAHUE.
3
Again we come to the end of a great ski trail. Such a ski trail is many trails, and neither of those trails is ever the same. Those trails are not bound to any lift line or fenced in by trees. They are a free expression of sheer delight by people who carve them into the snow. To them it doesn’t matter whether they ski good or bad because these trails will be gone again tomorrow, covered by the ever-shifting snows of the high mountains.
— Hans Gmoser, film narration for Ski Trails
The first time most of us experience the thrill of skiing, it is on a groomed slope or packed trail with the snow whizzing past. It’s an undeniable rush, the only contact with the snow being the unfeeling bases of our skis. Then, at some point, we ski in softer snow, where the sensation of movement creeps over our boot tops and a few more of our nerve endings come in contact with the passing snow, adding another dimension to the feel of speed and excitement in skiing and forever making us look to the weather report before a ski trip to see if we’d be lucky enough to score a powder day. Even a few centimetres of fresh snow are enough to change the skiing sensation from moving over snow, to moving through the snow. It’s as good as it gets. Or is it?
At some point, in a ski bar or around the table, with a group of excited faces stained tan in the shape of goggles, we hear the words champagne powder and bottomless snow float past. We begin to fantasize about what it would be like to ski snow so dry and light that it is more like the essence of snow than the element itself. We dream about snow so deep that touching the bottom with a ski or pole is like trying to touch the bottom of the swimming pool at the deep end. It is a phenomenon that exists in-bounds at a ski area only during the biggest storm cycles – in which case the area is often closed anyway. While skiing in bottomless fluff, every square millimetre of the surface of your body can feel the snow flowing past. All the senses are heightened during the experience. Snow hisses past the ears, eyes strain for visibility, wet skin and sweat flavour the tongue as your skis lose contact with anything supportive, and instead of carving and sliding, skiing takes on a sensation of flying. “It’s like someone’s holding you up by the hat!” says Mike Welch, the manager of Galena, smiling like a kid on Christmas morning.
Every square millimetre of the surface of your body can feel the snow flowing past. TOPHER DONAHUE.
Finding such snow is the problem. Before heli-skiing, venturing into the backcountry and skiing up the hill first was the only way to consistently experience these conditions, but this requires more effort and mountain savvy than is reasonable for the average downhill skier. Even considering the difficulties and danger, every year the number of backcountry skiers increases dramatically as more people join the quest for virgin powder. Heli-skiing captured the fascination of the world’s skiers not because of the remote mountains, the comfortable and remote accommodations, the fast machines or the badge of ski connoisseur it indelibly leaves on those who try it, but because it offers an easy way to ski vast quantities of this dreamy snow in its most natural form. Take a base of bottomless snow and add a frosting of champagne powder and fast, effortless access to rip thousands of vertical metres every few hours, and you have the recipe for a ski experience worthy of obsession, possession and addiction.
The root of the addiction is the fresh track. Skiing through fresh snow is ultimately a destructive process. During a snowstorm, billions of geometrically perfect snowflakes pile one on top of the other like the most delicate house of cards ever made. The foam on a cappuccino or the head on your favourite ale is typically about 20 per cent liquid, while powder snow can be as little as 3 per cent liquid and is often about 5 to 7 per cent in the Columbia mountains. While skiing in the lightest powder, the stuff ski guides call cold smoke, the force of passing through it with such violence, relative to the fragile structure, creates enough displacement through the snow to cause snow crystals to lift from the surface well ahead of the skier.
Pile up enough of this kind of snow, and skiing takes on an entirely different dimension and would be considered a different sport if it were not for the similar equipment and technique; the sensation is utterly unlike skiing on a firm surface. The trouble is that each skier leaves behind massive devastation on a microscopic scale. Crystals are pulverized, the house of cards crumbles to its foundations and, on all but the most epic days when tracks fall in on themselves as they’re created, a skier who crosses the track gets a very different sensation than the first skier. Skiing the chowder left behind by a thousand greedy powder hounds can still be fun, but it is nothing like the feeling of the high-velocity dance with the untouched perfection of freshly fallen snow.
One headline in the Montreal Gazette called powder skiing “writing your name on the face of the gods.” It is a heady feeling to make such a dramatic mark on the face of the Earth in the name of fun and have it matter not a whit. Surfers send plumes of water into the sky and carve their parabolas across the face of a wave, but their tracks only last a few seconds; while skiers take a flawless surface and carve it like a sculptor shapes stone into a personal three-dimensional expression of fun and skill. Leaving tracks in the snow silently says, “I did that. I was there. I have an effect on things. I am real.” In a world where we strain to make order from chaos, powder skiing is a chance to shred something to ribbons with the effect lasting only as long as the calm weather before the next storm.
Heli-skiing contains elements of the most popular addictions, and it’s not just the white powder. “Once you’re hooked on heli-skiing, anything else is just a little less interesting,” one skier explained.
Jeff Bellis stays just ahead of the “cold smoke,” the kind of snow that is so light and so dry that it behaves more like smoke than water. MARC PICHÉ.
It’s an experience, like a narcotic high, that only exists while it’s happening. Nothing can be taken away from it and the user starts to dread the end before it’s even over. The difference is that it doesn’t kill brain cells, and some skiers claim it saved their lives. Roy Ostberg, a heli-ski fanatic who spends several weeks each season both heli-skiing and ski touring, says: “It’s cheap compared to the medical bills I would have had by now if I hadn’t changed my life because of skiing. I was overweight and headed down an ugly road. Then I discovered heli-skiing, started training and taking care of myself and turned my life around.” When compared to most other addictions that tend to push families and friends apart, heli-skiing brings families and friends closer together. Skier Diane Soucheray explains it simply, “This is where my father turned into my buddy.”
Even world-class athletes are awed to the point of distraction by the magic of heli-skiing. After tasting great conditions on the Red Baron run in Galena, 20-time Wimbledon winner Martina Navratilova skied up to her guide, Mike Welch, and said: “I’d have given up tennis ten years earlier had I known about this!”
A German skier named Steffanie spent a week heli-skiing in the Adamants and promptly fell in love with the deep powder of the Columbias. She explained, “I was scared at first, but after the second day I was completely addicted.”
After returning home to Munich, she sold her business, left her husband and moved to Canmore to be closer to the source of her newfound passion. Ironically, the next time she went heli-skiing she broke both legs in a high-speed crash, but she rehabilitated in Canada without rescinding her commitment to live in the Rockies.
Even the guides, who ski every day, acknowledge the addiction. “CMH pays me $250 a day to serve dinner. I do the skiing for free,” says Bernie Wiatzka, a Galena guide, giggling and smiling from ear to ear.
“Powder,” says Roko Koell, the gleam of a pusher in his eye, “is a powerful drug. The perfect powder I had twice in all these years. Subconsciously it is what I am striving for all the time. Once, I was on Tango in the Monashees in 1989 after it had snowed for seven weeks straight. Even before reaching speed you couldn’t see. Before starting I’d look down the hill and guess I had 75 turns before reaching the trees, then I’d ski blind for 75 turns and stop. When we stopped it took two minutes for the snow to settle enough so we could see again! The only way to guide was to yell. You couldn’t see the others – you couldn’t even see yourself!”
For skiing, this kind of snow is euphoria, but for guiding, it’s nerve-wracking. Bruce Howatt remembers a day in the Bobbie Burns when the snow was so deep that he and the other guides were afraid someone would drown. “When a skier would fall, they’d just disappear,” he recalls, laughing, “but somehow, everyone did alright.”
When conditions are good, skiers push themselves to the limits of connective tissue and financial solvency to keep skiing. I heard one guest on a powder day say, “I’m on my 12th Advil of the day and I’m doing great.”
At the bottom of a powder run in Kootenay, Bill Morck, a skier from Colorado who was planning to try heli-skiing just once, said, “All I can say is my kids better get scholarships,” and gazed absently into the distance with a strange sheepish grin on his face.
That same day, another skier said, “I don’t want to, but I could die now. That was a lifetime day.”
One Saturday, after a big snow in the Monashees, a skier was trying to convince a friend to stay another week instead of returning home to their family: “You can always have another kid, but the skiing is never going to be this good again!”
The addicts accept their fluffy vice happily. Many groups return year after year to the same lodge, the same runs, and have the same mind-blowing ski-fest every time and are now introducing their children and great-grandchildren to the stuff. High-powered businessmen make an exception to their puritanical work ethic for their ski trips with CMH. “Our whole year revolves around this trip,” a clothing magnate said about the company’s annual group visit. “If business needs to be done during this time – forget about it.”
Heli-skiing also has elements of the gambling addiction: getting the best week of the year is a rush of luck and makes it easy to play again, while getting the worst week of the year just makes you want to try again at whatever cost. What are the odds of winning? According to Thierry Cardon, “If you come ten times, two will be exceptional, worth the cost of all ten. Six weeks will be good, worth the price of admission, but not exceptional. Two will be total shit – not worth paying for. But if you’re not willing to gamble because of the possible bad weeks, you’ll never get the exceptional.”
During the sixties, the wisdom was that, 70 per cent of the time, the skiing in the Bugaboos is better than anywhere else on Earth. The other 30 per cent was truly awful. One journalist called the bad skiing “a nightmare of Alfred Hitchcock proportions. Or perhaps Hans Gmoser proportions.”
Long dry periods are not too bad, as the glaciers take on a Styrofoam consistency that carves well under ski edges, and the scenery alone during high pressure systems is worth the trip. Windstorms turn the high country into an unskiable maelstrom, but as long as the helicopter can fly, there are usually protected powder stashes to be found. Big dumps are a mixed blessing; sometimes they ground the helicopter, but the anticipation of what awaits after the skies clear makes the downtime buzz with anticipation.
At the end of the day, it is just a matter of a few minutes’ flight back to the lodge. PAUL LAZARSKI.
The worst is a weather phenomenon called the Pineapple Express. It is so bad that guides don’t even like to mention it by name; they call it “the P-word,” as if Mother Nature were an illiterate child who will get a bad idea if they say the wrong word. It truly wrecks the skiing. Warm, wet systems can pour off the Pacific from the southwest at any time of the year, dumping centimetres of rain on the highest peaks and turning fields of glorious powder into repulsive slush within a matter of hours. A cold front on the tail of the Pineapple Express freezes the surface into a sheet of solid ice that shatters like glass under a landing helicopter. The resulting shards can be picked up and peered through like a windowpane. Skiing on such a surface is a bone-rattling experience and, while fascinating in the challenge and beauty of interacting with the glistening medium, it’s a world apart from the dreamy softness of powder skiing glorified by magazines and heli-ski marketing campaigns.
Then there is the truly diabolical breakable crust. Skiers tell stories of experts who can carve perfect turns in any snow, but according to ski guides, such a skier is a myth. At some point, there is a breakable crust that will send anyone tumbling. That point is where the surface almost supports a skier’s weight but fails catastrophically at the slightest movement. It’s akin to skating on a pond of ice that is too thin: no amount of skill can save you. Luckily, a helicopter is a great tool for minimizing the exposure to such snow, but all it takes is a few metres to humiliate even the most seasoned experts.
The third element of the addiction in this sport is the combination of freedom and responsibility inspired by wilderness skiing. Making decisions about where to ski and how fast to go are inherent in any skiing experience, but the big-mountain element makes the price of a mistake that much greater. There is nothing a guide can do to prevent a reckless skier from tumbling into a tree well or a big crevasse or falling off a cliff or over a fragile cornice if such a skier throws their own personal judgment to the wind, ignores the guide’s instructions and skis with total abandon. As a result, the vast majority of people ski their best while heli-skiing, and each individual contributes to the overall safety record of the sport, a record that is surprisingly good considering the numbers of people skiing in the rugged mountain terrain of the Columbias every day all winter long with opportunities for self-destruction on every run. Heli-skiing with a big, experienced operation is statistically the safest way to ski backcountry powder. Nevertheless, the impression of risk in the rugged environment capped with huge cornices, draped with avalanche debris and dotted with minefields of tree wells is enough to raise the consciousness of the average person far above the level required in daily life in the modern world, where danger has been eliminated or disguised by layer after layer of routine and infrastructure. This awareness is refreshing and awakens something vital within us that we crave awfully until the next time we can leave our padded, signposted and regulated world and get back into the mountains.
Skiers play a game of timing in hopes of getting those exceptional weeks and avoiding the “nightmare of Hans Gmoser proportions,” but the truth is that either extreme can happen at any time, and every part of the season has something worth experiencing. During early season, the days are short and the snow is cold and dry. For Mike Welch, manager of CMH Galena, December is his favourite month: “The snow is bottomless. Twenty centimetres fall every night. The days are short. It’s kind of dark all day. I love the whole ambience! We come home wet. Our gloves are soaked. Our zippers are frozen. I just love it!”
Most guests prefer mid-season because of the fear that a dry autumn could limit the skiing, but often the early season has the lightest powder of the year. Also, the snowpack is often simpler to evaluate for avalanche hazard because it is relatively similar no matter which direction a ski run faces, so the guides have more fun because their primary job of keeping everyone safe is a lot easier. This means unlimited options for skiing. Later in the season, changing weather wreaks havoc on various aspects, leaving a slightly different snowpack on every slope. In the spring, sun bakes the snow layers into a single, stable mass, but the intense rays quickly turn the surface into a slushy bog. In December, the daily tours often touch down on runs facing every direction on the compass, while during the rest of the year, each day’s program is more often limited in one way or another by snow stability or quality.
High season is January through March, when most of the spaces in CMH sell out a year in advance. Hans defined excellent skiing as “all day long from top to bottom, the face shots stop just shy of the chin.” For this kind of skiing, the consistently deep snowpack in even the driest years make mid-season the best gamble for scoring a week of powder skiing. However, it is also the season most at risk of having days of poor or impossible skiing because of the dreaded P-word. In mid-winter it takes a heavy snow to heal the wound, but by springtime the warmer days quickly turn the disaster of a Pineapple Express into a bonanza of velvety corn skiing.
These days, spring skiing is almost a forgotten word in heli-skiing, but originally, heli-skiing was only offered in the spring. In 1966 the CMH heli-ski season didn’t start until March 20. Longer days, buried crevasses and a generally more stable snowpack made for more options and gave the groups time to ski home at the end of the day. As demand and confidence in the system grew, the guides extended the season into December, but spring skiing still has its merits and Hans was always perplexed as to why more people don’t want to ski late in the season. For many years, CMH ran heli-ski weeks through late May until the demand changed to the point where most skiers wanted mid-winter bookings and effectively changed the season of the sport.
Besides the obvious advantage of après ski beverages in the sun on the lodge deck, there is also the stuff some guides call the best snow of all: corn. Corn snow forms during cycles of hot days and cold nights when the surface freezes into an icy slab at night, and the strong rays from the spring sun loosen the surface into a layer of small kernels of forgiving snow, creating a medium that is effortless to ski at adrenaline-pumping speeds. After a few short hours however, corn snow turns to repulsive mush that grabs skis like quicksand. A day of ski touring in the spring often ends with a challenging thrash through soggy snow to get to a less solar aspect, or a short day to avoid afternoon avalanches released by the sun. The temporary nature of good corn snow makes the helicopter the ultimate corn-harvesting tool. On a corn day, the lead guide will plan the trip to hit all the right aspects, following the sun, starting on east-facing slopes in the morning and then moving to south, west and finally north at the end of the day. Corn snow is easier to ski than the most perfectly groomed piste, and the skis seem to turn with no more energy than a thought. The ideal spring week includes both powder and corn skiing as the high- and low-pressure systems battle for the season.
Both terrible and fantastic skiing is possible at any time, and any skiing is better than a day in the office. The worst scenario is what happened to one poor soul after he arrived in Valemount: as he stepped off the bus at the helipad for the flight into the Cariboos he slipped on a patch of ice and blew out his knee. He turned around and limped back onto the bus for a truly sad ride back to Calgary.
Jim MCConkey, Hans Gmoser and Mike Wiegele exploring the Bugaboos. CMH ARCHIVES.
Skiing quality in the Columbias is so often fantastic that it quickly makes ski snobs out of many skiers. Like a junkie with high tolerance for their drug of choice, many powder skiers become quickly bored with less than perfect snow, irritable about delays in the skiing program, and only high doses of the white powder will put them back in a good mood.
Stefan Blochum, a German guide who has worked in the Gothics for several seasons, remembers finally getting to ski the legendary Run of the Century. It was perfect powder, and at the bottom he was thoroughly excited and waited for his group to show some appreciation. The only words spoken were from one guy who said, “I noticed the light was better half an hour ago.” Stefan remembers, “I almost choked.”
For most skiers, it would have been the experience of a lifetime, but for the junkies in the group, it wasn’t even a buzz. This kind of skier in the throes of powder withdrawal often puts unrealistic demands on guides. During a week of particularly icy conditions, one skier from Aspen irritably told a guide, “In Colorado, this would dry out and turn to powder overnight!”
Frustrated, the guide replied, “Let’s put a block of ice in the freezer overnight and see if we have a nice pile of powder in the morning!”
At other times, it can be raining to the mountain tops during the worst Pineapple Express of the year and someone will lean over to a guide during dinner and say, “A good guide could find us some powder snow on a high, north-facing bowl.”
One skier brought his family, including two small kids, to the Monashees and I was fortunate to ski with them through trees cloaked so heavily with snow that not a single branch or pine needle was visible. Guides call the formations “snow ghosts” and they take on ghoulish shapes and create a fantasyland for adults and children alike. Watching the kids revel in the experience was refreshing, while seeing the father wrestle with his inner snow junkie was shocking. At times he complained to the guide about delays in the skiing that were simply due to his own children struggling with tough terrain and deep snow. In the end, the kids skied great and everyone had fun, but just before leaving the Monashees the father turned to me and said, “It was great to get the kids out there, but some of the time I just couldn’t control the powder pig in me.”
Roger Laurilla dancing with snow ghosts in the Monashees. TOPHER DONAHUE.
Hans and Leo had started guiding ski tours in 1955, and many of the original heli-skiers were long-time backcountry skiers Hans recruited to give helicopter access a try. The first heli-skiing was a ski mountaineering experience, albeit in really deep snow. Skiers signed up for an adventure in the woods and paid little attention to how steep or deep the skiing was going to be. The CMH marketing reflected the same philosophy. The 1970 brochure advertises “helicopter ski touring” and makes no mention of the ski quality, but has a terse paragraph on the experience that still holds true today: “Words are quite inadequate to describe this skiing experience. Those who have been there know what we’re talking about. To those who have not been there, we can highly recommend it.”
The rest of the brochure is matter-of-fact logistics that seems to suggest Hans wasn’t even interested in trying to convince those who needed convincing. If you couldn’t see for yourself that it was a skier’s dream to use a helicopter for a ski lift in a massive and remote mountain range, you were not the kind of skier he was looking for. Helicopter ski touring took up three pages of the 21-page brochure, while human-powered ski touring was allotted six pages and the summer climbing and mountaineering program got seven.
By 1977, the brochure had grown to 33 pages, 23 of which were devoted to heli-skiing; only two promoted ski touring, and mountaineering had disappeared entirely. Hans built every aspect of the business based on feedback from his guests, so even the promotion was representative of what guests told him they wanted to know about heli-skiing. They wanted to know what they were getting themselves into, because the brochure included exacting detail of what to expect. Hans’s clients were some of the most successful business people in the world, and they taught him about promotion. Inevitably, marketing crept into the prose. The Monashees is the “steepest and the deepest,” while the Bugaboos section reads, “The general consensus of our clients is, ‘Unless you have skied there, you don’t know what skiing is about.’” Word was out, and in typical Hans Gmoser style, the honesty of the brochure was striking: accident statistics noted one broken leg per 1,500 skier days, and two avalanche fatalities in 12 years of operation. A photo of the contents of a guide’s pack showed no fewer than 60 different items, revealing everything the guides must be prepared to deal with.
Snowball dancing in the Monashees. TOPHER DONAHUE.
The brochure contained a section on conditioning for heli-skiing and a note on skiing ability that read, with undertones of Gmoser humour, “We don’t ask that you ski parallel in every kind of snow, but at least you should be able to control yourself.”
The brochure also included the first program for less than expert skiers, “Introductory weeks to Heli-Skiing,” which included five days of lift-service skiing and one day of heli-skiing at Radium, an area south of the Bugaboos where the Panorama ski resort and a heli-ski base allow for both varieties.
In seven years, CMH had reached maturity, and the essence of the business model has changed little in the three decades since. The company was becoming a viable business operated by skiers, and it showed: the housekeepers skied, the bartenders skied, the cooks skied, the managers skied, the office staff skied, the pilots skied, and the customers skied, with the thrill of mountain adventure the common passion that erases cultural, personal and professional boundaries.
All CMH staff and their families are encouraged to ski or hike, and every position in the company has an opportunity to get outdoors. Lodge staff go out when guests get tired in the afternoon and leave empty seats in the helicopter, while office staff get a few days of heli-skiing or hiking each year. Not every employee skis, but even the few who don’t are caught up in the vibe of working in the world’s greatest ski mountains with a management that encourages everyone to get out there. “Pretty much everyone I know has skied with CMH at some point.” says Cindy Wiatzka, a local from Revelstoke.
Area managers find days when the whole staff can go skiing together. The vibe surrounding a staff ski day is like Christmas in a house full of six-year-olds. Indeed, there is never a more excited group of heli-skiers than a group of mostly young adults who never imagined part of their seasonal work buffet of waiting tables, cleaning rooms or washing dishes would include flying by helicopter to some remote snow-cloaked ridge with a dozen buddies, to be dropped off to go shred the kind of mountain even ski movies don’t really capture.
By 1981, Hans was appealing to intermediate skiers in both marketing campaigns and editorial interviews. He told a CBC commentator, “In March and April we can take weaker skiers. The powder snow is not as deep, so it isn’t as difficult to master. At the lower altitudes the sun will put a crust on the snow that gives you the feeling of skiing down a groomed slope with ball bearings under your skis. Yet, you have total control! It is very exhilarating.”
Taking less skilled skiers heli-skiing changes the guide’s job description dramatically, and while the instruction suited some guides perfectly, for others it was a chore. Rather than just ripping down the hill, they had to attempt to teach skiing in an uncontrolled wilderness environment to skiers who were used to buying their way into anything they wanted. Up until then, heli-ski guiding was, to a large degree, a keep up or shut up event, with some skiers being thrown out of their group for not skiing fast enough. It made guiding possible for Europeans with poor English and rough people skills. After all, the guide was not expected to make people feel good, but rather to show them the safe way down the mountain. European guides were accustomed to this approach, and a number of hardcore ones were legendary for their blunt assessment of people’s skiing ability. But telling someone “You need to ski like you fuck, not like you shit” was not the most refined powder-skiing instruction to attempt to encourage a forward-leaning rather than a sitting-back position.
Ski education was always a part of the CMH world, but not as an endless continuum for everyone who wants to learn. In the mid-seventies CMH ran the “Ski School of the Canadian Rockies” out of the Banff Springs Hotel. It was essentially a regular ski school collaborating with CMH to prepare people to go heli-skiing, but the word was that you had better become an expert before you went. In Hans’s 1966 “Spring Skiing” brochure – a handmade, cut and pasted, 37-page monument to his desire to share the mountains, and the publication where heli-skiing was advertised for the first time – he also offered an introductory ski mountaineering course for ski instructors. The course was designed to provide “practical and theoretical instruction in high mountain ski touring.” The seven-day course was only open to qualified ski instructors and cost $120.
During the eighties there were still not enough qualified Canadian guides to fill the ranks of CMH teams, so Hans would go to Europe to recruit. On one trip to Austria he interviewed a guide who was also a level four Austrian ski instructor and coach of the Austrian women’s downhill team. With zero English skills, the guide was afraid he wouldn’t get the job, so he asked an English-speaking friend for help. His friend said, “No problem, we’ll just make you a list of questions to memorize, and whenever it is your turn to talk, just ask Hans a question.” The friend came up with a list of seemingly pertinent questions, and the young guide diligently memorized each one.
When it was time for the interview, Hans and the guide spoke in German about the details of the guide’s experience. Then, at some point, Hans switched to English to test the guide’s linguistic skills. Hans asked questions, and the guide replied with his own – with no idea of what Hans was asking. At the end of the interview, Hans switched back to German and told the guide he had a job for the next season. The guide was thrilled, and patted himself on the back for the cunning strategy of getting around the English issue. They shook hands, and as the guide started to walk away, Hans said in German, “Never mind the English.”
That guide was Robert “Roko” Koell, and Hans, in his eerily canny way of reading people, saw enough potential in the young guide to let a morass of butchered English slide in the interview – but he also let Roko know he saw through the façade of bogus questions. Upon arrival in Canada, Hans enrolled Roko in an English course in Calgary before the beginning of ski season and assigned him to the Monashees. It was heaven for the former downhill racer.
The guide team in the Monashees at the time– Erich Unterberger, Nick Stocklhauser, and Willy Trinker, and now Roko – was a group of speed freaks obsessed with vertical as much or more than their guests were. The guide with the most vertical for the day got the honour of carrying the title of Captain Vertical for the evening. With a lodge full of strong skiers pushing the guides, and a group of ex-racers gunning for Captain Vertical status, the scene was ripe for some of the fastest commercial heli-ski runs ever made. All manner of tricks were used to maximize vertical and get the best skiing. Typically, four groups ski in generally the same order all day, but in the days of Captain Vertical, sometimes the guide for group four would call for a high pickup in order to pass the other groups and get in number one position. Other times, on a high-speed run, a guide would arrive at the helicopter with only two guests, and rather than wait, would take the ride and catch the group on the next lap.
One day, Roko was put in charge of Andy Epstein and friends, a group of veteran heli-skiers infamous for always needling the guide to ski harder. Roko was aware of this and was wearing his 225 cm downhill racing skis for the day. On top of the run Elevator he decided to give the clients what they wanted. Willy Trinker’s record for skiing Elevator’s 1300 vertical metres was seven minutes. Roko’s English wasn’t yet good enough to tell the group what he was going to do, so he just took off, and two and a half minutes later he stopped at the pickup to wait for the group. He kept the speed up all day, and on the last run the group was so wasted that Roko had to grab one skier’s leg with his hands and push it manually into the binding for him because the client did not have enough strength left in his leg to engage the mechanism.
With groups like Epstein’s pushing even top-level ski guides to take them to their limit, Roko saw the need for many guides to improve their skiing – and Roko can’t help but teach. One day, he was skiing with a group of guides at Lake Louise when the area’s downhill course was set. The guides knew the race officials, so they ran the course at the edge of control and safety. “We’re lucky no one got hurt,” remembers Roko laughing.
The guides saw their shortcomings, and everyone felt more instruction would help. Ski guides train to be conservative and solid rather than to push their bodies, and they typically come from a background of mountaineering rather than ski racing or instruction, so their technique, though stable while wearing a pack in all kinds of funky conditions, is not refined by professional instruction or coaching. Roko organized a guides ski instruction day to teach guides refined ski technique, as well as ski instruction methods to help weaker heli-skiers.
Plastic four-buckle ski boots had been around for nearly a decade, but “some guides showed up in leather ski boots!” remembers Roko, chuckling. “We dug some plastic boots out of the CMH basement, and I talked the office into giving me the company credit card for the day. That night I threw a huge party for the guides and ran up an $800 tab on booze. They never gave me another card.” But the lifetime ski ability improvement concept stuck, and the CMH Powder Performance program began. It was not a marketing ploy, but rather a philosophical change in the idea of why people ski: even good skiers want to get better.
Roko remembers, “In the beginning I had no support for the Powder Performance program, but Mark Kingsbury was the first to go for it. Mark talked to Hans and Hans really liked it.”
“Roko changed the way we think about skiing,” said more than one veteran guide during the 2006 guide training at Sunshine ski area, where Roko continues to run a program for the CMH guides. The idea is simple: the guides study ski technique and ski instruction, then in turn pass on instruction to any guest who wants to improve. Roko begins his program for guides with instruction for teaching powder neophytes how to enjoy themselves more quickly, and progresses through the levels to the point where the guides are struggling to keep up and refine their own technique. Roko’s continuing education for skiers became an unprecedented, all-inclusive learning curve for anyone who wants to learn to ski better, and he’s the perfect man for the job. You’ll never meet anyone more enthusiastic about other people’s skiing than Roko Koell. He designed the Powder Intro course for first-time heli-skiers who don’t have the skills to keep up with the average guest groups, and the Powder Masters course for guests with too many years of turning skis under their knees who want to ski slower and learn ways to minimize impact on their bodies to extend their ski careers. In the future, more ski technique programs may emerge from the original Powder Performance concept, but for now skiers are simply encouraged to ask a guide if they want tips on skiing better.
Fat skis and good instruction allow intermediate skiers to quickly reach a point where they can keep up with an average heli-ski group. Powder snow is usually a very forgiving medium, and most people take a number of spectacular but harmless falls while learning. An article in Skisport magazine described the experience of learning to ski powder in 1977, and it all still holds true today: “In powder, if you ski slow, you end up flailing all over the place and using an incredible amount of energy to make the skis perform. The trick is to relax and let your self go. Even when you fall it’s like tumbling into a bottomless pit filled with feathers. You come up spitting snow and gasping for breath, and looking around for your goggles, ski poles and other equipment. But nothing hurts.”
After the requisite cartwheels in the feather pit, sooner or later everyone who tries hard enough experiences a euphoric moment when it all comes together and the crashes are replaced by the unbeatable sensation of floating through a substance made of 95 per cent air. Theresa Brand, a writer for the Montreal Gazette, was moved to the soul by the breakthrough: “All I could think about was survival (at first). I remembered something about risk exercise and how good it is for one’s mind and soul. Indeed. Suddenly I got the knack of it. I was floating. The tips of my skis were up and I had begun to feel what it was all about – oneness with the elements, with the universe. The majestic peaks were smiling on me.”
On the other end of the spectrum, expert skiers find that the fatter skis and collective knowledge of the mountains among guides and pilots continuously redefine anyone’s definition of excellent skiing. John Byrnes describes a run in Galena that captures the experience even experts have when their eyes are open as wide as any beginner’s:
Andi opens the door, but instead of walking away to unload the skis, he stands in the open door until he sees that he has everyone’s attention. Shouting would do no good with the machine still running, so he points right and shakes his head emphatically, NO! He points left and shakes his head again. He points straight down with both hands and nods slowly. We can read his lips: “RIGHT HERE!’
We’re on this knife-edge ridge just wide enough for a few skiers. Major drops on either side; what the guides call “terminal air.” Andi says this isn’t really a landing and stay away from the sides! After a short zip down the ridge, we swing left and look down on the most amazing section of technical terrain I’ve ever seen. Really steep, trees, staircases, small cliffs, ridges and convolutions in over-the-shoulder powder.
After learning to ski powder, the age-old tendency to quantify an experience raises its ugly head. With all the mountain complexities, differences in perspective and abilities, and elemental enjoyment that comes from skiing in the backcountry, when modern humans decide to communicate an experience it always comes down to numbers. Some sports, like baseball, easily succumb to description by statistics. Other sports, like heli-skiing, do not. The one metric that seems to have stuck while trying to describe the immeasurable world of skiing with a helicopter lift is the amount of vertical elevation skied – in a day, a week, a year, a lifetime. This one inarguable, objective measurement is so compelling that it inspired the world’s first frequent flyer program: the million-foot club. American Airlines claims credit for the first commercial airline frequent flier program, but legend has it that an American Airlines executive went heli-skiing and saw the CMH program and decided to reward his customers in some way for repeat business.
Anyone who skis a million vertical feet with CMH is given a ski suit and lifetime bragging rights. The night after a skier hits a million, an impromptu ceremony welcomes the new member of the million-foot club. Like snowflakes, no two ceremonies are ever the same, but most conclude in the dining room after dinner with a few staff of the opposite sex replacing the million-footer’s clothes with the new suit.
At 100,000 feet per week guaranteed, it would take ten weeks to get a million vertical feet, although it is possible to do it in half that time with the right group and the right conditions. That means at the current rate of heli-skiing, a million-foot suit costs between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars. The first million-foot suit was a cheesy blue blazer of seventies fashion. Hans was usually spot-on with his perception of what his guests wanted, but a blazer for million-footers was an exception. Something to wear while skiing made more sense, and at the time, Bogner ski suits were hitting the slopes with force and bringing sexiness to the ski world for the first time in history. The next year, the million-foot suit was an oh-so-seventies Bogner ski suit. Since then, the million-foot suits have followed the fashion of the day through the fart-in-your-own-face one-piece era to today’s minimalist, versatile technical pants and jackets.
These suits have made their way into virtually every ski area on the planet, and for the person standing in a lift line, the suit tells the story of endless face shots in mind-blowing terrain, of having seen the stunning scenery, felt the tight companionship and family atmosphere at the lodges, and of belonging to the fraternity of wilderness skiers. Some skiers, however, prefer to take a credit towards a heli-hiking trip with CMH rather than take a ski suit. For them, the suits are more of a statement of elitism than an award. Olav Ruud is a skier with several million feet who spends his time between Canmore and northern Italy. He skis the Monashees in a beat-up anorak and says, “Every time I see the suits in a ski area they look so snobbish. The only time I am comfortable in the suit is here, so I just take the heli-hiking credit instead.” Like letter jackets for varsity high-school athletes, the suits can make a statement of either utter cool or elitist attitude.
With 3,400 people in the million-foot club, just watch the lift lines at Vail or St. Moritz, and at some point two skiers in million-foot suits will see each other, strike up a conversation about heli-skiing and become instant friends. The suit in no way captures the experience, but since the rest of the obsession is the intangible, indescribable experience of skiing fairy-tale mountains in dreamy snow that only exists while it is happening, the suits are cherished, tangible trophies hanging in positions of honour in aficionados’ closets.
While hanging out in the world of CMH, it’s easy to get caught up in the quest for numbers. Chasing a million vertical feet with teams of millionaires is to belong to one of the most exclusive, challenging and envied sporting clubs anywhere. Gery Unterasinger, a lead guide at the Bobbie Burns, observed that “for people’s first few trips, they get obsessed with chasing vertical, but then they realize it’s more about having good days and having fun at the right pace.”
But there are people who are so distracted by the quest for maximum vertical that they miss out on some of the best parts of heli-skiing. In a 1998 issue of Snow Country magazine, an editor wrote:
A few years ago, a friend returned from a week at CMH, the largest heli-ski operation in British Columbia, in a grumbling mood. The weather had been good, the snow was fine, the guides were excellent, the scenery was spectacular and the drinks and meals at the lodge plentiful. So, I asked, what was the matter? It turned out he was put off by an obnoxious breed of heli-skier that has become all too common, the big-game bagger of vertical. Clad with a well-used Avocet altimeter, a surplus of adrenaline and a good month’s worth of anticipation, the character is often the central antagonist in the tales of others returning from heli-ski trips.
My friend, a lover of mountains and the full breadth of experience they offer, was especially put off by this new breed’s lack of reverence for the beauty around him and his inability to stop and enjoy it. Worse, woe to the laggard who might be cutting into the day’s volume of vertical. In a place you’d expect civility to reign, a remote mountain lodge far from work and phones, he simply trades his compulsive work habits for equally compulsive play habits.
The editor then quotes a heli-ski operation manager as saying, “With all the danger of avalanches we face and the absolute need for us to protect our clients, we still have customers who get furious if they can’t go out on days when bad weather clearly puts their lives in danger or when the snow is especially prone to sliding.” He then added, “They just don’t get it.”
And they don’t. A guide for Mike Wiegele once stopped to dig a pit to check stability, and a testy Canadian got so irate with the forsaken vertical that, according to the other skiers there, it almost came to blows.
The editorial later mentions another writer being warned not to be there during mid-season. “The Europeans,” she said, “especially the Germans, are all business at that time and have no tolerance for anyone holding them up.”
Not surprisingly, impatience and obsession have little to do with nationality and more to do with personality. In an article in the Christian Science Monitor, Rainer Degimann-Schwartz wrote:
We Europeans were always surprised to discover in conversation with our American counterparts that as far as they were concerned, neither the length nor the steepness of the slope counted. Rather, they calculated each day’s summary in terms of the vertical feet covered, counting, adding, multiplying.
A group of Australians made anyone who caused the group to miss a lift buy Dom Perignon that night. One season, they drained the entire year’s champagne stash at the Galena lodge before Christmas. While the motivation for vertical takes on many disguises, it sounds like regardless of which side of the pond you’re on, it’s fun to ski fast all day long with whatever kind of lift you use, and it is easy to get carried away with endless speed and fresh snow. Add a group of successful Type A personalities to the mix and you have a recipe for monomaniacal focus.
Hans once said,
You could dig a pit in the ground with the right pitch and vertical, cover it with the right snow, and most of these people wouldn’t miss the mountains at all! Most of our helicopter skiers are really only interested in the act of downhill skiing, the quality of the snow, and many of them, after years and years of skiing with us still have not learned to pay proper respect to the mountains.
Hans viewed the mountain experience as an adventure, a single product, not one to be piecemealed à la carte where you select the part you want to buy. To him, powder snow, breakable crust, blue ice, loose rock, solid granite, thick forest and the unpredictable nature of the mountain elements were inseparable parts of the experience. He intended the million-foot award to be a thank-you to the people who enjoyed CMH enough to keep coming back and to acknowledge them for making the business possible, not as a marketing tool or a motivation to collect vertical like some sort of ego currency. It is phenomenal how fast a group of even average skiers can rack up vertical with fat skis and a fat helicopter. A lot of times the day’s difference between the fastest group and the slowest group is laughably small, so the biggest difference between chasing vertical and savouring the mountain experience is purely psychological.
The world record for vertical skied in a day is 294,380 feet – 10 laps from the summit of Mt. Everest to sea level – but it wasn’t much fun. At the end of the day, after skiing the same 3,590-foot run 82 times, Mark Bennett, a heli-skier who became infatuated with the record, couldn’t walk and couldn’t sleep. He told a reporter for Snow Country, “Every time I closed my eyes I saw ski tracks rushing at me. I was nauseous. It was like falling into a nightmare.”
An excited snowboarder at the front of the lift line. TOPHER DONAHUE.
In 1963, the same year Hans led the first heli-ski runs through the breakable crust of Goat Glacier, several Americans were experimenting with the first snowboards. Tom Sims made a snowboard out of plywood in his eighth-grade shop class. In a separate brainstorm in 1965, Sherman Poppen was watching his daughter attempt to ride her sled standing up and was struck with the idea to bolt two skis together and tie a string to the tip for steerage. The Snurfer was born. Over the next ten years, he sold half a million Snurfers and held competitions that inspired improvement on the design.
Jake Burton Carpenter added a binding to the Snurfer concept, which made the steering strap obsolete and started Burton Snowboards in 1977. A 1980s CMH promotional film featured “Ted Shred,” a surfer who brought a surfboard to the Bugaboos equipped like a modern tow-in big-wave board with neoprene straps. Ted also used the Snurfer idea of a tip strap for steering and, for the first of many times, made skiers look silly with their little wiggles as he ripped by them, straight-lining on his board and kicking up a plume of snow that could be seen from outer space.
A combination of factors has kept snowboarding from booming in the heli-ski business, although for pure downhill speed and control in crud and powder the snowboard is arguably the superior tool. The difficulty of heli-skiing with snowboards is complex. For expert snowboarders, there is no trouble and they’ll blow away any group of skiers in the backcountry – as long as the terrain doesn’t flatten out, causing the fluid, effortless, high speed motion of snowboarding to change to the awkward limp of an amputee with a bad prosthesis. Heli-skiing happens in the backcountry, where crossing frozen lakes, slogging through rolling hillocks, and doing uphill traverses can be necessary to reach pickups or avoid dangerous slopes. For these reasons, snowboarders were discouraged from going heli-skiing until the demand exceeded the resistance and guides learned how to show snowboarders the time of their lives.
A snowboarder playing with the deep snow and pillow drops in the Monashees. TOPHER DONAHUE.
Nowadays, the guides know the limitations and strengths of snowboards and are able to accommodate boarders by choosing runs and giving directions that minimize struggling and frustration. During the pre-season training, CMH hires a snowboard instructor and takes the guides riding as part of their training so they can relate to the fun and challenge of the game. However, the mountains make it hard for everyone at some point and some snowboarders complain bitterly as soon as they have problems, unaware that at times the skiers will be having problems and snowboarders will still be shredding. Whether you’re on one board or two, at some point the backcountry kicks your ass. In 2006, Canadian Scott Newsome did what was once considered unthinkable: he passed the assistant ski guide exam on a split snowboard – separating it and using skins on the uphills, parallel skiing on the two halves for short downhills, and clipping the two pieces together and snowboarding for the big descents. The lines are blurring, and the difference between snowboarding and skiing today is really only a matter of choice and experience. Many guides and guests today have both skis and snowboards at the lodge, and each morning they choose their weapons based entirely on the snow conditions.
Steep-Camp terrain in the Cariboos. TOPHER DONAHUE.
The cross-pollination began in the late eighties when Atomic, inspired by the flotation and performance of snowboards in deep powder, introduced the Fat Boy ski and forever changed the face of skiing. CMH was one of the first to embrace the concept, but the guests and guides weren’t so quick to ditch their beloved old skis. At first CMH kept a few fat skis at the lodges for guests who were having trouble with deep powder, but everyone thought real skiers used skinny skis. One by one, guides and guests tried the Fat Boys for a day – and never wanted to go back. By 1991, fat skis had become standard heli-ski equipment, and any pride wrapped up in the traditional skis was replaced by the utter confidence and security the greater flotation afforded a skier in the deepest powder.
For the heli-ski industry, it was a windfall. Fat skis made off-piste (outside of ski resort) skiing a lot easier, which meant less-skilled skiers could shred big vertical and have the time of their lives. Fat skis are also much easier on the body, which, like Viagra for the powder hound, meant older heli-skiers and guides could keep it up a lot longer. Roko, who watches septuagenarians and octogenarians in the Powder Masters program come back year after year for 100,000-foot weeks of skiing, says, “Fat skis gave heli-skiers another 15 years.” Skiers could go heli-skiing both earlier and later in their careers, the potential client base for heli-ski outfits grew significantly, and guide work became a lot easier thanks to an idea that was born on the waves.
Fat skis extend the health of skiers, let average skiers experience deep powder, and let you get away with a lot sloppier technique. TOPHER DONAHUE.
Ironically, the piggybacking of ideas went the other way in the nineties when surfers were catching bigger and bigger waves to the point where their equipment became the limiting factor. Big waves travel fast and the airflow against their faces creates small waves, called chop, that make it extremely hard for traditional surfers to keep their feet on their boards – think skiing moguls with no bindings. A group of Hawaiian surfers went snowboarding, and had an epiphany that changed their sport as much as snowboarding changed skiing: if we can ride these huge mountains on these short little boards with bindings, why can’t we do the same on big waves?
They put straps on short boards and, using jet-skis to catch some of the fastest and biggest waves anywhere on the ocean, are able to ride huge, rough waves where traditional surfers wouldn’t last a second. Now, big-wave surfers are looking to deep ocean breaks and weather buoy data to find waves with faces nearing a hundred feet tall.
What will be next in the quest to rip powder? Legendary skier and assistant Cariboos manager Dave Gauley launched the first CMH Steep Camp in the Cariboos during April of 2008 when the stable spring conditions were most likely to allow steeper and more technical alpine features to be skied safely. John Mellis, the Cariboos manager, explained some of the possible variations the Steep Camp might reveal: “I hope we can find a place where we can rappel over a cornice to start a ski run. We can chop out a platform for people to put on their skis and then ski an exciting line with a good runout in case someone falls.”
Snowboard icon Devon Walsh is visiting Galena to rip with riders who want to share the snow with a pro. In the future, both more advanced and more basic heli-ski experiences are likely. Also, new ways of playing in the snow are being explored. One day, a guide was unloading skis at the top of a peak and found a funky contraption with handlebars in his ski basket. Someone else had loaded the basket at the lodge, so it was the first time he’d seen the thing. With the helicopter waiting, he decided to just unload it and decide what to do about it later. It was a ski bike, and it belonged to one of the guests waiting anxiously on the other side of the machine to try his new tool in the deep snow and big terrain of the Columbias.
Ski guide Dave Gauley, who brought the “Steep Camp” concept to CMH, is shown here taking strong skiers into steep and challenging terrain. TOPHER DONAHUE.
The guide didn’t know what to do about it so he radioed the area manager for advice. The area manager passed the buck to the Banff office, which checked to see if a ski bike was covered by insurance and found there was no reason not to let it ride. The reply went back through the chain of communication to the group waiting on the mountaintop. The skiers locked into their skis, the biker got on his bike, and everyone pointed their tips towards the valley bottom and had a great run. The rest of the day went seamlessly, with the biker having no problem enjoying the fresh powder just as much as the skiers.
Recently, a group of veteran snowboarders in BC pulled the bindings off their boards, attached a steering cord to the tip, and took the game one step closer to surfing by getting rid of the rigid attachment of a binding. Watching them rip powder you’d never guess they were just standing on their boards. The free feel of riding on powder with no binding – “noboarding” – inspired some of them to proclaim they’ll never use bindings again.
Everyone learns to bundle their skis for the ski basket. Here, Hans helps a young Robson Gmoser learn the tricks.HANS GMOSER COLLECTION.
Today, maybe the only real issue is the helicopter’s ski basket. It is designed for a dozen pairs of skis and neither a dozen high-back snowboard bindings nor that many ski bikes will fit in the current design. Changing the design is not trivial: any new design has to be approved by Transport Canada to make sure it does not interfere with the aerodynamics or landing abilities of the helicopter. By the 2008/09 season, the changes will be integrated and full groups of snowboarders will be able to ride together in comfort. Getting the tools up there is the only real difference; once everyone is on top of the mountain, it doesn’t really matter what you ride.
In the end, whether it is a snow rider’s first or 100th week of deep powder, the experience cannot be held onto. It slips like water through the fingers, leaving a haunting memory for the trip home that doesn’t really go away until the next time.