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The cocaine of skiing

By. G.D. Maxwell There are probably scarier things than flying in and being within rotor reach of operating helicopters. In fact, I’m sure there are.

By. G.D. Maxwell

There are probably scarier things than flying in and being within rotor reach of operating helicopters. In fact, I’m sure there are. But with few exceptions, those other scary things aren’t the kind of things you’d choose to do, given the choice. Flying in and being around operating helicopters is, however, something most of us would do, given half a chance. Especially if those helicopters were dropping us – and some skis – off on top of a powder-covered mountain and promising to pick us back up when we got to the bottom.

Repeat as necessary.

And so it goes this week. Through the combined benevolence of Ski Press magazine, Canadian Mountain Holidays and a pitch I never in my life believed they’d both fall for, I’m in the Cariboos for a week skiing my buns off over untracked, ultrafluff, damn-near-lighter-than-air, nostril-clogging powder. April showers bring deep powder, or something like that.

But despite the delirium, despite the four-seasons-in-a-day combination of heavy snow squalls, convection clouds, blazing sunshine and deep shade chill, despite the powder snow so monotonously untracked it blinds and overwhelms your sense of direction, speed and pitch, there’s still the helicopters.

Like some malevolent Godzillaed dragonfly, the Bell 212 hovers briefly overhead then descends, landing inches – okay, maybe feet – away. Prostrate like penitents awaiting redemption, we kneel silently, covering ourselves from the buffeting, the stinging wind-blown snow crystals that try to roll us away like so many tumbleweeds.

No matter how much I tell myself helicopters are safe in the hands of highly experienced, psychologically stable, non-hallucinating pilots, I can’t shake the feeling of imminent doom. The stroboscopic light and shadows playing over the snow within my limited, head down, knees to chest field of vision reminds me of what’s whirling inches – okay, maybe feet – directly over my head. I wouldn’t feel a thing. One moment light and wind and cold... the next, eternal silence and two halves where before there was a whole. A temporary newspaper headline, a coroner’s investigation, a stain on the snow.

But that never happens.

Heliskiers get whacked by avalanches. By heart attacks from too rich food and too much unaccustomed exertion. They get tipsy and drown in hot tubs, fall asleep in saunas that melt them to jelly, leaving only fat-stained towels and dental records. They gag at the size of their bar bill at the end of the week or have their bus slide over a guardrail on the way back to the airport.

It’s never the helicopters.

But still, the thought is rarely far from our minds – well, my mind – as that immense beast with the blades spinning so fast they all but disappear in an ethereal blur, lands next to us; it’s just that no one wants to discuss it. The skiing is too much fun.

Imagine an epic powder dump day. Imagine no one but you and a couple of friends showing up at Whistler Mountain. What lines would you ski? Which first? What if the week Twilite Zoned into a rerun of that day? Imagine something unimaginably better.

That’s backcountry heliskiing.

Somebody said it was the cocaine of skiing: damn near as expensive a habit and twice as hard to kick. Maybe I said that. Doesn’t matter; it’s true. It’s a crystalline, fine-focused, expansive, life-enhancing experience. It’s the essence of skiing, the distillation of gliding blissfully over snow, the humbling, omnipotent, Godhead, first-person narrative of who we are and where we belong in a world so achingly beautiful it causes us anguish to admit we don’t spend enough time in its embrace, and so thoroughly unimpressed with our importance it would gladly open its yaw and swallow us into oblivion without so much as a culturally polite, face-saving belch.

How many things in life make you feel both expansive and small at the same time?

And like skiing at a resort, heliskiing at a lodge hidden in the mountainous wilderness of British Columbia is a condensed version of the panhuman soup of interaction that takes place when socially diverse people find themselves thrown together for the same, passionate purpose. There are no dilettantes here. No poseurs, no wannabes. There are true believers. Crusaders and pilgrims, searchers for a holy grail of a more elusive variety.

There’s Ian and Jim and Glen and Moira, virgins, first-timers wondering why they waited so long, when they’ll come back, how they could have found some excuse for not doing this before. They’re ready to sit down with a calendar, a contract and a chequebook and lock in a week next season if they don’t let themselves think about it for too long or find something less frivolous to do with a couple thousand dollars.

There’s Christian from Switzerland who skied his two millionth vertical foot with CMH on Tuesday, who accepted his prized ski suit from the guides and who dreams about carving deep silent turns in the Cariboos or Bugaboos or Selkirks during long summers in the shadow of the Alps.

Watching him in quiet understanding was John, a neurosurgeon from California who’s working on five million feet, and Sheridan, his wife, working on four. Neither can adequately explain the addiction but neither can deny its powerful grip.

And there are the guides and staff, separated in age from most of the guests by a generation, in financial station by several orders of magnitude. They all do several jobs, from guiding to cooking to cleaning to laundry to serving dinner each night. The pay is secondary, the chance to hitch a ride on the chopper and get in half a day’s skiing is the real reward. Their infectious enthusiasm for their jobs and this place is as high voltage at season’s end as it was the first week. It’s hard to tell exactly who envies whom but I hear more of the guests fantasizing about being them than the other way around.

Finally there’s just this incredible place. It’s 9 p.m. and the sky is deepening shades of blue. A few clouds bruise the up-valley mountains and spill over onto the glacier, tumbling to a fractured staircase above a small lake that will be liquid again in a few weeks. A nail clipping of a moon rises from a near-vertical horizon and first stars begin to appear in the East. Venus hovers over the western peaks. Three hours ago, I could hardly sit on this patio for the blistering intensity of the sun. Now, the chill of night won’t let me linger long.

Of course, that same chill will suck more moisture out of the four feet of snow that’s fallen here since a week ago Wednesday. And tomorrow is most definitely another day.