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The lure of Bella Coola's Icy Peaks

A flight from the Lower Mainland to B.C.'s central coast is like journeying to the fabled Himalayan kingdom of Shangri-La.

A flight from the Lower Mainland to B.C.'s central coast is like journeying to the fabled Himalayan kingdom of Shangri-La. From the air, vast ice fields, remnants of the most recent glaciations about 12,000 years ago, spill out on all sides in a scene more reminiscent of Greenland. Closer to Whistler, the massive Pemberton icecap, a favourite destination for backcountry ski touring, is impressive enough. From the perspective of the Bella Coola Valley, though, it's just a drop in the ice bucket.

As Gail Moody, project manager with the Nuxalk First Nation's Healthy Beginnings community program, explained to Pique during a visit to Bella Coola in October, local peaks are closely tied to legendary events. "If the glacier on Table Mountain melts, war canoes will be revealed where they landed after the Great Flood."

Ice-encrusted topography like this is what lured three long-time residents of Whistler north to see for themselves a decade ago. "In the 1950s, Sir Edmund Hillary journeyed here to train with a group of climbers from Seattle," explained Peter "Swede" Mattsson, co-owner of Bella Coola Heli Sports and Tweedsmuir Park Lodge. "How can you lose in a place where one of the local peaks is named Mount Stupendous? This is way more impressive than Banff. Our lodge is only at 180 metres elevation and we look up at peaks over 3,000 metres tall."

Mattsson is an authority on the Coast Mountains. In the 1980s, he and his current business partner, Beat Steiner, recorded the first ski descents in Garibaldi Provincial Park's Diamond Head region. In the same era, Mattsson also laid claim to being the first to mountain-bike into Spruce Lake in the South Chilcotins, today a popular destination for fat-tire riders.

Mountain bikes aren't the only gear with inflated girth. Powder skis have also gone through a pumped-up retooling. As Steiner told Pique: "Extra-wide reverse-camber design not only represents a significant change in ski technology, it also revolutionized backcountry powder skiing. It used to be you were exhausted after a 100-metre run in knee-deep snow. Now you can float down 1,000 metres without catching your breath. As a result, it's made us reevaluate where we guide clients in our terrain."

Reverse-camber skis, which have upturned tips and tails while the ski between them is flat, were first pioneered in the early 2000s by the late Whistler-born freeskier Shane McConkey, who patterned a design after one already in vogue for wakeboards and water skis. McConkey reasoned that powder snow reacts like water and proved his point with the first prototypes.

When reached by phone at his Whistler office, Chris Prior, the owner of Prior Snowboard Manufactory, where Bella Coola Heli Sports custom-sources gear, confirmed that the advent of reverse-camber skis has made a considerable difference in backcountry downhill skiing. "You can definitely ski longer and harder than a decade ago and still have energy left over to party. Because they are so much wider than regular skis, these models perform like a surfboard, with a lot of room for pilot error."

Since the advent of the reverse-camber ski, constructed of glass- or carbon-fibre weave, Prior said, his company's ski sales have grown dramatically. "Designs are still evolving, although we've now reached a level with smaller, less dramatic tweaks." Then came a declaration that would once have been considered heresy, especially from a pioneer of snowboard design. "Even snowboarders are going over to reverse-camber skis to save their knees. That being said, reverse-camber skis with rocker tips and tails are not all that versatile. For one thing, they won't carve uphill. If you tried them on a groomed run, you'd be in trouble unless you're a really good skier, of course, and can ski on anything. Aside from heli-skiing and terrain-park riding, they are not for us mere mortals who otherwise need regular camber design to drive our skis."

Together with mountain-sports cinematographer Christian Begin, Mattsson and Steiner, boasting filmmaking track records of their own, first journeyed to Bella Coola in 2000 to scout as-yet-undiscovered locations for video productions. As Begin told Pique at the Tweedsmuir Park Lodge, soon after his return from shooting a National Geographic documentary on wingsuit flyers: "During the 1990s, my company, Radical Films, created a trend for shooting extreme-sports scenes of both snowboarding, skiing, and mountain biking in the backcountry around Whistler. By the late '90s, we found that we were competing more and more with other filmmakers for helicopter rentals. Whistler was becoming overexposed as a location, so we started to look around."

With a leading-edge reputation garnered by numerous film-festival awards, the trio had no difficulty enticing some of the world's most recognizable freeskiers, including McConkey, to join them. Subsequent publicity ensured that Bella Coola—both the location and the partners' newly formed heli-sport business—garnered cover-story exposure.

As tempting as it was to court business from the top echelons of the snow-sport world, Begin said that during the past decade their business focus has switched instead to hosting skiers and snowboarders primarily interested in the trip of a lifetime. Steiner echoed that sentiment: "The best three things about heli-skiing are the powder, the helicopter ride, and, most important, the environment. As the Nuxalk say: 'The Earth is our home'. Welcome to a new part of our home.

Pacific Coastal Airlines offers rates beginning at $132 from Vancouver's South Terminal to Bella Coola. For information, visit www.pacificcoastal.com. The writer stayed as a guest of Bella Coola Heli Sports. For information, visit www.bellacoolahelisports.com // Pique contributor Jack Christie is the author of The Whistler Book (Greystone Books). For more information, visit jackchristie.com