Heli-Ski the Wasatch

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Helicopter Skiing

Article by John Bresee
Photo by Lee Cohen
(As printed in Utah Outdoors magazine, Jan., 2002)

You drop $600 on skis without sweating. Lunch and tickets for the family cost you another $200. Skiing in every way slams your wallet. Unless you are one of the whippet thin telemark skiers using ancient rock-torn Karhus and toting your own carcass up every peak in creation, skiing takes a mighty bite out of your recreation budget. I’m here to ask for the rest; to boldly assert that everything you have spent until now is like pennies in a wishing well. The real expense of skiing is something called Hobbs Time, when the helicopter begins to lift, that’s when the meter is really running. And every other moment of skiing pales in comparison to the pure joy of having an A-star and endless untracked peaks at your disposal.

The phone rings at 6 a.m. The first part of the message is good. "It looks like we’re flying today. We need you at the pad and ready to fly by 7:30." Morning is a bad time for me; sunrise has the same effect on me as on Buffy’s foes, but the words "we’re flying today" are the one sure hangover cure, the magic elixir. At 7:15, I’m in Wasatch Powderbirds’ WWIII style bunker/landing pad and I’m perky as I rip through my gear, dial in my wax, fill my CamelBak and put on my Tracker DTS avalanche beacon even though I know they use Ortovoxes and will take mine away. It’s as if I’m trying to say, "Hey, I’m not a beater, I have my own avi-gear." But I am a beater; I’m so out of practice in beacon searches that a buried victim would be stone cold before I stumbled across him. I’ve skied with Oli, our guide, before. I trust him completely. He begins the safety recitations: "Always tie your skis together as soon as you finish a run. Use the ski strap we give you. Connect your poles like this…" He waxes omniscient as he tells you, "Never ever ever lift your skis up with two hands. With one hand you won’t be able to lift them into the blades. With two hands you’ll be tempted to throw them over your shoulder or just lift them higher. Skis in helicopter blades are bad." He’s subtle that way, because bad is too gentle a description for what would happen when $100,000 worth of carbon fiber blades meet $1,000 worth of fat skis.

I feel a little pressure in the seat of my pants and that odd unsettling feeling when the world starts moving and you’re not. The Earth just slides away, none of the Rambo-style Huey helicopter noise, just a smooth Cadillac ride, quiet enough that I could talk easily without raising my voice, but I’m too gripped, too tense and nervous to really get to know my ‘copter mates. That’ll have to come later. For now the pilot, Chuck Lambert, is taking us in lazy circles that look to lead to Little Superior or Flagstaff – no, now it looks like Red Pine area. And so I discover that my already lame sense of direction is gone for the rest of the day. The Wasatch gets a lot bigger in a helicopter. Suddenly, I’m not limited to my lung aspirated two hour hikes; peaks that I’ve only glanced at in the distance are now a 30-second hop. We come in fast to a knife-edge ridge, never really landing, the skids set into the peak, but Lambert holds us in semi-hover as we disembark.

I find myself buried in the A-star’s propwash as it whips Utah’s famous champagne powder into a tsunami obscuring everything except my trusty guide’s outstretched hand. Gripping and then stepping off the runner feels like leaping off a mighty cliff, blind. I drop – all of three feet to where Oli waits. I cling to the side of the hill as Lambert lifts off and baths us all in powder and propwash.

We huddle scrum-like on the ground, altogether closer than I’m comfortable with absolute strangers but it’s the coolest moment. The wind beating against me, blades spinning right above, snow flailing, and then suddenly relative calm as Lambert points the nose toward the canyon bottom and disappears in a sickening dive.

Lambert flies like a neurosurgeon, every move precise, no drama; he just lays you in on your landing zone with minimum fuss. When we were up with him the winds were at the limit of where he could operate, yet the clients never knew it until stepping out onto the raging hilltop. If I could do it all again I think I’d be Chuck.

Moments later, I stood at the top of Little Superior, looking out on a pristine Wasatch day and knowing that endless turns were waiting.

What seems like an endless line of perfect God-groomed powder is actually only about 120 easy powder turns, enough that my quads are screaming, but the terrain just rolls out in front of me offering more. Eventually somewhere in the 60th turn I find my wah; buried deep in my cadence is more strength, more satisfaction and I keep grooving big fat-ski turns right down to the waiting guide. I’m not generally a high-five kind of guy, but now it’s right and natural as Oli offers up his palm – and I miss it – which is why I’m not a high-fiver, and I topple over exhausted. And that’s run number one. I’ll take seven more just like it, please.

In the Wasatch Range you will find insane steeps, wide-open powder bowls, and the best chute skiing ever – all covered with an average of 550-inch deep, super-light powder. Ski it once and fighting with the resort masses for a few precious untracked turns seems ludicrous.

In the middle of Nevada, somewhere past the casinos and cathouses is a private ranch with a gleaming white Eurocopter A-Star B-3 sitting on the front lawn. It’s called Red’s Ranch but in winter it’s Joe Royer’s heli-skiing base of operations. Joe is one of the world’s best ski photographers and hiss wife Francy is a world class chef. So naturally they bought a helicopter and set up one of the most amazing secrets in the West. Joe’s sits at the base of the Ruby Mountains, a range of equal grandeur with the Wasatch, similar snow but not another living soul. In three days of lapping the peaks of the Rubys we never saw another track, much less another person. The tops of the Rubys get more than 45 inches of precipitation yearly, mostly in the form of snow, while the nearby desert gets less than 10 inches of moisture a year. That translates to about 540 inches of snow in the mountains.

Bruno flies his ‘copter the way I would if I could – in control, fast, stomps the landing. You know you’re not in a limo with Bruno but if the shit goes down, Bruno’s the man you want on the stick. Bruno flies us straight by the craggy 13,000-foot peaks of the Rubys and onto a postage stamp landing zone at the top of a chute called the Come Line. A gambling reference one hopes. It’s an amazing line carved 2,000 vertical feet into a cliff face. It’s a perfect 45-degree straight shot, turning and burning as long as you can go, with steep cliff walls two ski lengths away on either side. In every trip, there is the moment you return to when you are back at your desk – the one run, the one turn, the perfect floating moment. The Come Line encapsulates all that is right in helicopter skiing: fear, exhilaration, exhaustion and excellence.

Every time the A-star lifts off I am transfixed, repeating a mantra of this-is-so-cool-this-is-so-cool to the tapokata-tapokata sound of the tri-blades above me. I'm surrounded by cool, serious men with radios, beacons and vital life-saving equipment. And this craft, this gear and these men are spending the day making sure that my skis and I get to the greatest skiing on the planet.

The gear isn’t that much different from what you would use at a resort. I recommend fat skis – in fact, I wouldn’t do it without them. I’m not talking about big rich guy water-ski fat skis, but instead the new curvy all-mountain fat boys like the Atomix 10EX or the K2 AK Enemy. You might also want a Backcountry Access Tracker DTS avalanche beacon, a probe and a shovel. The guides have all this, but when else can you justify buying truly cool gear? A CamelBak Snowbowl and a Black Diamond Ava Lung keep you hydrated and breathing. If you’re a techie at heart, get a Suunto Observer Titanium watch and let it do all the altitude and lap measurements for you. All of the above gear can be found at www.BackcountryStore.com.

If you decide to go for it, here are a few companies that will take care of you in style:

High Mountain Heli-skiing
Teton Pines Resort and High Mountain Heli-skiing offer a Jackson Hole Getaway package that includes two nights’ lodging at the resort and a day of heliskiing. Cost: $725-$785 per person. Call High Mountain Heli-skiing (307) 733-3274 or Teton Pines (800) 238-2223 for more information or to make reservations. www.heliskijackson.com

Ruby Mountain Helicopter Skiing
Cost: $2,850.00 for a three-day package (includes heli-skiing, meals and lodging).
Call (775) 753-6867 or see http://www.helicopterskiing.com/

Wasatch Powderbird Guides
Cost: $700 per person, per day.
Call (800) WPG-HELI or see http://www.heliskiwasatch.com

Helicopter Skiing

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