Despite being v tired yesterday, I had an amazing day.  Yesterday was 80km of skiing and more than 10,000m of vertical drop.  No wonder I was tired.  However, I had a fantastic massage last night from the lodge’s masseuse and then got a lot of sleep last night.

The day dawned very clear and sunny but after maybe 10 lifts this morning the fog came in and there will be a storm tonight.  We stopped at lunchtime after another brilliant morning.    Only 6000m of vertical descent and 40km of skiing.  Jake who is the lead ski guide says that at Bearclaw they on average have only six days down time where there’s no skiing in an entire season.  Another reason to come here often.

There’s little point me banging on again about how amazing the whole thing is here.  So, since we had a forced downtime I spent some time editing together the hours and hours of helmet camera video into about four minutes which is what one typical lift is like.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did skiing it.  Be thankful I didn’t upload hours and hours of video.  I was tempted…

Oh and to make up for the fact we were a little disappointed not skiing in the afternoon, Craig did another one of his river level “attack runs” on the lodge.  This is worthwhile watching just to get an idea of how good a pilot Craig is.  Boy did it feel cool.  Once again Craig chose the music from Top Gun to accompany the flyby.  I wonder if he’s got a thing about Top Gun…

Just finished another serious session with the masseuse.  I’m sure it does you good but at the time, it’s painful.  Dinner and then a sleep and then another day of fun.  Enjoy the videos.  More tomorrow.

Another fantastic day.  Probably better than yesterday if that’s possible.  Took about 3 hours of helmet camera video and just can’t be bothered to edit it all down to something that people would like to watch.

Weather great, skied four or five mountains today.  Every one different, every one covered with virgin powder snow.  Incredibly tired since there’s just no rest.  You ski down 1000, 1500m in deep powder snow, get to the bottom and then it’s a 3 minute lift back to the top again by helicopter.  Every muscle in my body below my neck is sore.

Will write something better tomorrow.  Maybe I’ll have edited the video down to something watchable by then too.

Karsten and I arrived at the lodge which is literally in the middle of nowhere.  It’s 150km from the nearest town and the nearest mobile phone mast too!  The lodge is run by Skeena Heliskiing who are reputed to be the best in British Columbia.  There are some great pictures on their website.  Worth a look.

Rather strangely and surreally, the entire place is full of German speakers or rather Swiss German speakers. I’m the only native English speaker in the place.  There are two guides Jake and Urs who take groups of four people up on the hill piloted by Craig who is the stunningly good helicopter guy (of which more later).  Urs looks and sounds exactly like Felix Gasser (for those of you who know who Felix Gasser is).

Everybody was knackered so it was a relatively early night.

We woke at dawn and had a very lardy breakfast while Jake explained the kit.  We all wear ABS rucksacks which have a ripcord which blows out airbags if you’re in an avalanche.  (see picture left of one of the other guests and Jake demonstrating).  We also got some instruction on tranceivers from Urs and also how to get in and out of the helicopter without getting our heads chopped off.

And so, at 10am, we took off for the first ride.  We were dropped at the top of a mountain and off we went. 

It is quite literally indescribable.  Even if you’ve heli-skied in Europe it isn’t the same.  90% of the world’s heli-skiing happens in British Columbia and it’s easy to see why.  You don’t just have a mountain to yourself, you have an entire mountain range.  There are literally no other tracks.  Just mountains and mountains and mountains of virgin snow.  If you’ve skied before then it’s like that one time where you found a bit of powder which wasn’t tracked and skied down it for 100m…but you ski for literally kilometres in snow just like that.  If you haven’t skied ever then it actually is indescribable.

And after you’ve skied for 1000m of descent and maybe 5 or 6km of distance, you arrive at a valley bottom and there is Craig in the helicopter waiting to just take you back to the top again.  And each lift takes you up 1000m and takes about 3 minutes.  We must have done 10 lifts today.  Total descent 9,800m which is approximately the height of Mount Everest.  More than 80km of skiing.  Not a single track to be seen, different bowls and mountains every time.  The sun shone, the snow was simply beautiful.  Acres of virgin snow sparkling in the sunlight.

Half way through the day we stopped in the snow, dug some tables and chairs out of the snow and ate soup and sandwiches in the sun and everyone just beamed at each other with the sheer joy of it all.

Some high points of the day:

1) the first run when I realised I could do 5km of deep untracked snow and wasn’t going to make a tit of myself

2) Skiing over a totally untracked field of snow and the sun striking the snow and making it sparkle like diamonds or stars

3) Turning fast in deep snow sets off a little avalanche (called slough – pronounced “sluff”) which you then ski through when you turn back into it again and it all gets out of control and weird in a good way.

4) Realising that when we got back to the helicopter we just did it all again over and over and over again

The only problem is that this just makes all other skiing look like a waste of time.  It is truly truly amazing.  I have never had a better day of skiing in my life.  Here’s a little photo album with some more better quality photographs.  Too tired to really prune them properly.

First Day Heli-skiing VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Craig is a stunningly good helicopter pilot and literally puts the helicopter down within a foot of where he wants it every time.  He does have a rule though:  he’s allowed to play whatever music he likes at super high volume during each lift.  So here are two videos but please note that the music is nothing to do with me! 

The first is a typical lift.  2 mins 30 and gives a really good idea of the scenery.  The end is quite cool but if you’re only going to watch one movie, the second one is the one to watch.

The second is Craig ripping it up a bit as we come back to the lodge.  Unsurprisingly the music is from top gun and Craig is zooming up a river valley about 5m above the iced up river and we all felt pretty bloody cool when we got home.

So, that was my first day heli skiing.  An unforgettable and amazing experience.  Hard to express just how happy I am. 

No helmet cam movies today because I thought I couldn’t be arsed to fanny around with it while I was worried about doing all this off piste stuff.  There will be helmet movies tomorrow (so to speak).

After an almost surreal dinner with Karsten last night (where language difficulties and a German with low blood sugar and even lower patience meant we ate an entire lobster and not much else) we crashed out and I for one slept like a baby.  Karsten maybe had a more difficult night due to some snoring from me.

The following morning, I was up at 4am and went out in search of coffee.  No luck but got some email done and at 6am we ready to go.  Showered, checked out and waiting in line for “Fresh Tracks”.  This is  a special lift pass that you can buy which allows you to get a lift at 7am up to the top of the mountain with a few other hardy dudes.  Up there you eat a gigantic breakfast (see picture) and then ski before everybody else.  The breakfast was an unlimited cholesterol and sugar extravaganza with gallons of coffee.

We duly ploughed our way through the mountains of breakfast and headed out on the slopes.  It was outstanding. Truly beautiful.  The sun rising over the hills, completely empty slopes which had been beautifully groomed during the night.  The low angle of incidence of the light meant that the ice crystals coming off the back of skis created little tiny rainbows.  It was honestly just magical.  Unfortunately there hadn’t been any fresh powder snow but even without it, it was stunning.

Suitably warmed up and happy, we headed back up to the top of the last “double black diamond” left in the resort that we hadn’t done.  We had looked at it yesterday but chickened out…no wait…”had made a sensible and mature decision to avoid doing a risky thing late in the day.  Unsurprisingly, after a blissful few early morning runs in the sun both Karsten and I were feeling full of beans and so it just had to be done.

If nothing else, this run made me realise that there is nothing left to be scared of in terms of ski runs.  Nothing steeper, nothing harder, nothing more scary.  One throws oneself over a lip to land on a slope which has a sustained steepness of between 45 and 50 degrees for about 200m.  The snow was difficult, there are rocks on either side and beneath you.  Much steeper than this and snow just doesn’t stick to the rocks.  The fear factor is multiply enhanced by watching other people catch a little edge (like Karsten did yesterday) and tumble down the slope absolutely completely out of control, and by chance miss the rocks and roll out somewhere near the bottom.  But…two testosterone fired blokes, at the top of a run like that, what do you think is going to happen?  So we did it.  No slips, no mistakes and I can finally say that there’s nothing harder to do on a ski run. 

After that we did a lot of “glade skiing”.  Now this is where you ski through the trees.  Karsten is nuts this whereas I’m a bit more “ho hum”.  It is nice but it’s like skiing through a very difficult steep mogul field where every mogul has a big effing tree on top of it.

Then as a final treat we went right up to the top of Blackcomb glacier (and in the process rode up on a “double black diamond” SKI LIFT!!) and skied down a really pleasant 6.5km run.  Brilliant stuff. 

Now some tech stuff and equipment stuff.  I hired some really nice twin tip freestyle skis called Salomon Lords.  They’re pretty fat but good all round skis.  Karsten has these totally bonkers skis which are 160mm wide.  He loves them (see picture) and they’re supposed to be great in powder but they really are shit everywhere else.  There’s a fair amount of ribbing going on about this.

Oh and we crossed from Whistler to Blackcomb on the Peak2Peak lift which is the longest and highest of it’s type in the world.  It’s like the one in Kitzbuhel but longer and higher.  In the middle, the lift is 1427 ft above the ground!  And a few of the cable cars have glass floors.  Oh what fun.

I was given a great present for my birthday.  A pair of goggles with GPS built in.  How amazingly cool is that.   It tracks progress, distance, height, altitude, temperature, speed and shows you it all in a little display mounted inside the goggles.

So, the stats from yesterday were 72km of skiing in total and 10,500 meters of descent in a single day.  Not bad for two jet lagged guys…  The stats for today will be available when I can download the data from the goggles.  No video today because neither of us could be arsed to bother with it.

So we finished at 1pm, quick change, jumped in car and drove back down Highway 99 to Vancouver.  It really is a beautiful road.  Vancouver looks a bit worse during the day than in the evening and since I’m going to be spending a weekend there next weekend, I’m hoping it isn’t too boring.  Guide book says it’s fun. 

I’m typing this on the quite long flight from Vancouver up to Smithers which is the nearest airport to where Karsten and I are staying for the heli skiing.  It’s quite a long transfer from Smithers to the lodge we are staying in but once we get there I’ll post this.

I’m extremely excited and a little apprehensive about tomorrow.  First day heli skiing.   Eekk