Heli-Boarding Heaven
Fiefdom of Powder
By Mike Finkel
On day two, we flew into the Monashees. While the Cariboos are wind-scoured and glacially ground —"roly-poly," as Otto put it — the Monashees, a far younger range, are mean-looking and serrated, the type of mountains you imagine when you read a Gothic novel. It had snowed nearly a foot overnight, and the morning's first run was quintessential heli-boarding. We landed amidst the spiked summits, atop a steep glacier run called Benny's Dropoff, from which we gazed at a fiefdom of a glinting, untouched powder so fine that hundreds of curling snow tendrils floated skyward with every breeze.
Into the wild blue yonder
This time, the boarders went first. Cold smoke billowed around me, the snow sizzled as I sliced it open, and I rode and rode, lost in my own world, flying on adrenaline — yes! yes! — burrowing deeper and deeper into the powder until the weight of the snow on the front of my board tipped me over and I tumbled once, 360, then twice, 720, then resurfaced, upright, without missing a beat, and barreled on. At the bottom I watched my partners create sparkling rooster tails that lofted so high I could see each rider's last three turns hanging in midair, like jet contrails. You could ride every lift-served area on Earth and you'd never find a run half this sweet. We gathered at the landing zone, enraptured, and did the only logical thing — we rode Benny's once again.
So went the day: Mickey Mouse, Chicken Run, Ski World — deep, deeper, and deepest — never coming close to anyone else's tracks, filling my jacket, my pants, my gloves, my hat, and my goggles with snow, giddy with the beauty and the freedom and the speed. Eight hours of riding, 35,000 verts of fresh. My only lament: We were denied permission to stay out all night and board beneath the moon.
That evening, an end-of-the-world-style blizzard descended upon Blue River and remained for the next 48 hours, pounding the mountains with flakes the size of Coco Puffs. So much for April — we'd returned to January; the copters were grounded for one day and we were forced to stay low, in the trees, the next. Even so, the day in the woods, with 15 inches of new, was nothing short of extraordinary. We spent most of the morning riding in a large burn, winding through charred spruces in a black-and-white world, flying over every tree stump we could find (Ken's motto:"Stumps make jumps!"), cruising through a crazy Disneyland of downed logs and bobsled-run riverbeds — perfect natural half-pipes — and mysterious whoop-de-dos. Each run offered a mazelike challenge — it felt like it had to be solved — and I spent much of the day using all three of my edges: front edge, back edge, bottom edge of my chin. My scariest wipeout was a headfirst slide into a tree well. The tree wells at Wiegele's are literally wells, sometimes plunging 20 feet down, and I had to be dragged out by Ethan and Greg, though not before Ken finished off his roll of film.
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Article © Michael Finkel, 2000. Photo © FREMA-Sport-Reisen, 2000.
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