We were, I soon learned, the perfect posse to achieve it. The ringleaders were my two roommates: Ken Achenbach, 30, a Whistler-based snowboard-clothing designer, photographer, and Seinfeld-style raconteur, and his long-time friend Don Schwartz, 25, our group's assistant guide, who was training to become a fully certified heli-guide and could reel off ribald jokes for hours at a clip. Then there was the Hawaiian hellion, Ethan Powell, 30, who boarded surfer style, storming through every snow swale he could find, and knew only one speed: supersonic. Two Banff locals, Greg Patychuk, 39, and Leslie Sellers, 29, rode powder as if they were weaned on it, which they were. Finally, there was the old man of the group, Heinz Steinkellner, 40, an Austrian school teacher who'd learned to board three years ago, he said, "so my kids would think I'm still hip." In his own way, Heinz was: He wore neon-pink sunglasses and a court-jester hat festooned with little bells, and chain-smoked stinky, unfiltered European cigarettes—the schnitzelest of us all.
We crammed into the helicopter for the first run of the trip. The blades roared, the bird lifted, and through the tiny side window I watched a miracle unfold. Vast pine forests, thousands of acres, gave way to plunging cliff bands streaked with frozen waterfalls, which led to endless glacial expanses, rippled and crevassed, which poured from nubby peaks—each capped with a wind-blown snow creation as whimsical as a Gaudi steeple. Seven minutes, 6,000 vertical feet. Enough untouched powder to last 500 lifetimes. We hovered low, waited as a doughnut-shaped blizzard leapt from the earth and enveloped us, then settled down and tumbled out the door.
The schnitzeling started immediately. I'm sure you've seen the classic heli-ski brochure photos: a half-dozen people creating a perfectly symmetrical squiggle pattern; two skiers producing a jumbo DNA molecule; a lone two-planker wiggling his way through 500 identical turns. I'm sure you've also noticed that none of the people in these photos are snowboarders—it's only in the last few years that there's been a significant number of boarders wealthy enough to procure a seat in a helicopter. Well, in case you were wondering: Boarders don't do any of that precision stuff.
It was an overcast day, snowing casually, and we had landed above a gentle powder field called Norbert's Nose, on the Cariboo side of the valley. The snowpack was almost inconceivably deep—on top of rocks were piles of snow that could bury a telephone pole. Otto skied ahead and Don, back-guiding on his snowboard, told the plankers to go first. The four of them—three Calgary businessmen and a London banker—did their synchronized thing, right next to each other. The six of us snickered at the top—this was going to be fun.
Article © Michael Finkel, 2000. Photo © CMH, 2000
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