We had been slogging upward for 30 minutes wondering if the climb would ever end when we scrambled up one final ridge and the earth fell away from our feet.
An entirely new valley spread before us. To our left stood a glacier, its blue and gray striped ice ribboned with waterfalls that flowed into the rubble of gray glacial till. Below, all the melting water gathered into a braided stream that cut through a valley so vast, it was almost beyond grasping. And way off in the distance, stood yet another wall of snowcapped mountains.
There was absolutely no sign of civilization…no roads, no lodges, no hiking paths in this section of western Canada’s Selkirk Mountains in southeast British Columbia. We had come here by helicopter, hopscotching over endless miles of mosquito-strewn hills to reach this one special series of valleys.
Total travel time by air from our base in the Adamants Lodge: 10 minutes. Call it wimp sightseeing if you will, but the truth is if that chopper had not given us a lift, we would not be here staring at a river of wild ice.
Certainly many of our fellow hikers–several women in their ’70s, a middle-aged somewhat sedentary couple and a family with small children–would not have come in on their own, slogging days with heavy backpacks and sleeping in tents to reach this spot.
If you really want to enjoy yourself, you should be able to comfortably jog a mile. But if you get out of breath climbing stairs, this kind of a trip may not be for you.
The concept behind heli-hiking is the same as heli-skiing. Helicopters get you into deep backcountry, fast. There, you can stroll through fields of wildflowers, hike across glaciers or, if you wish, climb wilderness peaks. It’s not new — Canadian Mountain Holidays (the folks who invented heli-skiing) has been doing it for 20 years now.
But what started as a way to fill heli ski lodges in the summer with rich old folks who just wanted to hike wildflower meadows has morphed into far more. Now there are family weeks.
There are lodge-to-lodge hikes. There are serious glacier scrambles. And, in just the last couple of years, there has been real mountain climbing.
Of course, none of this is cheap. Five days of heli-hiking can run $1,500. But it’s about half the price of heli-skiing, which means it attracts a far more middle-class group than the CEO-laden crowd that comes in winter.
Half the fun of this trip is the flying.
“We’re really serious about our rules around the helicopters,” guide Ian Campbell was saying as we eyed the chopper coming in for one of our first flights. “You don’t walk near the rear end of a helicopter (the blades back there are nasty). When you’re told, you get into the huddle and hold onto your packs, hats and glasses. Hold tight!”
The huddle is a group action on all fours that looks like that air raid crouch taught to school kids in the ’50s. As for holding tight — the blast of a chopper as it settles down is impressive. We once saw a helicopter blow over a 1,000-cc Harley motorcycle.
We climbed into the 14-passenger, jet-powered Bell 212, and in seconds, we were soaring over the mountains. Flying in a helicopter is to airplanes what riding a motorcycle is to a bus.
There is a delicate sensitivity as you wheel around mountain spires hardly yards from the rock, then drop into valleys and follow every twist of their paths. Truly, it is like being a bird.
Each day, we did something different. Once, we visited a ridge strewn with pyrite — a windblown, spartan knife edge littered with splintered shale and glittering shards of brilliant metallic rock. This was our day with the older crowd, including two women who suddenly had second thoughts after landing–otherwise it might seem their fear is of the helicopter part, which it apparently isn’t . . . .
“You’ll be okay,” said Ian, who then threw himself on the ground and purposely rolled to show them that even if they fell, they wouldn’t plunge down the thousands of feet on either side of the ridge.
Another day, we landed on a ridge for a lesson on ice. Below lay a partially melted glacial lake with water so clear you could see every wrinkle in the sides of the ice below the surface. Above stretched a snowfield we hiked while Ian explained the life and movement of a glacier. He talked about how it usually forms on the north side of a hill, building year after year until it’s thousands of feet thick, and how you can tell which way one moved by running your fingers along the rock left behind. The rock is smooth in the direction of travel.
And then, there was the valley of the flowers. First, we crested a hill carpeted with cream-colored bell heather flowers so thick it looked like a glowing sheen.
Then we hiked a nearby slope and sat on boulders while marmots popped in and out, totally oblivious to us. A youngster flattened itself on a rock to soak up the heat, and mama appeared with grass in her mouth. She stood there a moment, grabbed a few more blades and, with a wad of grass the size of an orange in her grip, dove for her burrow.
We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the valley, across streams and through multicolor patches of wildflowers. Stalks of blood red paintbrush poked through 100-foot-wide swaths of purple monkey flower. A perfectly placed waterfall cut through the trees, and a creek trickled through the flowers. It was an absolutely enchanted place.
So is it fair to cheat, using a helicopter to reach all this splendor? Depends on who’s talking.
“Yes, there are traditional mountaineers who object to us, so we’ve tried to come up with a compromise,” said guide Brian Keefer. “We strive to not just pick the plums off our area by landing right at the base of the most pristine peaks and climbing them and then getting lifted off the summit.
“Our compromise is to choose a goal for the day. If you were doing this traditionally from a trailhead, this is where you would make your last camp. So you feel the same experience as someone who hired a guide and beat their way through the brush to get to the last campsite…the same experience they would have on the day they do their final climb.”
Ian added, “The Adamants lodge has 600 square miles to range across. The four lodges together have 20,000 square miles, which is a lot of space. We do our best to stay out of the way of traditional hikers.”
Back at the lodge, we gathered in the lounge around a relief map sunken into a coffee table and became acquainted with everyone. The CMH lodges are cozy affairs with enough amenities to be described as elegantly rustic. Each holds 44 guests, which split in four groups according to strength and ability. The Adamants lodge is a couple of hours north of Revelstoke on the eastern edge of British Columbia and, the week we were there, drew a widely mixed group.
There was The Family, three generations of Harringtons from Washington State, here to celebrate the retirement of the father. They spent their days wandering lower valleys — except for the morning the two thirty-something sisters went mountaineering. Their two children, girls 7 and 9, spent their evenings scampering up the lodge’s climbing wall.
There was the couple from the island of Guernsey in Great Britain who had trained for their first CMH holiday by doing 20-mile hikes (in one day!) and were so overqualifiedthey instantly graduated to the mountaineering program.
There were the older ladies who just wanted gentle hikes, and assorted Boomers who liked to scramble. And there was a group of mountaineers from Colorado who spent their nights assembling mounds of technical gear and their days scaling serious peaks.
One night after dinner, the valley below suddenly started to glow. The light deepened to a burnished gold, and suddenly, lightning arced across the valley, seeming to jump from peak to peak. As the sky turned orange, then purple, then charcoal, the fireworks picked up, electrifying the horizon with razor-lines of light.
Everyone crowded the balcony, cheering each new lightning bolt. Then Ian brought out his guitar and started strumming a musical accompaniment to the show in the sky. Tomorrow would bring more valleys, more flowers, more glaciers. But for that moment, the horizon was providing all the nature we needed.
IF YOU GO
THE DETAILS
Canadian Mountain Holidays runs an assortment of heli-hiking and heli-climbing trips from early July to early September. These range from two-day trips as part of longer Canadian trips offered by Tauck Tours to three-day photography workshops, four-day family trips with special focus on children and a week-long multi-sport adventure which includes rafting, horseback riding, fishing and golfing. There are standard hiking trips in a single lodge and lodge-to-lodge trips where you switch lodges.
CMH also offers mountaineering programs ranging from a single day during a regular hiking trip to entire trips doing technical climbs.
Hiking trips start from about $300 (all prices in U.S. dollars) per day. Mountaineering trips average about $380 a day. The rate includes the works–lodging, food, guides, gear, helicopter rides and bus transportation from Calgary.
If you need hiking gear, the rate includes outer gear, including boots, parkas and even water bottles. All climbing gear is also supplied. Though you do not need to be in marathon shape, you will enjoy it more if you have some aerobic fitness. Much of the hiking is done above 6,000 feet.
INFORMATION
Canadian Mountain Holidays, Box 1660 Banff, AB, Canada, T0L 0C0; 800-661-0252. Web site: www.cmhmountaineering.com.
