By Jennifer Pemberton
When I told my friends I was going to the Bugaboos in British Columbia in July, they responded with either “I didn’t know you were a climber” or “Is there still snow up there this time of year?” because the granite spires known as the Bugaboos are renown for world-class mountaineering and backcountry skiing. But I am neither climber nor skier; I was there for “heli-hiking,” which sounds like an extreme sport, but it’s not.
The founders of Canadian Mountain Holidays (CMH) and the Bugaboos Lodge invented heli-skiing in the late 1960s, taking post-war choppers up the mountain from the base of an abandoned logging camp. These days the Bugaboos Lodge in the Columbia Mountains has a well-appointed bar and the world’s most scenic rooftop hot tub, but no one would have called their early operation a “resort.” It was all about the skiing.
It was Arthur Tauck Jr., considered the father of luxury adventure tourism, who supposedly invented heli-hiking -- or at least proposed the idea in the late 1970s to Hans Gmoser, who was running CMH’s lodges for skiing only at the time. Tauck wanted older, less aggressive travelers to get to be up close and personal with alpine meadows and retreating glaciers. The idea was to use helicopters for access — so that people could go hiking in places they couldn’t hike to otherwise.
It starts with breakfast.
From the Bugaboos Lodge, you’re looking up at the dramatic granite spires of the range out the dining room window. It’s so grandiose it seems two-dimensional, and yet over your perfect pancake and poached egg, your guide is pointing up at the view and asking you where you want to go, like it’s a map. After breakfast, you’re in a large 15-passenger Bell helicopter with a group of eight to ten other hikers and then, six minutes later, you’re there and the picture is three-dimensional.
The helicopter lands on a slick rock streaked by thousands of years of glacial grinding or maybe on a spongy mat of alpine heather. The pilot keeps the rotors going and the guide opens the sliding door like it’s a minivan. The hikers pile out on top of one another near the helicopter’s skid and form a “heli-huddle” -- a mass that won’t be blown away when the chopper takes off just inches from your body like a short-lived hurricane. In less than a minute it’s out of sight.
Heli-hiking is getting left behind.
What follows is silence and then the sweet sounds of the mountains as your ears adjust to the engineless quiet. There’s the wind and the dripping of a melting snowpatch. There’s a distant rockfall and a songbird miles away. There’s the grumble of the small adjustments that the glaciers make and a rivulet that gains momentum somewhere down below and turns into a waterfall. If the wildflowers are making a sound, you’re sure you can hear it.
There’s a reason CMH’s first “lodge” was an old logging camp. The forested base of the Columbia Mountains is dense. There are no trails through the forest and to get to where CMH’s hikes start, you’d have to pick your way through steep and rough terrain for days carrying everything on your back. Hence the helicopters. Instead of hiking all day to get there, you can spend all day being there.
Being there.
The guided hikes around the Bugaboos are as intense or relaxing as you want them to be. They offer slow strolls with lots of photography stops or long ridge-line marches after scrambling up talus slopes. If conditions are right, you can land on a glacier. I hiked along thousands of feet of what used to be glacier-covered rock and learned from my guide how quickly the ice was retreating to higher ground. Small handmade signs marked the years when the ice was there: 2008, 2003, 1999. These were placed not long ago and the distances between them is an effort hard to imagine.
I am neither skier nor climber, but I am an adventurer. I had never been in a helicopter before my visit to the Bugaboos Lodge, and while it is certainly a scenic thrill of a flight, when I came back from my trip what I wanted to talk about was the groaning of a glacier nestled between 75-million-year-old granite spires and the ptarmigan hen I saw with a covey of chicks skipping along the heather. I wanted to talk about seeing perfect grizzly bear tracks in the mud -- claws and all -- and finding a tuft of mountain goat wool caught in a spruce tree. I like to hike, but I only had four days to be in the Bugaboos, so I didn’t want to waste them climbing to 3,000 meters. I just wanted to be there.
ATTA Member CMH Heli-Skiing and Summer Adventures operates 11 heli-skiing lodges in Western Canada, two of which turn into heli-hiking lodges from July to August. More information at www.canadianmountainholidays.com.