The Luxury Network International Magazine Issue 16

Mike is not the kind of guy I expected to meet
at a heli ski operation. But then again, none
of this is what I expected. When I was given
the chance to go on a Heli Safari with Last Frontier
Heli, located up in the far reaches of Northern
BC, Canada, I had figured it would be the classic
Canadian heli/lodge experience, the experience
the Canadian reputation is built on. But from the
moment I arrived in Stewart – the first stop on our
Safari – I had to rethink all of it.
Stewart is a town built to support a mining industry
that no longer exists. Situated at the end of the
Portland Canal, Stewart sits about a half-mile
from the border. A clear-cut through the forest
separates it from neighbouring Hyder, Alaska,
population 87.
The wheels of industry turned here for almost 100
years. There was a time when the town swelled to
many tens of thousands and business was good,
a time when men from all over Canada flocked
to work the silver mines, drink whisky and make
more of themselves. But the landscape was harsh
and unyielding. Giant glacial plateaus plunged
into icy ocean fjords. Avalanches engulfed teams
of men working the valleys below. Man, they must
have tried. They carved tunnels through rock, they
shored up massive slipping hillsides, they cut trails
through deep pine and hemlock forests, and they
laid tracks along the shorefront to set up a goods
line down south. But this was rough country,
nobody got rich, and when the mines closed
down and moved to more profitable locations the
workers left with them.
Today the town is all but dead. But the spirit of
frontier life remains in the buildings that continue
to line Main Street. Some are artfully restored in
Pastel timber, like the Ripley Creek Inn and the
Bitter Creek Café, with their cosy kitsch interiors
and bric-a-brac from the silver rush, others less so.
Down the road an original ‘57 Chevrolet Bel Air in
jet blue sits in an old warehouse. It looks like it’s
been driven once and then just left to sit.
But where most would see only history, two
salty old Swiss skiers and an Englishman saw
something else. Like the miners of the early 20 th
century, George Rossett, Franz Fux and Mike
Watling saw opportunity where others saw nothing
but wilderness. For the miners it was the rich silver
veins in the upper Salmon River Basin, for Rossett,
Fux and Watling, it was the 9,500km 2 of available
tenure, packed with expansive glaciers, steep fallline
forests and epically skiable peaks, making it
the biggest single heli ski operation on Earth. In
the middle of this skiing Nirvana, Last Frontier
Heli was born.
My arrival coincided with an Arctic outflow
causing sub-arctic temperatures starting at minus
25 degrees. Tundra-like conditions made the first
two days unbearable. It was cold, it was dry, and it
was hard. But then it snowed. After being sucked
into the slipstream of the outflow, this low pressure
dropped 50cms of the driest snow imaginable
in a single night, lighter than Utah, lighter than
Hokkaido, lighter than anything. I’ve never seen
anything like it. I figured being a heli operation
we couldn’t fly during a storm system, and that we
would have to wait for the next blue bird to go up,
but that very next morning we were out there in the
field. What we saw was a landscape transformed;
from an empty frostbitten Yukon to a deep winter
wilderness. Pow.
We couldn’t believe it. None of us, not even
Watling himself had ever skied snow like that.
It was all there in front of you, but there just
wasn’t any resistance, there was no feedback, you
couldn’t feel a single flake. It was so deep and yet
so fast that even making simple turns through it
was strange; less like skiing and more like moving
through a medium, like being a ghost.
“Having good tree line skiing is so important for
a heli operation,” said Watling as we waited to
drop the next run, “Otherwise you just don’t get
to ski days like this.” I wasn’t at all accustomed
to flying around in a helicopter in the middle of a
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ABOVE: IN THE VALLEY ON THE RIGHT IS THE TOWN OF STEWART, BC. IN THE VALLEY ON THE LEFT IS THE TOWN OF HYDER, AK. THAT LINE THROUGH THE MIDDLE IS
THE CANADIAN/US BORDER. OPPOSITE: TO GET SNOW LIKE THIS YOU NEED REALLY DEEP COLD, TONS OF PRECIPITATION, NO WIND, AND MOST OF ALL, ACCESS. LAST
FRONTIER CAN GIVE YOU THE ACCESS, THE REST IS LUCK. PREVIOUS SPREAD: IMAGINE DROPPING IN HERE WITH FIVE OF YOUR MATES. UNFORGETTABLE.