Canadian Heli-Hiking: Climbing to the Sky

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

Few tourists venture into the mountains of North America. They never find out that snow is pink; that furry little creatures (resembling tennis balls with ears) collect spring flowers for winter larders and that grizzly bears still chew the bark off arctic willows as a cure for toothache.

“Yes, this is bear country,” says our Canadian Mountain Holiday guide, Deborah Ashton, unfolding one of her many wildlife charts to make a point. “Groups of six or more hikers can intimidate bears to back off but once when I came up on a grizzly with a group of eleven hikers we retreated because I wasn’t sure the bear could count.”

She picks up a piece of glistening rock and asks, “When you find quartz what else might you find?”

“Wrist watches?” ventures one of her group.

She smiles then talks about “fool’s gold, iron pyrite,” and how the first prospectors came to those Purcell Mountains in British Columbia searching for gold. When they found only quartz they were said to have been buggabooed (fooled) and the name stuck.

Secrets like these were known only to alpine guides, adventurers, explorers, prospectors and maybe a few mountain goats until 1978. That's when the late Hans Gmoser, president of Canadian Mountain Holidays of Banff, Alberta, decided to offer helicopter access in summer to the Purcell Mountains of British Columbia. That opened up a completely new world; well-traveled tourists who felt they'd seen everything on God's earth found that they hadn't. CMH is in its fifth  decade of helicopter skiing. Friends of Gmoser (and he had so many) remember its beginnings: "Someone suggested we could use the winter skiing helicopters for summer heli-hiking. Hans was a true visionary. He said, `It will never work.' " It did, of course, and today, tours of the Rockies that include heli-hiking are among the most popular trips offered in Canada. When Hans died in July 2006 he could look back on six mountain lodges amongst the 10,000 foot peaks accessible essentially only by helicopter.

Banff, Alberta, situated in a national park does not permit helicopter flights. CMH uses cavernous Bell 212 helicopters to move hikers from a spot near Banff to its lodges in British Columbia. Its guest books are filled with superlatives. No wonder. CMH guides whether conducting heli-hiking in summer or heli-skiing in winter are probably the best -- and the best looked after -- in North America (there is hardly any turnover in staff; many having been with CMH for more than 20 years). The outdoor clothing and hiking boots provided guests are of high quality, the meals are superlative, even the snacks guests squirrel away in their CMH backpacks include options like bars of Lindt chocolate and cans of smoked oysters. Life far above the ground may be hard for some but not for those hiking the high Bugaboos under the wing of CMH especially when the weather smiles, the sky goes Kodak blue, the air turns crisp and the surrounding peaks seem as close as your back yard.

Here's one group of hikers wandering along 8,000-foot-high Groovy Ridge as if they were on a Sunday walk in the park. These tourists responded to CMH’s questionnaire by selecting photography as their main interest; heavy camera bags and long lenses swing from every shoulder. Rock fragments scatter like gravel beneath their heavy boots, but the going is surprisingly easy. It's a mixed lot: a young woman who came with a broken foot; another with multiple sclerosis walking with a cane; a New York City movie producer burdened by a heavy video camera; a Los Angeles radio announcer carrying a small bundle of taping equipment; a fashion photographer from Florida dressed for safari; a cheerful nurse who lives for exercise; and a somewhat overweight physician thinking he's seen bluer skies in Southern California. Maybe. But not with a vista like this.

The mountain range of the Bugaboos rises in every direction; some peaks are crowned by low cumulus clouds, like bald heads with wigs of white absorbent cotton. Some snow-covered peaks sparkle like diamonds in the occasional sun, while others are topped with blue-green glaciers, the ice hundreds of feet thick and hundreds of years old.

The Florida photographer hears the helicopter first; the group that chose active hiking for its pursuit is aboard. "Here comes the MASH chopper," he shouts cheerfully. "Get the podiatrists ready for casualties!" Led by their guide the photographers head for the landing site, a flat plateau, and crouch in the famous "huddle" taught to all heli-hikers on their first day. Although an average adult could easily stand upright below the swirling blades, the group is asked to bend over and form a tight scrimmage. There's always a chance that if the land slopes upward or the slipstream blows excessively, hikers could find themselves where they shouldn't be.

Hikers hold onto hats, glasses, packs and lens caps as the jet-powered twin-engine helicopter thrashes overhead.

The passengers jump out and form another huddle; it looks for all the world like two football teams preparing for a play. But after a moment, on a signal from the guides, the photographers clamber aboard.

Five minutes later, the chopper drops its passengers in an enchanted forest. Trees and shrubs as small as bonsai swirl in the slipstream like Krummholz forests dwarfed by weather and sculpted by wind. Brown marble-veined rocks, stacked like sheets of cardboard, are scattered in disarray, surrounded by decaying tree stumps studded with witches' butter, a fungus as yellow as corn. Indian paintbrush, ranging from pale pink to crimson, stands tall among the green moss. Purple scorpion weed, its beauty belying its name, competes with western anemone, sweet coltsfoot, wild strawberry and mountain sorrel to carpet the uneven slopes.

"That's moss campion," says our guide, pointing to a round clump of low-lying flowers. "It takes 25 years to reach the size of a 25-cent piece, but you'll sometimes see an area four feet across in the mountains - it takes thousands of years to grow that big."

The helicopter is a magic carpet. Here's Easy Roll, a gentle hike through a forest once struck by lightning; Silver Basin, a boggy slope of cascading glacial streams; Bugaboo Pass, with its deserted hut, a relic of gold-mine fever; Dead Elk Lake, surely transplanted from the Scottish Hebrides; and Tidy Bowl, a stop for a hearty lunch and outdoor toilet facilities. And maybe the most magnificent 360-degree view in the Canadian Rockies. For sea-level citizens, this panorama is something out of a fairy tale. Nevertheless, the hikers look higher, to the mysterious ice fields above.

Our guide finally puts our group on ice. Now we're standing on the edge of the Vowell Glacier, watching as milky, turquoise water trickles steadily from its base.

This strange lunar landscape features glacier erratics -- boulders the size of houses left millions of years ago when the ice receded. Eroded, craggy cliffs, topped with pink watermelon snow -- colored by the unusual red algae that grows at this altitude - rise above green, boggy meadows. Little pika scamper across these meadows, spending their summers gathering alpine wildflowers for their winter lairs. A single pika - a cross between a mouse and a rabbit - will harvest 25 pounds of flowers, all neatly arranged in piles, each type placed separately on rocks to dry in the occasional summer sun.

One woman picks up a piece of ice and wraps it in a paper towel. "That's for my Scotch and soda tonight," she says. "A drink with 300-year-old ice!"

The hikers work their way along the glacier, over hummocks of rubble cut in the slope by streams of melt water. They trek across 100-foot-deep crevasses bridged by ice sculptures, finally reaching the helicopter ready to transport them from this Pleistocene Epoch back into the 21st century.

Like an alpine shepherd, our guide ushers his flock into the helicopter. “In Europe, people live in the mountains," he says. "As children, we'd be sent up into the Alpine meadows to bring down the cattle. We'd learn to handle heights. But in North America people drive to visit the mountains. They have no native skills. But if they want to learn, we're here to teach."

Is there something mystical about mountains? Are they special?

Our guide thinks so. She crunches through the crusted snow and over the rocky slopes in serene contentment. Black clouds skitter across the jagged peaks, but she ignores the light drizzle.

"Liquid sunshine," she murmurs.

She stops and holds up her hand.

"Listen," she says.

A subdued moan whispers across Bugaboo Pass and deepens into a throaty rumble. Members of her group look puzzled. She points. With a crack and a booming roar, a chunk of ice the size of a Winnebago falls off Quintet Glacier and tumbles down the mountain.

The sound echoes over Silver Basin and bounces back. "Listen," she says once more. Absolute silence. Then it comes again: a high-pitched cry, then another, both answered by a similar squeak from behind some rocks.

"There," she says, pointing to the sky as the bird flashes overhead. "That's a Clark's Nutcracker, and the second jay-like sound was a whisky jack, its competitor. The squeak was a pika answering."

The guides believe the mountains sharpen people's senses. They hear the gurgling of mountain streams, feel the brush of fog against their cheeks and smell the woodsy spice of balsam fir with an intensity they never notice in other places.

Says one, "And after the sun goes down, when the sky bathes the peaks with a blue aura against the orange light with what we call the alpine glow -- that's the magic of mountains."

The hikers smile in agreement. "Mountains inspire me," a hiker says. "But they make me humble, too, because up there, we find the essence of our own insignificance in the grand scheme of God's plans.”

"It seems like a cliché,” says our guide, “but we've had guests leaving with tears in their eyes. It's as if, for the first time in their lives, they've found in themselves a sense of adventure and lived life to the fullest. As if perhaps for the first time in their lives, they've really left the pavement."

It’s all there for us, replies Dave Cochrane, a mountain guide for 27 years with CMH and manager of its most successful resort, the Bugaboo Lodge, “We offer adventure, challenge, education -- and fun.”

And what could be more fun than hiking at 8500 feet through mossy Alpine meadows quilted with wildflowers, wandering along lunar landscape crests hovering above glaciers, sliding down crystallized snow banks that turn pink when their red algae is exposed.

And why go? “It lets you walk away from the world,” explains long-time employee Heather Moreau, so happy to be sending us into the bugaboos she’s almost bouncing. “Our mandate at CMH is to protect the environment, maintain what God hath created and send you forth for what’s good for the soul!”