The Seven Run Day: Eagle Pass Heli Ski

Seven runs isn’t a lot of skiing. At a resort, it barely constitutes a full day out. But unless you’re a vertical-metre-counting ski mountaineer, quantity is rarely the metric by which skiers measure the quality of a day.

There are many ways to find value in skiing. Earning a single, variable descent on a ski tour or chasing powder laps beneath a chairlift can be equally satisfying. The currency just changes: effort, cost, time, adventure, solitude.

Then there’s heli-skiing: perhaps the most indulgent way of exploring what we actually value in a day on skis. Our day with Eagle Pass was the most expensive day of skiing any of us had ever booked, and with a lifetime of ski films having set the expectations somewhere around bottomless powder and steep pillow lines, there was plenty of room for reality to fall a long way short.

Eagle Pass Heli, based in Revelstoke BC, appealed because it offered a way to tick-off a bucket list item without turning the experience into a week-long luxury holiday. We could stay in Revelstoke, drive out for the day, and, better still, Eagle Pass specialize in small groups, so we would have just four skiers and a guide in our team.

Even with fresh snow in the valley and the excitement of pulling into the lodge, with its roaring fire and neatly laid out avalanche bags, the anxieties were hard to shake. Would we spend the day cautiously pushing ourselves down gentle meadows? Would the guide trust us with terrain steep enough to actually have fun? Would we be limited by the squally conditions? And, would my Old Man be able to keep up?

Then we dropped into the first run.

Our guide, JP, a straight talking French Canadian equipped with an arsenal of savagely inappropriate one-liners, disappeared into the trees after telling us to follow his line, and to stop whenever he stopped. “I’ve got the best job in the world,” he laughed as he disappeared behind a cloud of cold smoke. “I always get the first tracks.”

I rolled over the edge into a steep slope with spacious trees opening out in every direction, a single track weaving between them. It was a powder skiing paradise.

All those worries vanished in an instant.

Following JP’s lead, I hunted every pillow and lip his line drew me towards. We were clearly aligned in our appetite for air miles. I skied until my legs began to burn without catching JP, then I remembered my dad. I needed to wait and make sure the old man was okay. A few seconds later he appeared, followed by my brother and Chance, the fourth man. All of them were grinning from ear to ear.

After another pitch, we finally burst out of the trees to find JP standing in a clearing. He had skied a long way from a group of skiers he’d never seen ride before.

“You guys skied that fast,” he grinned. “We’re gonna have a good day.”

Our celebrations were short-lived. We had barely high-fived each other before JP was telling us to get our skis off and get into position. The helicopter was already incoming.

Kneeling in the clearing, holding onto my dad and brother as the machine flew directly towards us, snow and downdraft blasted into our faces. The bird delicately landed in the three metres between JP and us wide-eyed skiers, like a jenga piece into the middle of a tower, with the door handle inches from my face.

We scrambled aboard and were back in the air almost instantly. The machine was thrown around like a plastic bag in the wind as we climbed, stomachs in mouths, back towards the ridgeline, the rotors chopping through the turbulent air.

Luke, the heli’s jockey, barely spoke. He had an almost unnervingly stoic calm about him, seemingly unaware, or completely unfazed, by the chaos the weather was throwing at him, as if he was operating on a completely different level.

Then JP pointed down towards another pine-covered peak, looked back at us and grinned. “Do you want to hit a cliff?”

Luke aimed the beast at an impossibly small clearing near the summit, barely wider than the rotors. A tiny flag poking from the snow marked the landing zone. Touchdown was millimetre-perfect. With a thumbs-up from Luke, the doors flew open, then it was noise, adrenaline and a frantic scramble beneath the blades. A final blast of rotor wash and biting snow, and then the helicopter disappeared.

Silence.

Standing on that tiny summit with 360-degree options dropping away beneath us, surrounded by nothing but endless forests, having barely caught my breath from the last run, I began to understand what makes this experience so special.

There was no resort below. No lifts. No buildings. No roads. No ski tracks. Not even another group of skiers. Just powder-covered wilderness stretching seemingly forever. One moment we were being battered around in a tin can with a jet engine; the next we were standing in complete silence, looking down at a mountain playground that was ours to choose from.

That transition—from adrenaline to tranquility—became the defining rhythm of the day.

“How big is this cliff then?”

The laps began to blur together: the noise of the helicopter, the rush of being dropped somewhere new, the silence at the top, then the skiing—everything you could hope for a day in the British Columbian backcountry.

One run stood out. The sun had started to pop and JP instructed Luke to give him a fly-by of a zone he thought might have filled-in sufficiently. The view out of the window looked like it was picked straight out of a myriad of ski films.

It was Chance’s turn to drop first on the next run, but JP called over the radio. “Scott, you should go first,” he told me. “Jump off everything you can see.” I looked at Chance apologetically.

“Sorry mate. Guide’s orders.”

Pillow after pillow down a wide chute, brain overstimulated with options and shouting at the top of my lungs. I skied back to JP barely able to speak.

“Was that not one of the best runs of your life?”

After lunch, the weather deteriorated. The talk on the radio was of difficult conditions but to our delight Luke was intent on getting us up again. He wrestled the A-Star up another ridgeline, eventually giving in and swooped over the ridge down into the valley to less squally conditions. We laughed nervously until he looked back at us. “No worries, we’ll use the back door.”

By the final lap, my legs were starting to feel it and, judging by Dad’s reduced ability to miss the trees, so were his. Luke picked us up and took the scenic route back to the lodge, skimming the ridgelines and enormous cliffs, plunging down towards the Trans-Canada Highway below.

We laughed all the way home. Legs tired and faces sore from grinning.

Seven runs.

That’s the strange thing about heli-skiing. If you reduce the day to numbers, it can look ridiculous. Seven runs for an amount of money that could buy a season pass. A helicopter burning fuel to move skiers from one patch of wilderness to another. Economically—and environmentally—it’s difficult to justify.

But the absurdity of skiing is often hard to justify.

The value of a day isn’t measured only in vertical metres or faceshots. Sometimes it’s the effort of earning a descent. Sometimes it’s the perfect chairlift lap. And sometimes it’s those few quiet moments on a peak in British Columbia, with your dad and brother, before you drop in to share the sort of turns you’ve always dreamt about.

Those moments lasted only minutes. I’ll remember them for the rest of my life.

Eagle Pass Heli are based in Revelstoke, BC and fly only in groups of four accessing their exclusive terrain deep in the Monashees. www.eaglepassheli.com