Back to Nature -- by Helicopter

Helicopters are ungainly machines that do wondrous things. The most obvious keys to keeping them aloft are the top rotors, the blades that whir above the aircraft and give pilots the ability to hover. But the bit of metal that holds those rotors in place is equally important. The technical term is “main rotor retaining nut,” but certain dark-humored pilots call it “the Jesus Nut,” because if it fails--well, you get the idea.

Now, if that bit of information unsettles your stomach, there is very little chance you’ll be interested in traveling to the Bugaboos, a lonely set of mountains just west of the Canadian Rockies in British Columbia, to crouch under the roar and shudder of a 14-seat Bell 212 helicopter and shuttle between a lodge and one spectacular hiking spot after another. You may not want to think about the occasional takeoffs amid charcoal skies and pelting hail. I probably shouldn’t even mention the occasional landing on a narrow precipice of loose and splintered slate.

But there are those who possess the necessary faith and equilibrium for these actions, and not all are wild-eyed, free-spending heli-skiers besotted by the idea of virgin powder and no chairlifts for miles. A small but increasing number of North Americans have embraced the idea of helicopter-aided hiking and mountaineering, including yours truly.

I take you now to Groovy Ridge, a 9,000-foot-high mountain spine near Bugaboo Glacier. It’s an afternoon of variable winds and massing clouds. I shuffle along near the end of a single-file line of hikers, scarcely blinking.

Our path is perhaps three feet wide, with slopes of several hundred feet on either side. A few hundred feet down one slope, we can see mountain goats, still as statues. Farther down, about 1,500 feet, is the tree line. Out there on the horizon, dozens of ragged, snowy mountains are arrayed like ice cream cones. Occasionally, we pause to appreciate them. Then we go back to picking our way along the ridge, delicately placing our feet among approximately 1 billion bits of shattered slate. This is nothing compared to what serious mountaineers do around here with ropes and pulleys, but we are strangers in the high country of British Columbia, and this is plenty for us. It is astonishing, and if you were in the wrong frame of mind, it would be enough to make you curl into a terrified fetal ball.

Thanks to the ministrations of guide Jos Lang, we are in the right frame of mind: relaxed but alert, fully aware that we are tiptoeing through a singular environment.

As we scramble up a particularly problematic jutting boulder, my fellow hikers Dave and Jeanette Maddy start chuckling aloud at something quite absurd: They have just remembered that I’m supposed to put this experience into words.

*

Commercial heli-hiking seems to have been born in British Columbia in 1977. That winter, a Connecticut-based tour operator named Arthur Tauck Jr. took a heli-skiing vacation at a lodge run by Canadian Mountain Holidays.

Ideas run in the Tauck family. The senior Arthur Tauck is widely credited with popularizing the North American escorted bus tour. The junior Arthur Tauck suggested to CMH management that they really ought to find a use for their lodge in the summer. Perhaps he could help.

A deal was struck. The following summer, Tauck’s company introduced 800 summer visitors to CMH’s Cariboo Lodge and packed them off on daily expeditions by helicopter. Now Tauck brings more than 2,000 hikers each summer on group tours to several lodges run by CMH, the biggest operation of its kind in the world. An additional 1,200 hikers and mountaineers signed up on their own. This is small potatoes compared to the 7,000 heli-skiers who fill CMH’s lodges to capacity each winter, but the hiking idea is catching on among other mountain resort areas, including Whistler.

I fly to Calgary, Alberta, on a Wednesday in late summer, catch a bus to Banff, spend a night, then catch another bus and a helicopter into the mountains to the south. Getting out on Sunday was simpler--a bus straight to the airport in Calgary. In between, I had a standard package: three days, three nights, 11 flights, all meals, at about $350 per day.

The Bugaboo Lodge, about 185 miles west of Calgary, was built in 1968 and has been upgraded and expanded three times since. It is one of six CMH wilderness lodges in British Columbia. (All six handle heli-skiing in winter; four open for summer heli-hiking.) It gets its power from a pair of generators and stands in a long green valley. From the deck and about half of the bedrooms, you look out, and up, at the postcard view of Bugaboo Glacier, pierced by twin spires, Houndstooth and Marmalata. From this angle, the spires look like a single peak--look, in fact, like a 9,250-foot granite molar bursting forth from smooth white slopes.

This scenery is remarkable enough from a lodge window at dawn. But your sense of dimension grows with each flight and hike as you gaze at the mountains from above, below and amid. Though there are favorite hiking routes, they are used so sparingly that there are basically no trails. Guides stage barbecues beside green lakes of glacial runoff, then the helicopter carries away the barbecue grill and all other traces of lunch.

They are a worldly bunch, these guides, hailing from New Zealand and Austria, as well as Canada, and skilled in relations with both rocks and people. Joining us nightly at the dinner table, they help serve and join in conversation, casually disclosing their considerable experience. In conference out of our earshot, they assess guests’ endurance, skills and motivation, each day arranging four groups of no more than 11. Each group gets its own guide, drop-off point and hiking itinerary.

This is an imperfect art: Several eager hikers, assigned to a slow-moving group on one day of my visit, find themselves aching to move faster, and a few privately say the day has been disappointing. But the system works well for me and for most people, most of the time. Urged to test myself, I find that by the third day I am clambering up rocky peaks I didn’t dare approach the first day.

The flexible hiking setup serves families well, too. During my visit, 82-year-old Gus Hart of Montana and son Rob (a veteran climber who has bagged peaks in Chile’s Andes) could breakfast at the same table, hike according to their own speeds and compare notes at dinner. (Though lunch is available at the lodge, almost everyone opts for the picnics staged by guides in coordination with the day’s hiking itineraries.)

Some of my fellow hikers: an engineer from Ottawa; a doctor from New Jersey and his wife, who took up hiking after receiving a liver transplant 15 years before; a Montana couple celebrating their 55th anniversary with their five grown children; a middle-aged contractor from Tampa with his longtime buddy, a professional mandolin player, and their wives; a young couple, both software specialists, from Manchester, England; a retired woman from Washington, D.C.; a Social Security Administration researcher whose son gave her the trip for her birthday; and Amanda and Hailey, ages 12 and 8, with their parents--a young couple from just outside Banff. The girls are certainly the most fearless and tireless hikers in our group.

The lodge has only 24 rooms and lies 30 miles from the nearest paved road. Our guest rooms have no television, no phones and no door keys. We do have a fireplace, a family-style dining room, sauna, whirlpool, a spare guitar and a specially heated downstairs room in which our boots bake dry each night. CMH officials plant a tree for every customer, insist that guests use biodegradable soap and shampoo and have all waste carried out of the wild. A few years ago, to reduce garbage, they started raising three piglets on kitchen scraps at each of their six winter lodges. At the end of the season, a butcher is brought in, the pigs become bacon and the circle is closed.

To wake us each morning at 7:15, call us to breakfast at 8 and dinner at 7, staffers ring a bell. A typical spread on the buffet table: roasted plum tomato soup, salad with orange vinaigrette dressing, Thai chicken curry and, for dessert, a choice of apple-pear crumble, New York cheesecake, or both (remember, we’re burning a lot of calories here). To plan for the region’s highly changeable weather (sun, clouds, rain and hail in one day are not uncommon), they download satellite photos from the Internet. At 9 each morning, we troop off to the helipad and take turns waiting under the roaring rotors, piling into the copter and wheeling off into the sky. (The lodge’s helicopters are operated by Alpine Helicopters, which owns CMH.)

A typical day of hiking for me (age 37, on the skinny side, recurrent sciatica) begins with a ride from the lodge (4,900 feet) to a ridge or bowl near a peak (around 7,000 feet). From there, we’ll gain about 1,000 feet in two to three hours, rest a bit at the peak, descend about 1,000 feet, then either hike to lower ground for lunch or catch a helicopter ride to the picnic site.

Sometimes we climb around stable boulders, sometimes through glacial moraines full of loose rocks, sometimes up a bare slope covered in icy crust. Once we hike into a cloud, and twice we are pelted by hail flurries. We tromp past red and orange mushrooms, taste wild sorrel (lemony), bend to admire Indian paintbrush plants of a dozen hues. And we are introduced to “watermelon snow”--snow that takes on a reddish tint and fruity smell, thanks to algae. In the glacial moraines, grown men and women giggle, holler and smash rocks apart, looking for deposits of iron pyrite, quartz and garnet-encrusted granite.

*

Is heli-hiking cheating? Do I feel guilty? Yes, a bit. But for me, the problem is not that heli-hiking is cheating against nature. Unless you belong to an Amazonian jungle tribe, any 20th century life is an exercise in cheating against nature. How many hikers get from home to trail head without a motorized vehicle?

The thornier question for me is whether one man’s rotor-aided adventure unfairly ruins another man’s, or woman’s, hard-earned back-country escape from the modern world. So I start asking about who might be below us in all that rough forest.

The Bugaboo Lodge sits on private land but sends hikers into neighboring “crown” lands (owned by the government but free of many parkland restrictions) and into Bugaboo Provincial Park, an isolated preserve that is largely without trails. In a voluntary move to minimize its effect on hikers, CMH generally flies its helicopters above the 11,500-foot level when crossing over park territory, but the company has agreements that allow it to land helicopters at 17 park sites. There’s no clear count of day-hikers, but park records show a three-month total of 2,592 overnight campers during the previous summer season. In other words, out in that vast territory we are flying over, about 400 square miles, there are probably about 30 campers each day. If they’re lucky, they’ll never hear us. If they’re unlucky, a moment or two of the rotors’ roar will intrude on their wilderness.

In the office of the British Columbia park system, area supervisor Alex Green says that CMH has always cooperated in efforts to minimize helicopter impact. But, he says, “helicopters are noticed by those in the area. New individuals entering the area may believe that the helicopter access is a little excessive.” Some, he says, go elsewhere.

Of course, if you’re going to pass a portion of each day airborne beneath a Jesus Nut, you probably won’t be spending all of your time thinking about the welfare of other people. A prospective heli-hiker would be foolish not to think about safety, especially after the publicity following the helicopter crash in northeast Nevada that killed Walt Disney Co. President Frank Wells and two others on a heli-skiing expedition in April 1994. (Their copter, authorities said, was operated by a local company and crashed after experiencing engine trouble in stormy weather.)

CMH’s last flight-related fatalities, marketing manager Marty von Neudegg says, were in the early 1980s, when a stray ski slipped from an airborne copter’s storage basket and was clipped by the tail rotor. The ensuing crash killed two people, both CMH employees. Since then, the company has been carrying about 10,000 skiers and hikers per year in sun, sleet, hail and snow without a major accident. In 20 summers of heli-hiking, the company hasn’t reported a single flight-related injury. The pilot who delivers me to and from the lodge each day has been flying for 22 years.

*

Late one afternoon, after we stumble in from the copter, pull off our heavy boots and start nibbling on happy-hour California rolls, a bartender confides to me that heli-hikers tend to be more “middle-class” than the free-spending skiers who crowd the place in winter. I wasn’t feeling particularly middle-class at that moment, lounging in a mountain retreat and sampling hors d’oeuvres--but I suppose it’s true that we summer people throw less money around, demand less and raise less hell than those winter folk. Instead of pounding down alcohol, as some rich skiers have been known to do, we tend to gather on the porch or around the fire, chatting or reading.

Whatever. Except for the unlucky woman who slipped while crossing a stream, badly bruising her tailbone, and is laid up for a day and a half, most of us are radiating contentment by our third day in the mountains. Instead of worrying about those invisible hikers down below our helicopter, I find myself thinking, yes, I could happily do this every summer. Besides the hiking, I could learn to fish, mountain bike a little, maybe even give rock-climbing a try.

CMH, as it happens, is beginning to build a mountaineering program, taking about 100 guests out with ropes and harnesses last summer. Some sign up for mountaineering in advance and pay a little extra. Others are recruited daily from the ranks of hikers, and pay nothing extra at all.

“What we do in a day of mountaineering in summer,” says CMH’s Von Neudegg, “blows the doors off any day of heli-skiing” or heli-hiking.

So it may. But on the way back in from a long, steep hike, looking out the helicopter window at the pine tops and ridges below, taking care not to jar the locked latch with my elbow, I’m happy to keep my doors just as they are.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Guidebook: Take a Heli-Hike

Prices: All prices are approximate and are computed at a rate of 1.35 Canadian dollars to the U.S. dollar.

*

Getting there: Air Canada and Canadian Airlines fly nonstop to Calgary from Los Angeles. Delta offers flights, with a stop in Salt Lake City.

*

Where to heli-hike: Canadian Mountain Holidays, (800) 661-0252, fax (403) 762-5879, https://www.cmhhike.com, opens four lodges for heli-hiking in summer. In addition to the Bugaboo Lodge, the Adamant Lodge has a family emphasis; the Bobbie Burns Lodge has a rock-climbing practice wall; the Cariboo Lodge handles mostly one-day and two-day trips. Fishing, rafting and other activities are available, depending on the lodge. Rates run about $1,050 per person, double occupancy, for a three-night stay, meals and helicopter flights. Also, CMH has a five-night summer package (one night at a Banff hotel, three nights in a CMH lodge, one night at a Calgary hotel, local transport to and from the Calgary airport) beginning at about $1,400 per person.

“Shoulder season” discounts of about 25% are available in late June, late August and early September. All rates exclude transportation to Calgary. From Calgary, three companies regularly run buses to Banff, a 90-minute trip that costs about $30 one-way.

The Mike Wiegele Heli-Ski Resort, (800) 661-9170 or (250) 673-8381, fax (250) 673-8464, a very upscale village of cabins, lodge and recreational facilities near Blue River, British Columbia, offers heli-hiking, fishing, helicopter picnics and helicopter sightseeing. The Wiegele village has 114 beds, and rates for a three-day trip begin at $2,320. (A minimum of three people is required for helicopter trips.) Price includes meals, lodging and helicopter flights, but excludes transportation to Blue River, which is roughly midway between Vancouver and Alberta, with Kamloops being the nearest major airport.

In the Whistler resort area of British Columbia, Tyax Mountain Heli-Sports, (604) 932-2070, fax (604) 932-2500, has year-round helicopter day activities. A three- to four-hour heli-picnic runs about $88 per person, food included. In the same area, Blackcomb Helicopters, (604) 938-1700, fax (604) 938-1706, offers summer heli-picnics (about $140), half-day heli-hikes ($165) and daylong heli-fishing expeditions ($250 and up), and makes custom arrangements.

*

For more information: Canadian Consulate, Tourist Information, 550 S. Hope St., Ninth Floor, Los Angeles, 90071; (213) 346-2700, fax (213) 346-2767. B.C. Tourist Information and Reservations, (800) 663-6000.