Superhuman Prep: How Guides Get Ready for Winter

All mountain and/or ski guides have a different process to prepare for the heliskiing season. Whether it is mental, physical or spiritual, these guides have their relationships with the mountains dialled. Jamie Whiteside, Assistant Operations Manager at Last Frontier Heliskiing, has a process that doesn’t seem so bad at all: this year, it involved a yoga retreat in Mexico. Don’t you wish that your work preparation involved something like that? 

Jamie described the scene in Sayulita, Mexico: “it was a beautiful building, old style construction with hardwood floors and huge pillars, situated up on a hill overlooking the ocean. We practiced yoga every morning and evening, and during the days I’d head out surfing.” For Jamie, it’s important to calm the body and mind before the physical and logistical challenges of the winter season take over.

Right now he’s at home in Golden, BC, teaching Adventure Tourism and Natural History courses at the college until the snow really starts to fly. For fitness, he’s been cross-country skiing and ski touring a couple of times a week. This is mostly to prep his legs, because the real snowpack analysis that he will do for the purpose of Last Frontier Heliskiing operations won’t happen until he’s up at staff training. During the fall, mining companies hire guides to track the snowfall and avalanche hazards, and these guides update this information on the InfoX. This gives the guides a general idea of what’s going on up there, but they won’t have the details that they really need until they are there in person.  

Once the season kicks off in early December at the lodge, Jamie is 2 weeks on, 1 week off, and is flat out until the spring. On his weeks off he “pretty much needs to chill”; as you can imagine the physical demands of skiing, digging and loading skis combined with the mental demands of organization and logistics can be pretty draining. In other words: these guys are superhuman.  

This is Jamie’s fourth year at Last Frontier Heliskiing. As the Assistant Operations Manager, he handles more than just the in-the-field aspects of the program. Acting as liaison between the pilots, lodge staff, guests and guides, Jamie really has his finger on the pulse of the lodge. There are a lot of guides who have been at Last Frontier Heliskiing for longer than he has, but just aren’t interested in that side of it. Jamie genuinely enjoys that aspect of the operation; but he quickly followed up with “but the huge amount of terrain and endless exploration has really got to be my favourite part of working up here.”