My Top Ten Ways to Prep for the Heliski Season

My fellow Last Frontier blogger, Katie Burrell, wrote a great post on her top ten ways to prep for the heliski season…so I thought I would take a crack at the list as well.

First off, I’ll need to call my bank, re-mortgage the house…that’s gotta be number one on the list. Either that or spend the next month designing a really clever smartphone app so I can stop riding chairlifts and start using helicopters. Ok, let’s be serious. If I am going to write out a proper list of the ten things I need to do to get ready for heli-ski season, they would be as follows:

10. Get a really, really fat pair of skis

9. Get a snorkel. With an annual snowfall at Last Frontier of over 80 feet, it might come in handy

8. Invest in a Gopro.

7. Negotiate a hall pass from my wife for, say, January and March so the commitment on the home front doesn’t interfere with my availability to ride in a helicopter every day

6. Immediately buy the Greg Stump ski film collection to get my stoke on

5. Work every day until January 1st.

4. Start increasing my beer intake so I can roll with the guides every night after skiing

3. Look at becoming a ski guide so can just roll with myself and heliski for a living

2. Sell my snowmobile – who needs one of those when you have access to a helicopter?

1. Grow a beard.

This is a tall list, but yours would be too if you saw where I was going. Imagine a remote mountain range deep in the Central Coast of BC where snow is measured not in centimeters, but in meters. Where the trees are older than time and the snow is deeper than fate and the only thing to worry about is coming up for air between turns. Where that addictive, almost manic feeling that overpowers us all when we’re shredding deep pow is a daily occurrence and the only limit to it is the juice you have left in your legs.

So whatever your list looks like, get to it, ‘cause winter is coming, my friends. The mountains call and we need to be ready.

Be safe and ski hard.