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Helihiking the Rockies of Canada

Helihiking the Canadian Rockies Slide Show – Images by Lee Foster

by Lee Foster

Suddenly the Bell helicopter pulls into the sky, leaving you and a dozen other hikers in a huddled cluster under the wash of the rotors.

You rise up from the ground to look around. You have been dropped in a remote area of the Canadian Rockies–the Bugaboos of the Purcell Range on the western slopes. With a certified alpine guide, you will walk from the impromptu helicopter landing over terrain that few backpackers have ever reached.

In your party there may be children and seniors past 60. Since the helicopter will return to a site perhaps a mile down the ridge, you don’t need to possess more than casual fitness to enjoy this pristine wilderness.

You begin to key out the wildflowers with your guide, distinguishing between heaths and heathers, mountain lilies and saxifrages.

One drop puts you on the middle of huge Vowell Glacier. Expertly guided, you make your way amidst the crevices, the streams of water, and the massive boulders that lie on the surface of the ice mass.

While enjoying the visual experience, you breath the fresh, brisk mountain air. During the walks, aside from conversations with your comrades, all is silent, except for the wind and the occasional whistle of a pika, one of the small rodents of the mountains.

You see remarkable sights, such as excavations grizzly bears make to dig out ground squirrels. Your guide informs you that some researchers think the grizzly does this partly for play. The grizzly’s caloric energy expended to dig out the squirrel exceeds the energy gained by eating the squirrel.

Such are the insights of the mountains, available to the helicopter hiker.

Soon the hour and a half at the average drop is up, and the helicopter returns. Your guide calls the helicopter in with a radio phone. You lift off to another location for a second drop. In a day there are usually two drops in the morning and two in the afternoon. By late afternoon you return to the first-class comforts of the lodge.

The drops themselves have fanciful names that eclectic mapmakers have left on the land here. This writer’s drops for the first day started at a mountain site called Powder Pig. The next day included an outdoor barbecue lunch on a glacial moraine and drops at Groovy, Dead Elk Lake, Tidy Bowl, and Easy Roll.

All the 27 major drops in the area have special features to enjoy, whether they be alpine meadows with wildflowers, slopes tiled with small sheets of shale, lakes formed at the base of glaciers, or forests thick with spruce and fir. Big game, such as bear, deer, and elk, are sometimes seen.

The single main nature experience is that of geology. You immerse yourself in the wondrous forces of glaciers, learning how they scraped out the landscape, slowly shifting large masses of rock and earth. You see the metamorphic shales of the Purcells, folded and upthrust in different layers, then shot through with molten rock that cooled as quartz, sometimes with lovely crystals.

Such is the world of helicopter hiking in the Canadian Rockies, a relatively new adventure sport available to all travelers.

The sport began in 1978 when tour operator Arthur Tauck of Tauck Tours approached Canadian Rockies entrepreneur Hans Gmoser of Canadian Mountain Holidays. Gmoser had built a remote lodge in the backcountry on the west side of the Rockies. He had helicoptered skiers since 1965 for the extraordinary experience of skiing on the largest snowfields available anywhere, all made accessible by the helicopter. Skiers are dropped at hundreds of backcountry locations otherwise inaccessible.

Tauck saw the possibility of organizing summer tours that would helicopter people into the same area for walking and nature enjoyment. Gmoser was skeptical of the idea at first, but participated, and Tauck delivered the travelers. Gmoser expanded to three lodges (Bugaboo, Cariboo, and Bobbie Burns). Today the two entities–Tauck Tours and Canadian Mountain Holidays–do a brisk business in summer helicopter hiking. Tauck participates in the operation in summer only. Canadian Mountain Holidays sells the summer tours both independent of and in cooperation with Tauck.

The tour options can emphasize helicopter hiking only, in the Bobbie Burns tour, which includes picking you up at Calgary and providing all transportation, lodging, and food, as well as helicopter hiking, until you are returned to Calgary. The other two helicopter hiking tours–Bugaboo and Cariboo–include trips through the great national parks of the Canadian Rockies (Banff, Jasper, Yoho, Kootenay), with guided tour leaders explaining the natural and historical story. Nights are spent at the historic lodges of the parks, Fairmont Banff Springs and Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise.

The Bugaboo Lodge, base for one of the tours and site of this writer’s experience, is a friendly place with family-style dining. (The word Bugaboo is British for hoax, referring to the assessment of miners who had been lured into the area in search of gold. There was little gold. The area was a bugaboo. Little could they imagine that tourism would be an enduring vein of wealth for this Canadian Rockies region.)

All three of Gmoser’s lodges operate as helicopter ski operations in winter and helicopter hiking bases in summer. The Bell helicopter is the most expensive aspect of the whole operation. All three lodges are comfortable places accommodating a maximum of 44 people. There’s a reason for that number. The helicopter must be used efficiently and can carry 11 passengers and a guide. By dividing the party into four groups, the helicopter can operate continuously, dropping and picking up parties at scattered locations in the mountains.

The helicopter hiking occurs in the Bugaboo Recreation Area, an immense acreage along the west side of the Canadian Rockies in the Purcell Mountain Range.

Gmoser came to Canada from Austria in 1951, when he was 19 years old, and worked in various odd jobs, then at the Banff Hotel, starting in 1953. Gradually he rose in the travel industry here, accumulated capital, started helicopter skiing in 1965, built his first lodge, the Bugaboo, in 1968, and gradually expanded. He opened the Cariboo lodge in 1974 and the Bobbie Burns lodge in 1981.

Gmoser recruited guides from his homeland. Typical of the guides is affable Willy Trinker, who was trained in ski and guide responsibility in Austria. Some of the guides are Canadian. All are enthusiastic about the region and hike or ski on their free time as well as during their work.

The genius of helicopter hiking as a concept is that it opens up the mountain wilderness to everyone. Only the experienced backpacker, able to traverse treacherous terrain for days, could reach remote mountain locations that the helicopter can arrive at in minutes. The helicopter drops you at these locations and you savor the pleasures of the wilderness, a domain of philosophers and mystics, without the exertions that would limit the experience to a hardy elite.

“You arrive in an isolated area,” says Gmoser. “You know that it is entirely uninhabited, with no sign of man. The experience is incomparable in summer for hiking. In winter, skiing here is the best skiing I can imagine.”

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HELIHIKING THE CANADIAN ROCKIES: IF YOU GO

The helicopter hiking tours of summer are offered directly by Canadian Mountain Holidays and also through Tauck Tours, 800/788-7885; www.tauck.com.

Canadian Mountain Holidays can be reached at 800/661-0252, www.canadianmountainholidays.com.

Related Posts

1. Canada’s Rockies: Mountains for All Travelers
2. Winter Skiing in the Canadian Rockies
3. Canada’s Magnificent Railroad in the West
4. Rafting Through Canada’s Bald Eagle Country
5. Canada’s Polar Bear Country near Churchill, Manitoba

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Copyright © 2012 Lee Foster, Foster Travel Publishing. All rights reserved.

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