How heli-hiking in B.C. gets you closer to breathtaking mountains, glaciers and exquisite silence tgamtravel
Catherine Dawson March/The Globe and Mail
A heli-hike here touches all your senses: the cold wind blowing off the snow, the eerie groans from glacial crevasses, the made-you-jump roar of a rock fall, the sweet, icy nothingness of a mouthful of glacial water, the eye-boggling visual of an ice wall soaring above you. It’s impossible to leave the Cariboos unmoved. Exploring this terrain, newly reopened for the summer months, not only awakens the senses but a sense of wonder, too.
Upon arrival at the lodge, guests are asked how much or how little work they’d like to do. This is “technical hiking” – there are no paths – so you can be scrambling along steep ridges, over boulders, up snowy slopes or along knife edges of unstable sandy moraine. No matter what level of intensity your group is moving at, the quiet and the isolation of the Cariboos is exquisite.Ken Malecki of New York has been heli-skiing 15 times but he wanted to share the scenery he loved with his wife, who’d rather hike than ski.“It’s like a religious experience being on top of the mountains with no one else around,” he says.
We’d scrambled out of the hovering helicopter – they never actually land – and waited, heads bent, glasses and hats clutched, until it left. Once the deafening whomp-whomp-whomp was swallowed by the vastness of the valley, we looked up and gasped. We’d been dropped on aThe chopper ride offers more photo ops than you'll ever need, giving guests great views of the mountains and glaciers.The chopper rides make all the difference.
There is a magic to this place that gets under your skin – and on it. The rocks we’ve been climbing every day break down into a pretty, glittery mica dust. When stirred up by the chopper blades, it gets into every nook and cranny. It’s tough to wash off, but eventually I chose to look at it differently: Maybe the mica was less of a nuisance, more of a memory.
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