| Heli-ski the Rubies |
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Page 1 of 5 Once a year, Scott Mellin and his friends escape for some heli-skiing in Nevada’s Ruby Mountains, where the helicopter docks in a cow pasture, the ranch is just a quick flight from deep snow, and there’s always a good bar brawl brewing in town  Heli-skiing in northern Nevada, like many things done out in the rural West’s last authentic places, doesn’t happen on anybody else’s terms. It's done the cowboy way. The Ruby Mountains way. Consider the helipad at Ruby Mountain Helicopter Skiing: It’s a pasture of pale grass mined with cow pies and boxed by a rail fence to keep out the white-faced cattle. In the center of the pasture, a Bell L4 Long Ranger is umbilical’d to a fuel truck. On a warming March morning, Joe Royer, owner of Ruby Mountain Helicopter Skiing, climbs into the copilot’s seat, and I join buddies Scott Bowers and Scott Mellin in the back. The bird can barely fit the latter two’s grins.The pilot, who goes by Sharpie, punches a few buttons and the blades wind up—spinning slowly, then faster, until the blades are a Cuisinart overhead and the seats vibrate. Sharpie checks the windows one last time and pulls up gently on the collective. The Bell shudders—it’s gravity, that poor bastard, trying hard to stop the fun—and eases skyward. Then the chopper is hammering through the good light of a western morning at 500 feet over ranchlands, where black cattle look as small as chess pieces.
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Sage becomes aspen. High desert swells to ridgeline. Below rise the unlikely Rubies, a desert mountain range with snowfields that last into summer, when the barren flats some 5,000 feet below are scorched and baking. The chopper sets down on a 10,400-foot ridgetop next to a landing-zone marker flag that looks like it was whittled from a tree branch. Then the heli’s gone again, leaving the guys to the immense desert silence. There’s not another sign of man for…hell, for anywhere, really. It feels like the frontier. |
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