| Heli-ski the Rubies |
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Page 4 of 5 
Overhead, beams of light lean through the newly gathered clouds like God in an Old Testament painting—pretty, but not the warm sun needed to tenderize the night-crusted slopes. The forecast? “Flat light and windy,” says T.C. “Character-building conditions.” Then he adds, “This place, some magic things can happen. But you don’t want to stare at it too long.”The first run, down a slope called Cherry, is anything but. It’s a tilted ice rink today, sprinkled with the chocolate chips of exposed rocks—so wildly Killingtonesque that everyone is in a great mood just to survive it without taking a ripper and sliding to the bottom. One of the guides keys the mike. “Uhhhh...are we doing that again?” The radio crackles. It’s Royer. “Negative. We are going somewhere else.” Howls of laughter. The chopper is a dragonfly hopscotching from one landing zone to another. It’s no use; everywhere is scratchy. Heli-skiing has a reputation of nonstop calendar-cover runs, but it’s axiomatic that days like today happen too—days when the snow is bulletproof, not powdery, or the temperature spikes and you step out into Cream of Wheat. And what do you do if you’ve paid thousands of dollars and waited all winter for the Orgasmatron of waist-deep fresh tracks? If you’re smart, you just enjoy being wrapped by the solitude in the company of friends and the absolute coolness of zipping around high peaks in a glorified lawn dart. Luckily, everyone gets it. Midmorning, Bowers turns and says, “It’s not really a matter of how many runs or how great the snow is, but the experience and the adventure of it all.” As if in reward for the insight, and even though clouds are rubbing the western sky the color of charcoal, the snow soon after begins to soften. We wait until the chopper dumps a pack of 12 of us atop a run called Beaver, an open slope flecked with pines. With conditions stable, the guides let us ski down in groups—rarely allowed at other heli operations—then, whooping chaos: A dozen experts lay swooping GS turns in two inches of ripe corn. Everybody pauses halfway down to cheer everybody else, on this snow that has suddenly, unexpectedly turned perfect, on this day that is suddenly, unexpectedly perfect. For all the week’s belly laughs and big smiles, a certain melancholy hangs over the trip like smoke in the room. Last year Joe Edwards’s wife, Belinda, died of cancer. Four months earlier, he’d brought her, a big skier and Heidi Mellin’s best friend, to spend time here with the gang. One day Belinda even went up for a few runs. Everyone still talks about that day with awe—the way the conditions lined up to open up runs the guides never ski. The way the sun spangled the snow. The way Belinda skied so elegantly despite the terribleness chewing at her. |
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