new years day

This year I finally made it to midnight on New Year's Eve without falling asleep.

For as long as my bank manager's allowed me, I've spent New Year at Mike Wiegele helicopter skiing in British Columbia. Somehow I've always found it easier to get up for breakfast at 06:30 than to stay up past ten o'clock in the evening. You have to get your priorities sorted out, and the helicopters don't wait for anyone.

The reason I was still awake at midnight this year was because I still hadn't found my contact lens, which had disappeared into the unknown following a mild excess of very fine wine on my part. Eventually I gave up and went to sleep wondering how I was going to snowboard with one functional eye.

Fortunately Russ, who had plied me with the very fine wine, also had a spare contact lens, so by 08:15 the next morning I was clambering into a helicopter with two guides, one pilot, one borrowed contact lens and Russ.

The morning of January 1 2003 was gray, with heavy flakes falling through Blue River fog. It was one of those mornings where the visibility's so bad that the experienced skiers and boarders carry paperbacks in expectation of a down day. Although visibility was severely limited, our pilot Darryl can fly his A-star in conditions where I wouldn't even get in the machine, so we were soon heading into the gloom in search of fresh tracks.

We flew around in the murk for a while before the heli settled into the snow on a small knoll above the forest. We briefly paddled around in the 50cms of fresh 5% powder retrieving boards and skis, and then the heli was away in the inevitable cold wet blast of snow. We were marooned in a white-out of silently falling flakes.

It had been snowing all night and it was still coming down. The visibility was too poor to see any avalanche activity, although we heard over the radio that there were multiple slides reported as the new snow settled. The avalanche risk was the highest any of us had known it, and we headed gingerly across the hundred meters of open slope towards the trees one at a time.

Traversing through fresh deep powder is rare and strange. The snow falls into your tracks behind you and leaves a distinctive profile to your trail. The sound of board on snow is subtly different. The last thing you want is to try to walk through this stuff, so on a snowboard the trick is to start last and speed through the tracks left by the others.

We regrouped at the top of the trees: two guides, one skier, and one snowboarder. All experts. Our private helicopter was already 1000m below through the trees, ticking over gently waiting for our next lift. Lead guide Barry has an approach to guiding which suits me well: once he knows you're not going to get lost or fall over he just skis down the run and expects you to catch him up at the bottom. That's precisely what he did, and we followed with some enthusiasm.

The powder was so deep through the trees that it broke over our heads in the turns. The telltale sign for this at the bottom of the run is when everyone's goggles have snow stuck to their bottoms. On my snowboard, speed was limited by visibility: high speed turns kick up snow into your face in white waves. Whilst that sounds good when you talk about it in the pub, it makes it tricky to see the trees in the woods. I experimented with different types of turn to see if I could find a combination that let me outrun my own wake.

We stormed through the forest, and somehow managed to all appear almost at the same time and at the same point on the frozen lake below. Our helicopter was waiting, and it didn't take long until we were flying cautiously back up through the mist and snow to the top landing.

On our second run down I cut ahead and stopped briefly to get some pictures of the others. It's hard to set-up for photography on a steep slope with lots of fresh snow on it, and the falling snow didn't make things any easier. The main problem was trying to persuade the camera to focus on the skier instead of the snowflakes. The light isn't the best in the middle of a forest in a snowstorm, but it was good enough to get some shots of “over-the-head” powder. Once the skiers were past, the challenge was to catch them up - these guys weren't waiting around for stragglers.

We heard on the radio that several other helicopters were grounded because of the poor visibility; BC has strict laws on how much you should be able to see before you fly. We seemed to have found a small pocket of flyable airspace in the surrounding storm. Our guides were deliberately vague in reporting our precise location, so we were able to work our secret stash in isolation for the rest of the day. I lost count of how many runs we made well before we broke for lunch, which was a smorgasbord of smoked salmon and other seafood. It is slightly strange eating gourmet food whilst leaning on a helicopter in the middle of a snowstorm on a frozen lake, but it's something I could get used to given time.

I didn't ask how many vertical meters we'd trashed before the light started going at the end of the day, but it was definitely “enough”. Enough until the next day of course.