Words by Josh B
Alaska- the final frontier, the "proving ground" where every skier worth their wax hopes to test their mettle, a trip 9 years in the making for myself and Level 1.
The real discussion started just over a year ago, as a few of the athletes that I've long since worked with finally had the skill set, the desire, and the budget (well, almost) to take their skiing to the truly big, heli-accessed terrain. Stefan Thomas, Tanner Rainville, and Steele Spence were ready and willing to make the trip happen, and the ball started rolling.
What film company are you shooting for? Who are your athletes? How much money are you willing to spend? Once you actually make the decision to shoot in AK, the battle has only barely begun. Finding a trustworthy heli operation that isn't out to gouge you for every last cent, deciding when to go (better snow mid season? better light late season?), for how long (how many weeks are you willing to roll the dice on, when you know you could be shooting something somewhere else?), clearing schedules, raiding savings accounts and cleaning out travel budgets for extra cash... the road to an AK heli adventure is not a short one.
We had all long since heard the warnings loud and clear- you can go to Alaska and spend weeks on end slow roasting in a motel room, lose every penny of the HOBBS time (the HOBBS meter measures the actual time that the heli is in the air, ie, what you’re paying for) deposit, and go home empty handed. Of course, you can also strike gold and get guided access to the worlds most amazing terrain with epic snow conditions, and that's a risk that we, following in the footsteps of dozens of film crews that have been doing it for over a decade, were willing to take.
To their credit, heli ski companies put forth a massive financial investment to make their operations work, and have a very small window in which to recoup their costs and turn a profit, though by all accounts owning and running such an operation is NOT about making money. Regardless, each Fall most operations sign contracts with companies that provide helis and pilots for the season (all but a very few heli ski ops in the world actually own their helicopters), and they’re committed to spending “x” number of dollars on the time that they’ve arranged for. In a good season with lots of flyable days, its relatively easy for them to fulfill their minimums, and come close to turning a profit. But in bad snow years, or worse, years where flyable days are limited by storms, high wind, etc, they’re fighting tooth and nail to cover their overhead. For this reason, its no wonder why so many of the operations have developed a reputation as cutthroat. “The skiing in AK is pure gold,” said an industry friend reflecting on his AK experiences, in a conversation I had with him the day before we departed. “And once you’re up there they’ve got you, and they know it. They’ll sprinkle a little bit of gold dust on you, give you a taste so you know how much you want it, and gouge you for every dollar they can.”
After flying into Anchorage, and waking up at 5am to clear skies, we packed into our "full size" rental SUV, and hit Highway 1 for the five-hour drive to Valdez. Otherwise only 100 miles or so, as the crow flies, Highway 1 winds completely around the Chugach mountain range through some of the most epic scenery you would ever hope to witness, and deposits you in the small fishing town made famous by the 1989 Exxon oil spill disaster. With a year round population of only 4000 people, and an economy based around small commercial fishing operations and the Alaskan Pipeline, Valdez sets up a sharp contrast between the native population, and the dozens of clients spending $5-$10k for their week-long heli skiing dream vacations.
We followed clear blue skies for the majority of our drive that first morning, arriving before noon with the hopes of flying that day. As we wrapped up the requisite beacon tests, snow safety talks, and of course the heli orientation, the clouds thickened, the winds picked up, and we experienced our first taste of what it is to wait out the forever unpredictable Alaskan weather. Despite a forecast calling for clearing skies the next day, the day after, and then again the day after that, we awoke each morning at 6:30 to look out the window, nod at the thick rolling clouds, and go back to sleep for another hour before hitting up the continental breakfast waiting in the downstairs lobby.
We had set up camp for the duration of our stay at the Sea and Sky Motel, H20's seasonal headquarters, and lodging for their guests. Certainly a nondescript motel like any other, aside from the fact it’s situated a couple blocks from the Valdez harbor, and surrounded by snow covered mountains, dramatically rising thousands of feet out of the sea.
Seemingly half the vehicles in the town were AK Pipeline worker's trucks emblazoned with the foreboding statement, "Nobody Gets Hurt." The oft-repeated joke was made whether this was referring to their emphasis on safety, or rather, their threat that they should be allowed to drain every last drop of oil from the AK landscape... or else!
Down day activities in Valdez are limited after you're already watched all the daytime TV you can handle, skipped all the flat stones on the beach, digested your 10th meals at Halibut House and THC (The Harbor Cafe), and conversed with the drunken locals on the docks. But no trip to Valdez is complete without an afternoon spent shooting guns and drinking beer at the dump, in the rain. During our 4th down day in a row, Jeremy, H20's office manager, convinced us (it didn't take much) to follow him out to the dump while he scavenged for some random materials for a project he was working on. No one objected when he offered to bring out his Colt 45 and let us take shots at old refrigerators and rotting elk carcasses. When everyone in the crew was a handful of beers deep (who would bother going to the dump for the afternoon without a couple 30-racks?), and sufficiently soaked by the rain, we made our way back to town, but not before witnessing the town dump truck dropping off a fresh load of trash, and an anxious local hot on its heels determined to be the first to get dibs on the new trash. This guy knew the schedule, and wasn't going to let anyone beat him to the fresh pickings, after all, as he put it, "You can get $2/lb for good scrap metal in Anchorage!" At $2/lb, a full truckload of scrap metal probably wouldn’t buy him a pint at happy hour after the multiple tanks of gas it would take to get back and forth between Valdez and Anchorage, but we were content to let him think he had a pretty sweet system going.
After 5 restless days, the forecast all but guaranteed clearing skies, but not before the winds picked up. Throughout the night we were continuously awakened by a low howl; awakened just enough to consciously understand that the snow was being ravaged, but not enough so that we couldn’t brush it off as a really, really bad dream and go back to sleep. At dawn, our suspicions were confirmed as we pulled back the drab motel room curtains to reveal an arctic wasteland, where the air was thick from blowing snow and the boats in the harbor listed at odd angles, fighting the wind to stay upright. No doubt that the 3-4 feet of fresh snow 6000 feet above us was being whipped into boilerplate...
Sure enough, our worst fears were realized. The winds kept up for the rest of the day, pummeling the alpine, as well as low-lying terrain, in what was described to us by our guide as the "biggest wind event (The Chugach) has seen in over two years." The same characteristics that make AK such a spectacular place to ski, also leave it vulnerable- in a wind event like this everything is exposed, there are no trees where the pow gets deposited, or sheltered zones that escape unscathed. Everything gets worked.
The excitement of our first fly day was abated by the knowledge that we had missed out on the goods. With five days left in our trip, and the snow conditions trashed for hundreds of miles in every direction, we wouldn't get what we came for. Regardless, we were going to make the most of it, not that we actually had a choice at that point.
Our pilot, Carl, a Vietnam vet with over 13,000 hours under his belt was not as bothered by the lingering winds as we were, as the heli bounced around, navigating over the massive mountains and glacier fields below. For all the technology and engineering that goes into the making of a multi-million dollar A-Star B2, truly among the finer machines used in guided heli skiing, ultimately to say you're suspended thousands of feet above AK peaks in a glorified bucket of bolts is not an exaggeration. Carl, on the other hand, couldn't have been more comfortable as we wound our way through the awe-inspiring Chugach.
A warm-up run quickly confirmed what we already knew- what looked like pristine powder from the air was binding-deep wind buff at best, more often then not wind crusted, and boilerplate at worst. We resigned to the fact that the snow wasn't going to get any better, and we spent a solid 45 minutes (almost $2000) flying through glacier country looking for smaller, sheltered zones that might have been spared from the most violent of the winds. A few other would-be warm-up laps later, we found ourselves in a zone with a few deceivingly small cliffs, and relatively soft, ankle deep pow. Anxious to get things going, Steele lined up a fair-sized, but certainly doable cliff, came in with a few slow turns, and then sent it. He readily sailed over the 40-foot rock face, over the small transition that would have given him a relatively smooth landing, and at least another 30 feet to much flatter, less forgiving snow. He stomped it, straight to his feet, twisted as he compressed, and ragdolled, backwards, several hundred feet before the slope mellowed and he came to a stop. It looked bad. Steele lay there for a few seconds, then got up, and made a dozen or so perfect turns to where I waited below, then collapsed as he pulled up next to me. "I'm fine," he said, "I just need to lie down for a minute." By the time the rest of the crew made it down, Steele wasn't feeling any better, and the decision was made to fly him out to the Pass (Thompson Pass, our refueling spot), and get him down to the hospital. Two hours and three x-rays later, Steele was diagnosed with a severely sprained neck (update- 2 weeks later he was re-diagnosed with two herniated discs, C5 and C6), and while it wasn't the end of the world, sadly enough, 4 runs deep, it was the end of his Alaskan skiing experience.
While the snow conditions didn't improve, the winds died down, and the next two days were spent exploring the massive glacier-covered landscape, poking around a few of the less wind-affected zones that we found nearly 40 miles inland. Stefan and Tanner went after it, schralping a few 2000+ vert lines, and a number of smaller, more technical lines, logging a few bangers here and there.
One of the biggest misconceptions that were quickly clarified was that almost no one actually skis a whole, legitimate, AK mountain face from top to bottom. Some of the largest peaks rise 4, 5, 6000, or more feet above the glaciers that wind through them. The massive lines that the worlds best big mountain skiers and snowboarders bag are more often then not the shoulders of the larger peaks, or sometimes, the smaller peaks themselves. Bottom line, EVERYTHING in AK is big. Take the longest run you've ever tackled at your local resort, make it a sustained 40-60 degrees in pitch, throw in some exposure, triple its length, and chances are it still only qualifies as "minigolf" in AK. We laughed during orientation when our guide and H20's director of operations, Aaron Karitis, quickly blew up our definition of the term, something that we threw around to mean small cliff bands, pillows, and maybe 500-vertical foot lines. Aaron explained that anything under 1800-2000 vert (certainly larger then anything our group had ever skied) is still only minigolf.
The films I've watched over the past decade paint a picture of athletes readily accessing epic terrain, willfully depositing themselves at the top of gnarly, exposed lines in "no fall" zones, where one mistake can end in season, career, or life-ending tragedy. Though, as Tanner pointed out after a particularly rowdy line, the skiing, to a certain extent, is the easy part (sometimes)! While most clients of heli ski operations are likely dropped off in relatively safe, flat LZs (LZ = landing zone, 12 feet by 9 feet is the minimum flat surface area that our A Star required), accessing some of the lines, and filming angles that we were looking for was a bit more intense. A good number of our chosen lines required the athletes to be dropped off on knife ridges, often in high-exposure areas where the only flat spot was the hole you dug for yourself after climbing out and bracing for the rotor wash of the departing bird. For the uninitiated, rotor wash is the 'knock you down' 140mph gust of wind caused by the blades- picture storm coverage on The Weather Channel of last year's Floridian hurricane season. Such drops required our pilot to "toe-in," where he would literally jam the front end, or the "toe" of the landing skids into the slope, and keep the engine at full power while we carefully climbed out. Getting to the exact spot from where you would then drop into your line, and clicking into your bindings is no cup of tea either.
Furthermore, no one ever talks about the experience from the filmmaker’s perspective. For every shot of a majestic AK line, there's a cinematographer or photographer, more often then not, positioned precariously on some opposing peak, rolling tape or film. Not gonna lie, I for one, am terrified of heights, readily the victim of vertigo, and I'd like to think that shooting in AK made me push my comfort zone at least as much as Tanner, Stefan, and Steele pushed their own. The only thing that kept me from several panic attacks was faith in our still photog Jeff Cricco, who had been training as a tail guide with H20 and supposedly knew what he was doing. That, coupled with the fact that more often then not, I didn't actually realize that the cliffs below our post had more vert then the mountains I grew up skiing in Southern Vermont.
Our last afternoon, as we approached the limit on our 7 hours of HOBBS time, we sat looking across the valley and waiting for our pickup, watching as Travis Rice and the Brainfarm crew worked on what must have been the largest backcountry stepover jump ever constructed. The 15-person crew (4 athletes, 4 filmers, 3 photographers, 2 pilots, and 2 guides) wielded shovels, smoothing the hundreds of feet of tranny, and stacking blocks on the towering takeoff. Their two helis (one for athlete transport, done up with a slick $10k custom Quicksilver wrap) and the other mounted with a million dollar Cineflex camera, whose sole purpose was aerial pov shots, sat in the background. They were about 3 weeks deep on their month-long trip, and still had dozens of hours of HOBBS time left (according to our guides, they had dropped nearly $250k for their pre-paid 96 hours).
The place, and everything about the situation was unbelievably humbling. It was the ultimate in juxtapositions, our small crew of rookies who begged and pleaded with sponsors and emptied their savings to make this trip happen, across the valley from a who's-who of the best snowboarders in the business, uber-pros and veterans who were likely in their second decade of heli-accessed riding, and each who were probably spending more on this trip then the sum total of career-long travel budgets for our entire group. Humbling indeed, but everyone starts somewhere.
We had just barely scratched the surface of what this place has to offer, in every way, and the shots we bagged barely whet our appetite for the endless possibilities that AK and its terrain represent. We'll certainly be back next year, and the year after that, until one day perhaps a rookie crew will look at us across a glaciated valley, inspired to reach the level of experience and support that we had earned for ourselves. One day...
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