Only 40 short minutes outside of Golden, BC lay the answer to any ski bum’s vertical challenge:  Great Canadian Heli-Skiing.  I chose to drive in, but flights arrive daily into Calgary, AB or Cranbrook, BC.  Easily accessible off of Highway 1 near Roger’s Pass, GC’s tenure claims terrain in both the Purcell and Selkirk ranges.  This means lots of options to find good snow, even weeks after a storm.

I checked in and dumped my gear in the comfortable hotel style room located in a separate building.  It’s only twenty yards from the main lodge and dining hall, and in this day and age, it was a pleasure holding a real room key again. Accommodations were more than this ski bum would ever need, with two queen beds and a great view of the terrain to be skied the next day.

The food at Great Canadian is great, with breakfast served continental style, and new menu items each day.  There are lots of healthy options and some real tasty bacon!  Lunch orders are placed the night before…I chose the chicken Caesar wrap, which came with a cookie.  Dinner is family style with long wooden tables and lots of shiny glassware and silverware.  Gourmet chef Dan Bracko makes some really good food, better than this ski bum could elaborate on.

With A-star helis seating only four guests and a guide, there’s no wonder friends are made quickly and kept for years. The lucky ones continue to come back to meet up year after year.  It’s a tight operation with lots of time for skiing and very little time spent waiting. Everyone is friendly, with European clientele mixing in with local canadians and americans alike.  I even had the pleasure of skiing with Ian, Justin, and Harry ‘the Dreamer’, a group of guys who have been skiing together at GC for over a decade.  I knew at once that I was in for a good day of skiing when I heard that name and immediately remembered the main character of the same name in Greg Stump’s cult classic ski film ‘The Good, the Rad, and the Gnarly’.  As his nickname would have you believe, Harry gives me a serious run for the Ultimate Ski Bum title splitting his winters between Alta, UT and Great Canadian Heli.

The conditions were fantastic, even a few weeks after a storm.  The guides really knew their terrain and found a ton of good stuff for each of the groups to ski.  With so much terrain and so many different aspects of the hill, we were able to knock off run after run without crossing tracks!

This was one of the first days of my life where I got to ski pillow lines.  The guiding style at GC is very professional, but they were really helpful in finding some challenging steeps to ski.  With all that good snow, I truly began to understand how the snow here in Canada just plasters to everything.  Lines I could never ski in Colorado are filled in with deep layers of the creamiest pow.  The terrain at GC is for real skiers; make sure to pack your ski legs!

GC doesn’t base their rates on amount of vertical skied, but with an average group who visits this heli op, be ready to put in some serious laps.  We were able to pull of 14 runs by the end of the day, and it got me wondering how whooped the other guests must be after a full week.

I had one of the best days of my skiing life with Great Canadian, and I can’t wait to go back and see what else their terrain has in store for me.  A big thanks to Greg Golovach and Rob Dalinghaus for showing me the fun stuff to jump off of, Alison Dakin for the beacon practice and heli intro, and Pilot Mike Johnson for keeping it smooth all day long.  To Greg and Tim, thanks for being such an important part of this Powder Highway Ultimate Ski Bum experience!

Tags: british columbia, Chris Tatsuno, Christatsuno.com, freeskier.com, golden, Great Canadian Heli Skiing, greg stump, heli skiing, powder, Powder Highway, powder skiing, purcell range, roger's pass, selkirk range, Ultimate Ski Bum