There’s a myth that those in my world would like to keep alive. That what we do is treacherous, daring and only for the reckless; that only an elite group of us who eat deep fried grommets for breakfast are worthy of taking on such a challenge as this. Certain companies will tell you this is not true. They will say that the experience can be suitable to most abilities and that no guide will take you to death defying terrain, unless of course your sponsor is Red Bull.
The first time we stepped into one of those giant machines was in Girdwood, Alaska. We were an absolute wreck the night before. We starred mesmerized at hours of footage from the company’s website, biting our fingernails, hoping that the videos of other people’s experiences would help dull our fears and instill us with super human powers. We were convinced that we would have to huck ourselves from under the whirling blades into the endlessly deep powder below. Warren Miller and Travis Rice have a lot to answer for, as the truth was far less extreme.
We leaped from the chopper landing with a muffled thud on the thick landing pad of snow. Our heli guide grabbed our snowboards from the helicopter basket and stopped just short of strapping our boots into the bindings for us. After we heard the last clicks of our straps echo through the mountains and watched the helicopter morph from a massive machine into a tiny dot floating in the sky miles away, we stood alone and abandoned at the top of a snowy ridge, staring down at our dream: a vast world of untracked powder, laid out below the nose of our snowboards. A few deep mouthfuls of crisp mountain air and we took to the snow, following the guide’s turns and breaking fresh tracks. Not a lift line in sight, no lift pass necessary, and an entire mountain range for us to call our own. We glided with ease on our mountain’s snow, carving perfect lines amidst the silence of the unhindered wilderness.
After about an hour of, as we say in our culture, “shredding the gnar”, we came to a halting stop on a plateau about three quarters of the way down the mountain, reconvened with the rest of our group, and suddenly heard the wop-wop-wop of the helicopter coming to take us to another stretch of fresh powder on another section of uncharted Alaska.
As we sat in the helicopter on our journey back to civilization, we looked back at our mountains. We saw the tracks in the snow that would leave our fingerprints on these unknown and unexplored regions forever, or at least until the next snowfall.
We landed back at the headquarters of Chugach Powder Guides just in time for the Alaskan sun to set on our Warren Miller-like adventure and for us to return from our fantasies of being backcountry explorers to just being Lexi and Dillon, two kids fortunate enough to have had this thrilling and adventurous experience.