Heli-hiking with Canadian Mountain Holidays
High-alpine adventures.
Time spent in the mountains, in all their varied majesty, is as close to a full battery recharge as a person can get. The feeling of being on a mountain peak is an indescribable blend of exhilaration and picture-perfect beauty. Packaging high-alpine adventures with the thrill of helicopters is CMH—Canadian Mountain Holidays—the outfitter that introduced the world to heli-skiing in British Columbia’s Cariboo, Monashee, Selkirk, and Purcell mountain ranges in the 1960s, and which operates heli-hiking excursions in the summer months.
The lure of heli-hiking is to get to places you would never be able to reach by foot alone. Based out of a well-appointed CMH lodge—the Bugaboos or Bobbie Burns—in the thick of the remote wilderness, a Bell 212 helicopter scoops up hikers from the landing pad early in the morning and whisks them away to a mountain peak, glacier, or alpine meadow for the day’s adventure. No matter where the drop is, looking out, you are humbled by what you see (which, at times, may include a grizzly). There are no marked trails so no one hikes solo. CMH’s alpine guides are experienced in the backcountry, and whether the desire is for a leisurely stroll, a moderate trek, or a full-on gravity-defying via ferrata, it is ambition and fitness that define how far you can go. At day’s end, when the chopper whup-whups in to collect you and take you back to base camp, it is sheer awe looking down at the five-star Canadian wilderness.
