High-End, Polished Powder - by Lukas Huffman

The second backcountry product we sampled was the high-end, polished-powder, no-bullshit approach to bagging vertical courtesy of Mica Heli Guides. I will begin my report with an overview of the Mica Heliskiing Lodge. It's perched on top of a huge clear-cut hill a few hours north of Revelstoke. The view from the lodge is what sets the tone. Now, I don't usually go on about pretty views, but this was impressive and sure to move anybody—no matter how extreme you are. A giant lake spreads out about a thousand feet below you, and on the other side of that lake are enormous B.C. mountains rising up to create the horizon. The giant peaks taunt you with constant reminders that you are small and they are big.

The Mica Heli Guides lodge has been designed to exploit this view. Both floors of the lodge are outfitted with huge windows facing the lake and mountains. Whether you're eating breakfast, putting on your boots, or reading in the afternoon, the scenery is right there keeping you company.

The detailing of the lodge is out of some in-flight luxury magazine. Downstairs is a cute dining room with a heated stone-tile floor. There's a burl-wood staircase, big overstuffed chairs that swallow tired bodies, and—the hallmark of modern existence wireless Internet, ensuring that jet-setting extremists can check stocks or just keep up with their MySpace cyber buddies. Even the bohemian DCP booked a plane ticket to Russia while we were perched up there on the mountainside.

Let's get into the real action of this backcountry product. Mica Heliskiing claims to have the "most skiable acreage in North America" (over a million acres). I don't doubt it. They charge their clients by the amount of vertical skied in a run, and Mica Heliskiing provides lots of long powder runs. No messing around you better train before you show up, because your legs will throb and your heart will race. You get what you pay for—and you pay for what you get.

Our crew had some overcast weather on the first day, which turned out to be a blessing. This meant that we rode the Mica Heliskiing pillow stash. Holy crap! I have never seen pillow lines this long. The snow was deep, so the riders looked like a pair of goggles and a hat in a cloud of snow falling down twenty pillows at once. Of course, the second and third days were sunny, so it was on. The heli dropped us off on any peak we chose, and we terrorized the taunting mountains. We barely saw a fraction of the "most skiable acreage in North America," but we got the picture. The dudes at Mica Heli Guides are holding a lot of terrain back there.

Of note: Cartwright was the MVP of this episode. He confidently did one of the biggest cliff drops (a solid 50 feet) I've seen all winter. This was in the beginning of January, and his quote after riding away from that was, "The preseason is definitely over." I collected my dropped jaw and mustered up a, "Touché, my friend."

Once we were all full of five-star shredding, we would head back to the lodge and watch the Alpen glow on our mountainous companions. We were the only people staying at the lodge while we were there, so the guest-to-staff ratio was pretty much one-to-one. They were eager to please and took care of any needs we could think up. We would all wind down the days sitting by the fireplace, each of us surfing the Internet and watching the stars out those big windows.

This experience was very intimate. (The lodge is currently capable of holding up to twelve guests at a time, but they have plans to expand). It feels like you have the mountains to yourself—just you and your close friends out there making tracks and getting a lot of attention from the staff. This is a backcountry product with all the amenities, including more vertical than it's physically possible to handle. I leave Mica Heliskiing with that impression. We were all fully pampered, just the way any backcountry enthusiast would want to be.

After our week of sampling the backcountry buffet at our disposal, we all went our separate ways: DCP and Simon went back to Whistler, Jon and I went to Vancouver, and Gallup vanished into smoke signal. We'd successfully managed to explore two different British Columbia backcountry offerings. Chatter Creek was the down-home, blue-collar approach to getting' 'er done, including deep-ass powder, as much fun snowboarding as we could handle, and some hilarious social terrain. Mica Heliskiing was having the whole damn mountain range to ourselves. As you can tell, upon comparison, one isn't better than the other just apples and oranges. I guess it all depends on how you like your backcountry.