SILVERTON — There is something about hovering above a serrated snow-covered ridge in a helicopter at roughly 13,500 feet that can make a man think twice about Friday the 13th.
No matter how superstitious anyone in the A-Star B3 helicopter admitted to being on this particular date in February, it’s safe to say all three guys in the back seat took notice.
They watched carefully as pilot Barry “The Blade” Wilson coaxed the heli’s rocking nose into the wind and edged over the ledge of the narrow knife ridge. They focused keenly when the door swung open and they stepped swiftly, yet gingerly, onto a small slab of swirling snow. And when the hovering helicopter peeled up and away safely without them, they noticed with intense clarity that, aside from guide Aaron Brill, there was no one else around.
Talk about your lucky day.
Standing on skis atop a steep chute in the shaded northeast corner of Silverton Mountain, it quickly became evident that no one had been here all day. Stretching for some 2,500 vertical feet below the group were nothing more than a couple of bomb craters from freshly detonated charges dropped from an earlier helicopter run to control the 45-degree slope for avalanches. Between them were the as-yet untrammeled dreams of a powder skier.
“To be honest, I’ve done a lot of this kind of thing, and I can’t think of anywhere else you can go where you could get dropped like that and get put onto stuff like that,” said James Menning, a skier from Seattle. “What Silverton puts you on, I haven’t seen it anywhere else in the Lower 48.”
Menning, a first-time visitor to the experts- only, single-lift ski area in southwest Colorado, is exactly the type of skier Brill had hoped to attract when he signed a lease with California-based Sinton Helicopters this winter to offer pay-per-run heli-skiing within the 1,819-acre area. Skiing with his pal James Chickvary of Salt Lake City, it didn’t take long for Menning to make the $150 investment for a ride to the top of the inviting 2,200-foot powder chute known as “Grande,” followed by a second lap in the slightly harrier slot called “Pequena One.”
“That was my first day of heli-skiing, and it was super impressive,” Chickvary said. “I love this place. It’s just so unique.”
Menning agreed. “It was a pretty easy sell,” he said after his impulse buy. “And it delivered.”
Since its inception nine years ago, uniqueness has always been an attribute at Silverton. Nowhere else in Colorado — or North America, for that matter — can skiers and snowboarders access so much advanced and expert ski terrain from a single chairlift. The catch, of course, is that you had to walk to most of it.
Until now, that is.
“There’s only one other option to heli-ski in Colorado, and they serve a different clientele than we do. The way we do it is in single-run increments, so that somebody who is not rolling with a thick bankroll can still go out and sample the helicopter for only 150 bucks a drop,” said Brill, who owns and operates the ski area with his wife, Jenny. “It’s way cheaper than anywhere else that I’m aware of in the U.S. or Canada. And the great thing is that you get to ride our best terrain — and not take two and a half hours to get there.”
Unless you work in forestry or firefighting (or happen to be named Amelia Earhart), it’s a surprisingly difficult hop aboard a helicopter in Colorado ski country. Since 1982, Telluride Helitrax served as the lone heli-skiing operator in the entire state, with a four-run day for four people starting at about $900 per person.
By comparison, Silverton’s $130 day ticket for a guided, lift-served ski day easily amounts to four laps on avalanche-controlled steeps, with the option of an afternoon helicopter ride still coming in at under $300. The most popular day to date drew 50 heli-riders.
Perhaps most significant though is the ability the helicopter gives Silverton to control the many avalanche paths that riddle the ski terrain. What used to take hours for patrollers on foot or a not-always-reliable avalauncher gun to blast with explosives now takes only a matter of minutes to bomb from the helicopter.
The heli allows Silverton to keep more of the best terrain open more often, bumping up from roughly 45 percent in years past to nearly 100 percent even after significant snowfall.
“It allows us to blast all of our terrain and get it open faster for those who want to heli or those who want to hike it,” Brill said. “We use the heli-skiers to help offset the costs, so it’s pretty sweet.”
The experiment has inspired Brill to expand his heli-skiing realm to the all-but- untapped Tordrillo Mountain Range in Alaska this spring, where he and his guides will offer three five-day boutique heli tours from April 14-29 to invited guests at a discounted rate. Should the idea catch on, more trips are likely to be added in the future.
For the moment though, the focus is on Colorado’s newest helicopter skiing and snowboarding option. The new addition, approved as part of a 40-year lease through the Bureau of Land Management, is sure to change the way people ski Silverton for good.
