On a recent weekday at the Powdah Mountain Lodge, a handful of out-of-state visitors are getting antsy.
There’s thick, wet snow falling outside and low clouds, meaning no helicopter flying today for Alaska Heliskiing. Guests here have to find their own entertainment.
“I hate it,” said Ed Irons, a 60-year-old electrical engineer from Las Vegas sitting around a long plywood table in front of a cribbage board at the Powdah Mountain Lodge. “I’m completely on pins and needles.”
Irons and others watched ski film in the morning as they waited for the weather to clear. The night before, they shot pool at the Fogcutter Bar. In the evenings, they’ll feast on hearty dinners — tonight it’s fresh-made pizza. Often, they’ll juice up on hard liquor from the “Jäger-luge” and dance late into the night at the lodge, 35 miles outside of Haines.
Weather is just one of the obstacles heliski operators face to keep their tentative businesses afloat. Over the years in Haines, they’ve faced pushback from environmentalists about helicopters’ effects on mountain goats, a unique regulatory framework in the borough with complicated jurisdiction, and tensions between the operators themselves.
But for now, the Chilkat Valley’s two most established operators say they’ve found a tentative status quo that works for them.
“From our perspective, we have what we need,” said Nick Trimble, an owner of Southeast Alaska Backcountry Adventures (SEABA). “We just don’t want to fight about it anymore.”
Regulators — both borough, state and federal — have made few changes in the last two years after sharp debates adding more permitted operators.
“I think we’ve come to a little bit of peace on it,” said Haines mayor Tom Morphet. “But it’s something that will continue to require management.”
In mid-March, industry is already kicking into full gear this year, with clients from Asia, Europe and Australia riding the slopes and wandering through town.
“You can walk into any bar in town on a down day or night and meet somebody from France, Germany, Romania, Russia,” said Trimble, who used to live fulltime in Haines. “It’s almost like life returns after the dark time.”
Despite the patchy weather, clients at Alaska Heliskiing were able to ride a few lines the day before during a brief break in the weather. In most of Europe, heliskiing is banned, so the chance to ride the soft fresh powder is worth the jetlag and thousands of dollars for Alaska Heliskiing clients like Ales Lah.
“There’s more snow, steeper lines here so you can have more flow and longer turns,” said Lah, a 43-year-old from Slovenia.
After lunch of risotto and leftover sushi rolls, Lah decides it’s time to find his own entertainment. With a friend, he heads out to shovel snow onto the slope above the lodge into a jump.
After more than an hour of work, the jump is ready. He’s sweating from the effort, but changes into his snowboard boots. Within a few minutes, he’s getting towed up on a snowmachine to hit the jump a few times.
Seandog Brownell started a heli-guiding company in his early twenties in Juneau in 1995, the first guiding service in Alaska. In 2002 he started skiing around the Haines area.
“It was a new spot. Amazing mountains,” said Brownell.
Brownell eventually settled into his spot at Powdah Mountain a few years later. He cleared the land to add a small terrain park that skiers and community members can ride on off days and one-by-one built up the facilities.
Staff at Alaska Heliskiing come from around the world for two-month stints, living in modest communal houses and spending their time on a never-ending set of chores, including feeding the animals, chopping firewood, and keeping buildings standing.
Brownell said one of his biggest challenges to staying in business is finding qualified employees willing to work the short season. Ideally, Brownell said the company looks for guides with 10 years of experience. But many of those guides are looking for longer-term jobs that will make the two-month move to Haines more lucrative, according to Brownell. This year, he’s pulled together staff from Colorado, Poland and New Zealand, among other places.
“Finding a couple extra guides is hard because they’re all mopped up by companies that have longer seasons,” he said.
Brownell thinks that if the borough allowed the season to start earlier in the year — even before Christmas — it could capitalize on Alaska’s earlier winter in the mountains.
“It could be pretty cool because that’s a time of year that Alaska has snow and other places don’t and we could market that,” said Brownell.
The borough limits the season to Feb. 1 through May 3, and caps the number of heliski user-days at 2,600, but the industry has never even broken the 2,000 mark. Last year, it hit just 1,119, for which operators pay approximately $20 each in borough, state, and federal fees. Brownell said that in other jurisdictions of Alaska, the total regulatory burden is about $7.
Brownell keeps goats, chickens, turkeys and rabbits that he uses to offset the high price of food in the Haines.
“Haines is probably the most expensive place to operate in Alaska,” said Brownell.
Trimble of SEABA agrees. He said a common perception that the industry is raking in big profits is false. He manages a ranch in Montana during the off-season and other business owners also take on other seasonal jobs.
“If we were doing this for the money, we would have declared bankruptcy years ago,” he said.
At SEABA, most clients stay in town, meaning there are different options when the weather is bad. Trimble says staff organize morning mindfulness circles at Fort Seward Lodge and dance parties in the evenings for the clients, who range from “ski bums to billionaires.” Throughout the day, they’ll take clients on hikes to Battery Point, or to Thor’s Gym, where they can exercise.
“Those are the most difficult days, because it’s all hands on deck trying to keep everyone entertained,” said Trimble, sipping a cocktail at Fort Seward Lodge on a weekday evening. In the back kitchen, staff are preparing curry for the dozen guests, plus guides.
Trimble said despite spotty early-season weather, the year is looking solid. Bookings were stronger than last year and snow conditions firming up.
There are continuous challenges. Understanding the different layers of land management by BLM, the state of Alaska, and the Haines Borough can be complicated. That leads to confusion and fines, including in 2013, when the company experienced a fatality of one of its guides.
The borough now requires operators track GPS data of flight paths, and yield to human-powered backcountry skiers who request access for certain areas. The borough and Federal Aviation Administration also define flight paths to avoid noise pollution for residents and mountain goats. Beginning this year, the borough requires a subscription to a service that operators used to share avalanche conditions.
Despite the approximately 200-square-mile area in the mountains around Haines, the places with safe ski conditions each day can be a minuscule amount of that. That means that the three companies licensed in Haines could all end up on the same area in a given day.
“The industry has what it needs, it’s just a lot of operators out there so it makes everybody’s area really, really small,” said Trimble.
He said it’s a paradoxical problem to solve, since the isolation and great snow that attracts people here can become overrun. Reducing the number of helicopters permitted to fly would be one way to solve the problem. (Stellar Adventures, the most recent permittee, could not be reached for interviews or a site visit.)
“I’d rather have half the business for twice the money and have a higher quality product,” Trimble said.
Mid-March clouds gave way to several days of bluebird skies, making for easy flying.
At the Haines Airport around 9 a.m., about a dozen SEABA clients stack up their skis and splitboards to load into two yellow helicopters. Guides circle up into their groups of five or six for an orientation and to check safety equipment like avalanche transceivers which could help rescuers find them if they are buried in an avalanche.
For 17-year-old Benjamin Martin, it’s the trip of a lifetime. He’s a competitive freeskier from Aurora, Colorado. He’s here with his dad, Jordan Scheremeta, who also coaches skiing. For others, like David Gardner, it’s his 20th straight year, basically since the industry began in Haines. He’d been skiing in California before he got a chance to come to Alaska.
“We thought we had extreme skiing,” he said. “I realized [it] was like mini golf.”
The groups pack into two six-seat yellow Eurocopters, operated by Coastal Helicopters, and take off, headed towards a glacier below the towering 6,800-foot Mount Emmerich, their first stop of the day.
Trimble said the clear skies were helping conditions, allowing avalanche-prone slopes to harden up with cold nighttime temperatures. With some soft powder on top, the conditions are just about ideal for the group, which gets a chance to head out in clear skies over the next few days again.
It’s a good week for the industry, said Trimble, and, he thinks, for Haines. Businesses gets an infusion of cash from the clients. And, Trimble said, another good thing about the heli-industry is that it doesn’t fundamentally change the local character of the town.
“The best thing about it for locals is that they leave,” he said.