Helicopters lift hikers high into Canada’s Selkirk Mountains. Photograph by Maria Stenzel

| Learn more |

By Tom Dunkel

The whirling sound of the chopper blades is barely audible, just a whisper on the wind, but we know our cue. Backpacks get tossed on the ground and we sink to our knees, forming a tight shoulder-to-shoulder half-scrum around the gear. What a curious sight we must make: a dozen men and women huddled heads-down on a remote snow-covered mountainside. An Outward Bound prayer session? A communal contact-lens search?

No more than 44 guests at a time share the 386 square miles (100 square kilometers) of wilderness leased from the federal government by Canadian Mountain Holiday lodges. Photograph by Maria Stenzel

Moments later a Bell 212 helicopter swoops up majestically from the green valley below, bringing with it a whirlwind of noise and commotion. A now ear-shattering roar hits us first, followed by a hurricane-like blast of air that kicks up a shower of snow crystals. Then...utter calm. The pilot pulls back on his throttle, and the helicopter touches down with all the fury of an autumn leaf falling from a tree.

We’re saved. Well, okay, not exactly saved. “Serviced” may be a better word. As much as this might resemble a search-and-rescue mission, nobody in our party is in any distress. So why has a helicopter pilot come to fetch us? Because this is heli-hiking, where catching a high-mountain chopper ride is easier than finding a cab in midtown Manhattan. The 12 of us scrambling aboard the roomy twin-engine helicopter are part of a capacity crowd of just 44 guests booked into Adamants Lodge, a quasi-Tyrolean retreat set amid the wild and jagged 7,000-foot [2,134 meter] peaks of British Columbia’s Selkirk Mountains.

Get the complete story in the September 1999 issue of TRAVELER.