Words and Captions Dan Kostrzewski STARING out a charter plane window at British Columbia’s Coast Mountains was equally reflective and surreal. Whistler was merely the gateway to these gnarled, snow-caked peaks stacking from saltwater all the way north to Alaska. Moving north, they commanded awe with powerful coastal glaciers and icefields of unimaginable scale. Even the access was rugged, with few signs of humanity for hundreds of miles at a stretch, save for a logging camp, a fly-in fishing lodge or a rare depopu-lating resource town. where Seth Morrison turned the spines of “Morrison Hotel” into hallowed ground, where Hugo Harrison earned the Powder Awards Line of the Year accolades then returned a year later, barely escaping a brush with trauma in “Harrison Hop-i-tal” and learning that the bigness of this place is not to be taken lightly. I was forever sold on the legend of Bella Coola after sitting in Seattle’s old King Cat Theater, mind-surfing through the 2013 Sherpas premiere of Into the Mind . For those 82 minutes Callum Pettit, Kye Peterson and JP Auclair showed me all the transcendence possible there. Years later it was more than enough to break me from the Seattle routine at the drop of a text message and point the compass north. Jarringly, we banked hard right up North Bentinck Arm, the Beechcraft 1900 descending into a fjord that revealed a single runway shouldered between giant granite cliffs. The tiny community below, once driven by fishing and forestry, now trended toward tourism—especially our two-planked, adrenaline-fueled variety. Scando-style fjords carved fingers through the glaciated peaks. Coastal forests, either in a stage of harvest or impos-sible to reach, flanked mountaintops shrouded in cloud and mystery. The skiable lines were overwhelming—more than any human could check off in a lifetime. Too much for even John Baldwin, the patron sage and author of Exploring the Coast Mountains on Skis , who wrote the guidebook for this 1,000-mile expanse. For those with less time, thankfully, it’s also home to 3.5 million acres of heli-ski tenure—all of it accessed by a single, legendary operation. Bella Coola Heli Sports has achieved almost mythical status as a big mountain venue in the two decades since film crews like MSP and TGR first started migrating there. In its relatively short 20-year history, the massive venue has hosted Cody Townsend and Dave Treadway, Chris Davenport and Doug Coombs. It’s where Shane McConkey brainstormed the first spatulas, big-buttering his edgeless water skis down a spine to prove a point and forever changing powder skiing in the process. It is the place Bella Coola 073
The Ski Journal Volume 15, Issue 1: Page 73
