MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Winter 2018

74 ML BLUE WINTER 2018 L ast Frontier Heliskiing is well- named. It really is a “frontier” in the definitive sense of the word, which is “the extreme limit of settled land beyond which lies wilderness” (according to the Oxford Dictionary of English ). With a staggering 2.2-million-acre (9,500 km 2 ) tenure in the Skeena and Coast Mountain ranges of northern BC near the Alaskan border, LFH gives skiers and boarders access to wilderness that might as well be infinite. Even if you return every year, you’ll never have to ski the same line twice. Before skiers and boarders lusted for untapped lines here, mining companies lusted for untapped copper. In the 1960s and early ‘70s, copper mining was in full swing in the Granduc Mine near the frontier town of Stewart and a Swiss-born mountain guide named Herb Bleuer was in charge of avalanche control work for the operation. A pioneering backcountry skier, Bleuer spent his downtime exploring the region’s untracked slopes. Later, he became a certified guide, avalanche safety instructor and examiner for the training programs of the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides. In the early 1990s Bleuer steered LFH founders George Rosset, Franz Fux, Mike Watling and Geoff Strait to a place he knew boasted some of the choicest terrain in the world. Here, the old-growth tree skiing, sprawling glaciers and high but skiable alpine stretched on and on— there was more skiing here than Bleuer could manage in 10 lifetimes. He knew snow well, and he knew the snow here was fathomless. And he knew where and how to access all this bounty.