Our tracks down this colossal face in the Boundary Ranges of far northern British Columbia, near the Alaska and Yukon borders, are not the first of the day or even the season – they are the first ever.
Powder is detonating from my skis and billowing up as I journey down continuous 1,500-meter descents from yawning peaks through alpine bowls and down to treeline. “What should we call that run?” asks our guide, Johnny Mellis, as we arrive in a breathless pod at the bottom of the hill. “Nobody’s skied it, so it needs a name.”
I’m in Atlin, British Columbia, in mid-March with two other skiers as the inaugural clients at Gold Rush Heli Skiing. With a tenure spanning 648,000 acres – an area 120 times larger than Vail Ski Resort – two A-star helicopters, nearly 100 ft of annual snowfall per year, and a maximum of eight clients, there are more first-ever tracks to be had.
But the appeal here goes far beyond powder hounding. “This is adventure camp for adults,” Gold Rush founder Brian McCutcheon tells me over a cocktail in the lodge, a renovated three-story house with commanding views of Atlin Lake. “Yes, we have the luxury cabins and the gourmet meals – but there’s also so much to do here.” That menu includes snowmobiling, cross-country skiing, aurora borealis viewing, and dog sledding on the frozen lake, which, at 300 sq miles, is among the largest in the province.
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On successive mornings, while waiting for storm clouds to lift, I cross-country ski for two hours through silent spruce forests and blast not-so-silently through powder on a 550 cc Ski-Doo Tundra with McCutcheon and five others. The instant camaraderie of the group, which includes a Gold Rush guide from the Yukon, a local builder, and the other guests, is something that comes only from chasing outrageous fun with good people.
“I’ve been on a lot of heli trips,” says Brad Preece, who’s here from the US with his wife Genevieve Edwards, “but I’ve never been anywhere where everyone was so cool.”
This starts with McCutcheon, a 6’4” flannel-clad Chuck Norris doppelganger and preternatural problem solver with unflappable good cheer. “If you’re not having fun in life,” he says, “you’re doing something wrong.” When McCutcheon heard about this wild, remote ski tenure, he pounced.
The Taku River Tlingit First Nation hunted and fished here for millennia before prospectors discovered gold in Atlin in 1898. The settlement instantly boomed, then burned to the ground and was rebuilt – twice – before transforming into a tourist destination, attractive in part because of how hard it was to reach. Today, with a permanent population of 220 and early 19th-century architecture, Atlin remains the adventure frontier, demanding persistence, adaptability, and optimism to thrive.
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On the third day of my trip, the storm clears, leaving nearly two ft of feathery powder under blue skies. “This one should ski nice,” Mellis offers as we click into our bindings and the bird banks away against a backdrop of serrated granite spires that stack to the horizon. And by ‘nice’ Mellis must mean ‘like the best run you’ve ever skied’ because that’s how it materializes, turn after gluttonous turn, all the way down to the white tongue of a frozen lake etching into a still-life winter fantasy.
Mellis joined Gold Rush after 35 years with Canadian Mountain Holidays because, he says, he tired of CMH’s corporate milieu. “Plus the terrain and weather up here, with the vibe Brian’s creating … it was too good to pass up.” To his point, Gold Rush feels more authentic than a classic luxury offering, from the loose banter at dinner, the snowy scamper to the wood-fired hot tub and the guide-client guitar jams in the lodge bar.
On our final night at Gold Rush, we head five minutes down the road to the town saloon. Locals tip back beers as dogs wander in and out. The conversation rises, cresting to a fever pitch when McCutcheon buys everyone shots and Mellis incites a 1970s greatest hits sing-along.
I catch a glimpse of Preece and Edwards, laughing, hugging newfound friends, and promising to return for somebody’s engagement party in June, and I conclude that McCutcheon may have stumbled upon Atlin 130 years after the rush, but he still, somehow, struck gold.
Gold Rush Heli Skiing’s season runs from late February through April, with 5-day packages from $12,995.
