Costco'ing My Way To AK

Alaska has always been a Mecca for big mountain riding thanks to the accomplishments of some of its early pioneers. Riders like, Jay Liska, Johan Oloffson, Julie Zell, Noah Salasnek, Sean ''Dog'' and Tom Burt, as well as other back-in-the day line seekers who laid down some of the heaviest tracks ever documented on film are responsible for helping to create a subset within the snowboarding lifestyle. Snowboarders from around the world work countless hours in shitty, mindless jobs-even giving up days on the their local hill to achieve one life goal.

In 2000, my wife and I along with a group of friends were fortunate enough to fly into Anchorage from Salt Lake City, a mere four-ish hours away. Upon our arrival we rented a piece of garbage Dodge Durango and were told by the lady at the car rental desk to never put anything on the roof. I nodded in agreement with her command and decided to (for once) take the full insurance. We picked-up our car, I then opened my board bag and took out my sleeping bag and threw it on the roof, as to not scratch the paint with the eight-bursting-at-the seams board bags that would be shortly resting on top of it.

After securing the overload of weight, we blasted off to one of the most beautiful resorts that I have been to, Alyeska. For those of you who have not been to Alaska, a good way to open up your trip is to checkout this horseshoe bowl of a resort, it's visceral scenery is out of this world; you literally ride down the interior of the bowl to the not-to-distant inlet. Finishing our second day of riding Alyeska's endless cat track drops, hero rocks and hips, we ventured over to Hatcher's Pass, once a defunct ski area and now a bastion of backcountry terrain, for a day of cat riding. It was this third day that we all got a very strong taste of Alaska's vast expanse of topnotch terrain.

I remember the snow was soft and the cat could only climb so far before it dug itself into the well worn trail, so we hiked the remainder with our guides to a few peaks which were fun but the bigger, scarier aspects loomed in the background-ones only a heli could access. Our group gazed towards these monstrous masses shrouded in what appeared to be artificial spines-how could snow stick to aspects that steep? It just seemed fake. Later, after finishing our day, our weary possé loaded all our gear back into the car and onto the roof. As we made our way back to Anchorage we rolled over a small bump in the road. The tiny indentation caused our recycled Coke can of a roof to cave in from weight of the bags, leaving the poor bastards in the back seat bent forward to their knees for the entire drive back. Thank god for declaring shotgun-and purchasing insurance. We crashed out on the plane and all vowed to go back to AK the following season in search of bigger, more remote terrain.

Fast forward to 2011, that group who promised each other to return to Alaska the following year but didn't for whatever reasons-came across the deal of a century. This deal was put out by Valdez Heli-Camps through none other than America's favorite do-it-all in one grocery mega shop, Costco. For $1,000 of your hard earned dollars, Valdez Heli would put you up in the Best Western, provide three meals a day, a guide and a 25k vert package. Bang for buck, it was (and is) a remarkable deal. My friends and I quickly got the proper permission from the authorities/wives and made our online purchases for April 1-3.

We lined-up our flights to depart on March 31st, arriving in Anchorage at 1am. Our plan was to take a taxi to Clippership Motorhomes, where I had arranged to have our rented R.V. (that comfortably slept seven) turned on with the heat running and a name tag hanging from the mirror indicating our battleship. Upon getting to the Clippership parking lot, we saw only one tiny R.V. with the lights on and a hang tag with the name Edmorld. It was now one-thirty in the morning and we had run out of options, we decided to enter Edmorld's empty R.V., remove the hang tag, stow our gear away in its minuscule space. The tin box was freezing inside, spending all of three nano seconds trying to locate keys to start the engine or turn the generator on, we opted for the most logical place to stay warm... The Great Alaskan Bush Company directly across the street. Before you all judge, please know that this was the only place to have an Alaskan Amber and stay warm for thirty minutes before all were booted out at 2am (Really? Even SLC stays open until 3am). After a titillating experience at A.B.C. we walked back to the R.V. where we proceeded to freeze our asses off until later that morning where we were notified by management that they gave us the wrong touring vehicle and failed to turn it on for us. And we thank you for this.

Re-packed and ready to go, we stopped for a V.I. breakfast, picked-up cases of beer and blasted off on HWY 1 to Valdez. A six hour drive that really only feels about three due to the beautiful views, card games, beer drinking and frat-boy Jager shots. Thanks to our trusty designated driver we made it to Valdez with only one speeding ticket from a cool cop who drew us a map of some secret backcountry stashes-for real). As we drew nearer to Thompson Pass we were awed by the immense pillow lines-and some seriously heavy tracks over them. It would not be right to note that every shred on the side of the road seemed to be from Wyoming with their respective film crews and photogs working away. A few handshakes (no pound dogs/knuckle bumps here, asshole), high-fives and pictures, we hoped back in our bacteria-ridden battleship and descended over this remarkable area into Valdez.

To say Valdez is a one-horse town is a slight exaggeration. The quaint town's populous is a scratch over four thousand folks with the main employer being the Alaskan Pipeline Company. As many of you know, Valdez became known for the slight mishap of the Exxon Valdez in 1989. The tanker spilled 53 million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound and every bit of machinery and all human hands were needed to curb the disaster. Launch the helis!

Every helicopter was used that landed in Valdez (some say at a premium rate of 10k a day!) and every person in Valdez was employed during the clean-up. After most heli pilots left at the project's end, some stayed for good reasons. Valdez's first Helicopter skiing operation was launched by ass-kicker Doug Coombs in 1993 and shortly there after, fellow ripper Dean Cummings launched H20. Today there are five separate heli ops in the small town of Valdez... not bad.

Making our way into the Best Western's parking lot, we checked into to our clean, yet simple living quarters for the next three days. The hotel staff were cool and mellow and apparently used to skiers and snowboarders descending on them from all parts of the world. We met for dinner at seven, as requested by Valdez-Heli Camps, in their private banquet area. The food was actually pretty good with meat and vegetarian offerings, you could eat as much as you wanted, and your server was more than happy to bring you whatever beverage you so desired. Some of the guides were present and sat with all the different tables which was a nice way to get intro'd. After dinner we graduated into Valdez Heli's semi-private bar within the hotel (all are welcome and it's non-smoking unlike its across the street rival, Pipeline Bar). It's a mellow joint with comfortable lounge chairs, a full bar, cool servers and bartenders and good music to round things off. I'd be a damn liar if I told you we did not end up there every night. Although, we called it early our first night, as to not oversleep our seven-thirty pick-up time.

The next morning we grabbed our one of three included meals-breakfast-which was a basic but decent Best Western breakfast and made our way to the shuttle pick-up. Throwing our boards inside and finding seats among our basta... French counterparts, we were greeted by a rather attractive blond lady from Sydney. Low and behold she new one of the guys in our group from a previous Canadian heli trip. As she multitasked her way to the back of the bus she was audible in her concerns of bringing her laptop. Seriously-bringing your laptop to the heli pad?-yes. Even the French guys thought this was nuts-the same dudes that packed bottles of wine for their outing (no kidding).

At eight a.m. we received our safety briefing which was rather, uhh, intense by non-other than our soon-to-be guide, Virgil. I appreciated the information but others in our group thought he was a bit overboard, perhaps he was (but I am back here safely). Virgil sent groups out before us, ones that paid a premium (6-8K), he apologized to us, and we assured him that we knew that we would be the last to fly given our poor man's Costco packages. Not ten minutes later, two helis landed for our six-man group and we were off-did I mention I was in an A-star-stoked even more so. We landed in greybird conditions South of where we took off from (you could see the Sound) in an area called Brown's. The terrain run had a mellow to 38 degree pitch to flat and drawn out runway (which was easily a mile) that opened up into a steeper bowl. We were all amped to be getting out of a heli, as it was all of our first time doing so on the snow. Yet, after our warm-up runs, we wanted more and more challenging faces... but the damn weather closed us out. Bummed we returned to the heli pad and chilled with some riders from Mammoth-we made fun of the French together. Then they opened their bottles of wine... those bastards never offered to share.

The next morning we awoke to bluebird skies and rallied to our R.V.-forget the shuttle, we have beer in the R.V. We made it to the heli pad, our group parted ways with our respective guides. We were switched to a younger guide (which apparently is not normal) who took us to our first drop zone of a wide open pow field that was decently steep. Mounting up we followed our guide down about 1,200 vertical feet one at a time to a small saddle of safety. The snow was great, as we each put up walls of snow in un-tracked territory. Meeting at the saddle, our guide Ret, pointed over to a small spine-like double barrel pipe shot. Our buddy, Dave had opted to spend most of his winter in Costa Rica surfing (as Utah's winter sucked), being the nice people we were, we gave him first shot (his first run of the entire season).

Ret was great and let us go just about anywhere we wanted to with exception to Jeremy Jone's Meteorite. He claimed to have not skied it himself making it illegal for them to take us there (on our last day they tried to up-sell us on more vertical and promised to take us to Meteorite. Funny how that works.). We ended up going to H-Wall and B.S.M (Backside of Mercury) which were two of the trip highlights for our group. H-Wall was a nice open bowl with some chutes and cliffs to drop. Our pilot had a tough time negotiating the knife ridge that we landed on, we bounced three times before finally putting her down. When we got out, we saw the Frenchies a few hundred yards away, they appeared pissed as they had (according to our guide) worked their way up to this terrain after six days of skiing and here we are on day two. Being the diplomats that we were, we waved, they returned the favor with a look of vas te faire encule. Their guide, a snowboarder, briefed them as we tried to scope lines over the convex ridge for ourselves.

One by one they dropped into this massive expanse of a fifty-degree open face. Seeing all of them re-group a mile or so away, our guide told us to ...dawn our rape masks and slaughter those powder wiggling bastards' tacks; yes, they actually had uniform butt squiggle tracks, side-by-side-by-side-by side of each other leaving no doubt in our minds as to why the Germans kicked their asses-you just make it too easy for all of us. Our powder masks were dawned and we dropped in after our guided radioed from the safe zone. Looking over the enormous convex ridge you could see one guide turn and then... nothing. I was the last to go in our group, and although not freaked I was a nervous, if that makes sense. Knowing this was going to be our last run, I guessed it was going to one of the best shots of the trip. Along with the rest of my group, we wanted to make it an all-or-nothing type of run. As each of us went, I was last to go with the radio in my pack. Getting the word to drop, I plowed right into the fall line with a big heelside turn (figuring if the slope was going to release, I wanted to see which way to try and get out), a huge plum of smoke shot up, once clearing I got a very good idea of how steep (and freaking addictive!) the pitch was. Making three big s-turns across the Français' perfectly manicured field of dreams, I saw the beginning of some pepper in the snow, I followed the trace rocks in the hopes of dropping something big and fun for the last run. As I began to slow myself and look for a take-off, my radio began bellowing out Avoid the cliff ban! Avoid the cliff ban! It's eighty feet! Stop!!

Well, lets just say the minute I heard eighty feet, I quickly turned down and way form the cliff edge and got back into the open part of the face, blasting a wide toe-side turn under the exposure. I looked upwards to the wall and just about shit myself. I would have been dry-docked on the run out, as the landing zone was covered in another 80 feet of million year-old debris that would have spread the remainder of my body into neighboring Cordova. And this is one of the many, many reasons you always tip your guides out daily.

Our last day was a great way to end this once-in-a-lifetime trip. Upon meeting our other friends back at the heli camp, we were all eager to exchange stories and terrain with each other over beers from the R.V. It was apparent that each group felt that they had brought to the best terrain-which was a great thing. Both groups had high intentions of shooting video and taking riding pictures but quickly learning that we needed bigger zoom lenses to capture the goods from afar, we opted out from carrying them in our packs and deciding to shoot from the helis. I hope you all get a sense of what we rode from my pictures, everything you see (with exception of Meteorite) we slashed. And it should be known that we offered beers to the French guys, who were not all that bad. In true French fashion we were given a fous le camp look. Bastards!

Next year, we will be going back for sure. I encourage all of you to take advantage of the Costco/Valdez Heli-Camps package when they put it back up for next season. Riding in Alaska truly is a life altering experience... ok, that smelled of fromage.