Big mountain skiing
Cost: $6800 for 8 nights accommodation and 100,000 vertical feet of skiing.
Forget the hotels, forget the lift tickets, forget the well groomed snow that’s beneath your feet when you’re having a fun time skiing down the “black diamond” trails at the resort. Forget everything you thought you knew about skiing. Big mountain skiing is BIG…and STEEP. It is so BIG that you need to hitch a ride in a helicopter to reach the mountain summit at 15,000 feet; it’s so STEEP that a slight pop of the skis when sliding down the mountain slopes can send you flying through the air for 20 feet. There are no closed trails, no boundaries, no maintenance crew, no paramedics. You can ski any lines you want; you can ski any time you want, the lift does not close at 4:00pm (actually, there aren’t any lifts at all). But at the same time, you can hit a rock buried under the snow and tumble down the mountain at 40 mph (64 km); you can set off avalanches that will bury you under 50 feet of snow. There’s no one but your friends to save you when shit goes down; you’re playing a dangerous game with the mountain. Most of the time, when she’s feeling good, she lets you have some of the most amazing time ever. But don’t get it twisted, when she’s in a bitchy mood, there’s no telling what she’ll do.
Big mountain has evolved a long way from the early days of Andre Tournier skiing down Aiguille d’Argentiere and Bill Brigg skiing down Grand Teton at Jackson Hill, Wyoming. The video industry has brought the extreme sport to the general public through movies like the Blizzard of Ahhs and STEEP. When Blizzard of Ahhs first came out 1987, the film literally revolutionized the skiing industry. Avid ski enthusiasts can all remember where they saw the movie and what they were doing at the time, even to this day. It created a new breed of big mountain skiers in Doug Coomb and Shane McConkey who pushed big mountain skiing to the forefront of extreme sports.
The uniqueness of Alaska Chugach comes from the wide open canvas of snow that cannot be found anywhere else in the world. Unlike mountains like Chamonix, where the presence of 1000 foot vertical cliff drop and big rocks block many of the long stretches of skiing lines, Chugach is much more wide open. The many unobstructed ski slopes really allows the skier to really get after the lines they want to ski. Skier who has been to Chugach often describe their experience as out of this world. Due to the dry weather condition in the Alaskan mountain range, moisture gets sucked out of the freshly laid snow, which turns it into perfect white powder. Sometimes the snow gets picked up by the ski and follows you down the slope; it almost feels like they have a life of their own and are dancing around you as you carve your way down the mountain. To most skiers(which probably includes you), it is one of the most incredible and exciting experience in the world.
Alaska Heli Skiing Part 1
Alaska Heli Skiing Part II
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