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The Monashees |
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The Ultimate By Seth Masia Bob Smith was a dentist until he invented the double-lens thermal pane ski goggle and made a ton of money, whereupon he abandoned his practice and set out in search of the world's finest deep powder snow. He found it, in the Monashees Mountains of British Columbia. Now Bob Smith won't ski anywhere else. Smith lives in Sun Valley, Idaho, so has some pretty good powder skiing right outside his window. Not good enough. "I ski the Monashees exclusively," says Smith, who visits Canada twice each winter to ride a helicopter into the Monashees. "It's the most wonderful ski terrain I've ever seen." Wonderful, to a powder skier, means steep and deep; ask anyone who has skied the Monashees, and those will be the first words you'll hear. "The steepest, deepest and longest," says Fred Grunwald of New Jersey, who has skied the Monashees two or three times a year for the past dozen winters. "Some of the runs are so steep, you can't believe they're skiable. It's just the wildest skiing there is." Many heliski operations in the Canadian Rockies are steep and deep and are far better known - the Bugaboos in the Purcell range and the Cariboos, for instance. What sets the Monashees apart? The difference is the trees. Naturally, it snows a lot in the Canadian Rockies, which is both good and bad; during snowstorms, low-lying clouds sock in the upper reaches of the 10,000-foot peaks, and the poor visibility prevents helicopters from reaching the higher elevations. But in the Monashees, skiers can fly to the 7,000-foot tree line and ski from there. The trees - fir, spruce and cedar - are perfectly spaced for powder skiing. They stand about 20 feet apart in the steep ravines. The trees shelter the snow from sun and wind and provide visual definition so skiers can navigate when it's snowing hard. Monashees skiers can spend storm days porpoising powder stashes two miles long. There's one drawback: the guides won't take you into the Monashees unless you're an experienced helicopter skier; tree skiing poses safety problems. For one thing, skiers can't see the guides for the trees. For another, it's possible to fall into a tree well - the deep airspace around each tree trunk - and suffocate. "I use a buddy system," says guide Rob Rohn, "so there's always someone nearby." Tree-skiing in the Monashees wasn't discovered until several years after the region was pioneered. In 1971, Canadian Mountain Holidays, then a small company based in Banff, Alberta, scouted the Monashees, which rise above the west bank of the Columbia River, and began high-terrain heliskiing there. "At first we didn't use the tree runs," recalls Sepp Renner, the veteran guide who first surveyed the area. "But then in 1976 we took some skiers into the ravines above Soards Creek and the operation changed completely." The skiers went nuts. The Soards Creek runs typically drop from a 7,000-foot level to the 3,000-foot creek bed, traversing a horizontal distance of less than two miles, an average 40 percent grade. That kind of slope ordinarily wouldn't hold snow this deep. "But it is amazingly avalanche-free," says Bob Smith. "It's so steep the stuff that's going to slide comes off as it falls." The rest lies sheltered on north and northeast exposures, held together by the trees. Because the elevations are low, the tree-skiing season in the Monashees is short - veterans like to get their skiing in before mid-February, when the warmer weather sets in. After February, the snow is still skiable higher up, but high sunny skiing is not what these guys pay big bucks for. They're paying for steep and deep. Originally published in Leisure, Dec. 1986. Copyright by Seth Masia.
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