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Inside Out
The Drop Zone By Craig Vetter
Tighten your bindings. This winter, for the first time, you can heli-ski the Nepalese Himalayas. Himalayan Heli Ski Guides (HHSG) will take its first clients into this cathedral of peaks between mid-January and April. "Nearly every run will be a first descent," says HHSG director Craig Calonica, a 49-year-old adventurer and former professional speed-skier who has been climbing in the Himalayas for 22 years. He has been up Everest twice with the ambition of skiing it from top to bottom, and though storms have kept him from reaching the summit, he says his time in the Himalayas has always made him wonder what it would be like to have a helicopter to scout those mountains and open ski slopes. "The possibilities are endless," he says. "We've only just nicked the bare edge of it in the Annapurna region, but we're hoping to open other areas every season. It's like finding the Alps before anybody skied them." While these days you can heli-ski mountains from Greenland to New Zealand, the addition of the Himalayas has even veterans of the sport whirling. "I'd love to go, take some groups in with their outfit," says Dean Cummings, owner and guide for Dean Cummings's H20 Guides, which has been running Alaskan ski tours for eight years. "It's exciting that they're going to provide a way to use those mountains with minimal environmental impact -- no roads, no discarded oxygen bottles. They're going to fly in and leave nothing but tracks." Calonica and his three guides, Stephan Dan, Dede Rhem and Jerome Ruby, all former ski-racing and snowboard professionals from Chamonix, France, made their first scouting trip last March, choppering into the Manang region, which lies on the north side of the Annapurna range. They began most of their runs at around 18,000 feet and finished 10,000 feet below. "We had perfect conditions," Calonica says of that trip. "Everything from knee-deep powder to windblown to hard pack to spring snow and every terrain from flat to rolling to as steep as you want. It was amazing to stand there in the shadow of these incredible peaks picking your line down a slope that no one had ever put a line on before." HHSG plans to scout and open Everest-area slopes soon (weather permitting), as well as slopes in the Dolpo region, which borders Tibet in northwestern Nepal and was until 1989 closed to Western tourists. "Dolpo could be one of our best areas," says Calonica, "because it gets the best snow in the country and has endless miles of wide-open mountains for ripping or just plain cruising. But we have permission to scout the whole country, so there's really no limit to what we might find." Clients (who, as a reminder in the company's brochure puts it, should be "accomplished skiers in fit shape") can choose from one-week, 10-day or two-week itineraries, with accommodations at local inns or in tents at a fully equipped base camp manned by Sherpas. The camp will be stocked with medical equipment, including oxygen and a decompression chamber. "Skiing is a risk sport," says Calonica, "and heli-skiing adds to that. But our guides all have extensive avalanche security experience, and we'll be checking the runs every morning." So that you can check them out for the rest of the day. Prices and schedules can be obtained by e-mailing Calonica at himalhelieasyconnect.fr. Issue date: December 16, 2002 For more news, notes and features from the world of adventure sports, call toll free to order SI Adventure at 1-888-394-5427. |
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