Fresh virgin powder. Pure alpine wilderness. Crisp mountain air. The brief thunder of rotor blades.
Backcountry heli-skiing is big business in Canada, offering those who can afford it a bucket list-topping adventure. When paired with remote lodges accessible to guests only by helicopter, the experience is unmatched.
Behind these experiences at the 11 CMH Heli-Skiing & Summer Adventures (CMH) lodges in Eastern British Columbia is an army of highly skilled Alpine Helicopters pilots, maintenance engineers, and support personnel following a strict mission for safety and aircraft availability.
Based in Kelowna, B.C., Alpine Helicopters helped grow heli-skiing into what it is today, creating a safety-focused operation with an emphasis on people and continuous improvement that extends throughout the company’s operations.
Alpine’s beginnings, however, had nothing to do with skiing. The company was founded in Calgary, Alberta, in 1961 by two pilots, Jack Nicholson and Ted Jansen. The partners initially focused on agricultural, forestry, mineral exploration, and survey flying. In 1968, the company relocated to Kelowna and expanded its services into wildland firefighting.
The operation grew modestly over the next decade until 1981, when an experienced group of mountain pilots left competitor Bow Helicopters and joined Alpine, forever changing the company’s trajectory. The pilots brought with them a contract to provide support for acclaimed mountaineer and heli-skiing pioneer Hans Gmoser’s operation, CMH.
Operating Bell 212s and Bell 206s that often sat idle in the winter, Alpine worked with Bell to develop an upgrade for high-altitude performance and put them to work shuttling heli-skiing clients throughout the mountains in the winter. The upgrade also enhanced the aircraft for wildfire fighting and heli-seismic activities, as well as Alpine’s later expansion into heli-hiking in the summer.
The company’s contributions and dedication to CMH’s leisure activities led to the operator acquiring CMH and its remote lodges in 1996. Over the past three decades, Alpine acquired competitors, and has itself been acquired, yet has remained focused on a dedicated heli-skiing operation in the winter, extensive firefighting operations in the summer, and year-round search-and-rescue contracts, sightseeing tours, and utility work.
Today Alpine offers these services out of seven bases: Kelowna and Golden in B.C., and Canmore, Calgary, Grimshaw/Peace River, High Level, and Kananaskis in Alberta, with a fleet of Bell 212HP, Bell 206L3, Bell 407, Airbus AS350 B3e/H125, and Bell 412EP helicopters.
president Jeff Denomme. Heath Moffatt Photo
Bread & Butter, Snow & Fire
The majority of Alpine Helicopters’ operations rotate between heli-skiing in the winter and wildland firefighting in the summer, while supporting its communities and parks from its base locations.
In the winter, starting around mid-November, each of CMH’s 11 mountain lodges are supported with a Bell 212, a combination of a Bell 212 and a Bell 407, or two AS350s. Most lodges also use either a Bell 206 or a 407 for snow safety and ski support activities. Two pilots and at least one aircraft maintenance engineer (AME) — an apprentice may also be assigned — accompany the aircraft, all working a 10 days on/10 days off or two weeks on/two weeks off schedule, depending on the individual lodge’s bookings. The aircraft serve the lodges until returning to the hangar in April.
Starting around May 15, the majority of Alpine’s 15 212s fight fires across the country, with seven of them on exclusive use contracts and six on spec (call when needed). Several of Alpine’s 14 407s and AS350s also support firefighting efforts across Canada.
The fire season used to end closer to mid-August but can now run through mid-October, leaving Alpine with a short window to prepare the aircraft for the switch in work. The process to turn at least 22 aircraft from firefighting to heli-skiing configuration and back is monumental. Alpine has it down to a science.
“For those shoulder seasons, it’s all hands on deck for our AMEs,” said Alpine Helicopters president Jeff Denomme.
For the Bell 212s, belly tanks are removed, high landing gear is swapped for lower gear, utilitarian interior seating is swapped for cushion seating with company branding sewn into the headrests for a more upscale look, baskets are secured to the helicopters’ right sides, and more. The intermediate helicopters undergo similar equipment swaps.
In the spring, the process repeats in reverse for firefighting with two 212s equipped for heli-hiking.
Onboard equipment swapping is the easy piece of the preparation puzzle. Alpine maintains a commitment toward a zero aircraft on ground (AOG) target. A large part of meeting this goal is considerable maintenance planning.
“We preload all our maintenance in our shoulder seasons to help maximize reliability,” said Alpine Helicopters director of maintenance Scott Hayward. “Every time you change a component in the field, you open an element of risk. Many years ago, Alpine decided no major components should be changed in the field unless absolutely necessary.”
Together, Hayward and Alpine Helicopters’ chief and lead AMEs closely track all life limited and time before overhaul components on each helicopter, planning how each aircraft will be prepared for the next season. When the aircraft come home between seasons, the Alpine team swaps out components to build a helicopter that requires no component change or overhaul before it returns.
“All the engineers come to the hangar in shoulder season to perform all the critical maintenance tasks, like resetting couplings, and swapping components to reduce the requirement to open up primary flight controls or primary power controls in the field,” Hayward said. “This practice has proven to be very reliable and really reduces the human factors element in the field, especially in the winter where engineers are performing outside maintenance in [down] to – 20 C [- 4 F] temperatures.”
To stay on top of this practice, the Alpine team works year-round to maintain an extensive inventory of new, overhauled, and time remaining spares to meet predicted need, Hayward said. The company works closely with OEMs and its heavy maintenance provider, Alpine Aerotech, to achieve this goal.
Through decades of experience, Alpine Helicopters has developed its own preventative maintenance practices, Hayward said. These range from implementing tighter inspection criteria to introducing overhaul and retirement lives for on-condition items. Over time, these practices have proven to reduce downtime and support more effective predictive maintenance planning.
The (Snow) Safety Dance
Alpine’s heli-skiing operations are demanding on the crews and aircraft. Here again, the company has developed a precise plan for optimal execution with minimal risk.
Due to the remote nature of the lodges, nine of CMH’s 11 properties rely on Alpine to transport everything from staff, food, supplies, and construction materials to all waste out of the lodge, and, of course, the guests.
A day of heli-skiing typically starts at 6 a.m. with the engineer reviewing work done the night before. Each aircraft is thoroughly heated by jet fuel powered heaters for at least two hours to bring oils and seals up to temperature and dry out the interior, explained Felix Abraham, Alpine Helicopters’ medium helicopter lead engineer.
Heli-skiing clients purchase set package days of skiing, with each group arriving and leaving together by helicopter. On the first ski day, the pilot and ski guides provide a thorough briefing on how the operation runs, teaching guests the proper and safe way to get into and out of the aircraft, what to do at each drop-off and pickup, and general helicopter safety.
Every morning the smaller helicopter launches ahead of the guests’ aircraft, with snow safety guides onboard. This team scouts for safe runs for the day, making go/no go decisions based on snow quality and safety, setting off avalanche bombs when warranted, leveling the landing site with an avalanche shovel, resetting flags marking landing sites if needed due to wind and/or snow, and in most cases, skiing the run to test it, preparing the pickup spot at the base just as was done at the drop-off point.
“The ski operators are not reinventing the wheel,” said Alpine line pilot Mark Adams. “They have a list of known runs, and it’s all mapped out. They want to ensure the safest and most positive experience. If the ski quality is bad, a guest can get hurt or just won’t enjoy the run. We’re trying to provide the most positive experience possible.”
A heli-ski lodge can house up to 44 guests, each of which hope to ski as much as possible for the day. The guides break the group into equal weight sets, based on weight and balance, and the helicopter gets to work. The first group is dropped off at the top of a run. The minute everyone is clear, the helicopter launches back to the lodge to pick up the next group. When timed right, upon dropping off the last group at the top of a run, the helicopter repositions to the bottom and picks up the first group, taking them to the next run chosen by the ski guide.
Depending on the length of the runs, the helicopter can move everyone to an average of seven to 10 runs a day, Adams explained. Each run can take between 15 and 30 minutes to ski.
When the aircraft return in the evening, the AME performs a daily inspection and any required maintenance, prepares the aircraft for the next day, and puts on all the covers to tuck it in for the night, Adams explained.
Each step of the heli-skiing operation is refined and strengthened with input from Alpine and lodge staff to reduce risk as much as possible. Alpine is consistently updating its company operating procedures (COPs).
One example is how it trains pilots for their first heli-skiing assignment.
“Flagging and setting up ski operations in the field can be very risky,” said Alpine Helicopters chief financial officer Jill Seaton.
Mark O’Brien, the company’s director of operations, added: “Our people in the field asked that we strengthen the training and procedures around this activity to reduce potential risk, and we did. We developed a training program that starts at the ground level with a brand-new pilot to skiing to when they start taking snow safety guides out to flag. They go through all the training step by step and what should and shouldn’t be done. The pilot gets leadership from the chief pilot, the training team and a senior ski pilot. They develop approach profiles, power management profiles, points of reference when coming to a site, what to look for — tree, rock, cliff, stump, a guide — as basic references, and how to safely land in the right spot for the snow safety guide to get out and put flags in. We set up what we call an obstacle course in the training area. It includes flags, all in different types of conditions a pilot would experience in the field, and we train.”
Diversification
Outside of firefighting and heli-skiing, Alpine Helicopters holds two separate standing offer contracts for search-and-rescue (SAR) using its Bell 407s. One is based in Canmore, Alberta, and the second in Golden, B.C. Together they perform more than 325 rescues annually.
These aircraft perform technical rescues with longline human external cargo, sometimes on up to 300 feet (90 meters) of line. With its location just outside Banff National Park, the Canmore-based helicopter is the busiest of the two, performing more than 275 rescues a year. Typical responses are related to hiking, climbing, hunting, and mountain biking accidents and incidents, as well as nature-caused events that lead to injury such as wildlife attacks, rockfalls or avalanches.
“Most of the injuries come from the downhill component: biking, hiking, scrambling downhill,” said Todd Cooper, lead pilot and one of the rescue pilots for the contract based out of Canmore. “It’s hard to generalize the rescues as they can be just about anything visitors can do.”
Alpine Helicopters also operates a hoist-equipped Bell 412HP in Kelowna, helping a local not-for-profit society create the service in the Okanagan region of B.C. The aircraft provides both dedicated SAR and wildfire support in the area, if needed.
Alpine Helicopters’ tourism component operates out of its Canmore and Kananaskis locations in the Bell 206. Tours focus on delivering eagle eye views of the eastern Canadian Rockies, with a variety of packages ranging from 25 to 60 minutes.
Alpine Helicopters’ additional operations include utility, seismic, mining support, powerline patrol, and construction. It also commonly supports the construction of lodges and renovation activities during the summer.
People and Safety Culture
Denomme believes focusing on people is the key to success. “When your people feel valued, appreciated, and have a sense of belonging, they take care of the company, each other, and our customers. It’s that simple.”
Many of Alpine Helicopters’ initiatives are focused on its people.
Alpine Helicopters actively hires newly licensed pilots to work in Canmore and Kananaskis as ground crew for a year before receiving tour pilot training. This allows the company to immerse new hires into the company culture and prepare them for a career in the company.
Pilots will fly tours for at least two years before progressively moving into longline, utility, and forestry work at Alpine’s northern Alberta bases. After building these skills for a couple of years, they then receive mountain training and eventually move into heli-skiing as the light aircraft pilot. The process is a big investment and can take five to seven years from new hire to entering heli-skiing, ensuring a skilled, safe pilot, O’Brien said.
“There is no other helicopter company in Canada at all, bar none, that puts as many junior people through from zero to a flying seat than Alpine,” O’Brien said.
Alpine also invests in AME apprentices, often employing several at any one time. Apprentices will receive hands-on experience in hangars and, in their second year, field assignments. Much like the pilot training track, they learn the company culture, procedures, and operations from day one in preparation for a long career with Alpine, Hayward said. And since Alpine is a Transport Canada Approved Training Organization, Alpine can deliver much of its type training and issue endorsements in-house.
Despite all the internal and industry changes over the years, Alpine has maintained a focus on its culture and dedication to safety, which has expanded significantly in recent years.
“We’ve gone through a wave of retirements, resulting in change at every management level and many of our senior, long-term crew members since I started,” said Seaton, who joined the company in 2006. “Through all that change, we still maintain that feeling of pride, of family and belonging, and everybody just wanting Alpine to be the best in the industry. I’ve also seen a shift in management’s approach to safety in operations and maintenance. Our SMS manual has undergone a significant maturation over these past 20 years with constant, continuous, significant improvements. It is very much a living document and the center of what we do. Overall, culturally, everybody is deeply aware of the importance of the safety, and it remains at the forefront of all we do.”