CMH HELI SKI – WING MAN
HELI-ENTREPRENEUR HANS GMOSER’S QUEST FOR TRUE FREEDOM ON SKIS
WORDS BY LESLIE ANTHONY 

After a magical week in British Columbia’s Purcell Mountains, we landed one afternoon atop a glacier abutting the iconic granite tooth for which the Canadian Mountain Holiday’s Bugaboos operation is named. Clambering out and retrieving our gear in what now seemed routine fashion, the helicopter levitated from a selfgenerated snow cloud and disappeared into a cerulean sky, leaving us in preternatural quiet to consider the impressive shadow cast by Bugaboo Spire into the valley. Hard to imagine after a week of magical vistas, but this one was the most soul-stirring of all.

wing_man_3
The first group to heli-ski in the Cariboos in 1963. From left: Jim McConkey, Bob Smith, Starr Walton, pilot Russ Timrick, Linda Crutchfield, and Hans Gmoser.

That’s the thing about heli-skiing. Every chopper lift is a geology lesson—the sweep of the land, the thrust of the mountains, the flow of glaciers and moraines. Textbook stuff. As such, every lift is also a revelation of the forces that shape the Earth, keep it together, and make winter work. When you find yourself alone on a ridge where it feels you’re the sole living thing in this grand sweep of silence and history, your heart, famously, swells two sizes. Not to mention that you’re about to ski thousands of feet of untracked, ethereal powder.

This, I knew, was the moment that iconic guide and CMH founder Hans Gmoser knew so intimately, and dedicated his life to sharing with others.

Born in Linz, Austria in 1932, a young Gmoser took to the hills to escape the grind of the post-war era. A dreamer and doer with new horizons always on his mind, the capable climber immigrated to Canada in 1951 with friend Leo Grillmair and headed directly to the Rockies outside Calgary. Wasting little time, he linked up with the Alpine Club of Canada and during the 1950s pioneered new rock climbs, made first Canadian ascents of several peaks, and led successful expeditions to Mount Logan (1959) and Denali (1963). Early on he began shooting films of his adventures. Eager to share Canada’s mountains through this new medium, he travelled throughout North America presenting them to audiences. He was a founding member of the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides (ACMG) and first director of the Canadian Avalanche Foundation. Before that, in 1957, he founded Rocky Mountain Guides, the company which, catapulted by heli-skiing, would become Canadian Mountain Holidays (CMH), the largest mountain adventure operation in the world. When he retired in 1991, Gmoser had time to reflect on the unlikely trail that had led there.

Following on the 1950s’ experimentations of a few European and Alaskan skiers with helicopters, Calgary geologist Art Patterson convinced the Banff-based Gmoser to guide for him in a nascent commercial heli-ski venture in 1963. Unfortunately, their two attempts had been, by all measures, disastrous: costly, with manky snow and high winds that beat back the tiny, 178-horsepower, two-seater Bell 47. Patterson gave up and Gmoser put it out of his mind until, touring a ski movie through the eastern U.S., he met Olympic racer Brooks Dodge.

“On a flight back from Europe I was thinking how, by the ’60s, [the Europeans] were powder pigs like we were, so the good powder would get cut up in one day, and that we needed to go out to someplace in Western Canada—maybe use a ski plane or a helicopter,” recalls Dodge in Topher Donahue’s Bugaboo Dreams (2008).

wing_man_2
Gmoser’s early days in filmmaking.

After a Gmoser show at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a film about ski-touring had included a shot of  a helicopter unloading food and gear, Dodge asked Gmoser if he thought it might be possible to use a helicopter to ski from. Given the trials of those first attempts Gmoser was hard to convince, but Dodge was persuasive. It was a classic partnership: the brash American with money and clients, and the circumspect, typical Canadian mountain guide (i.e., immigrant from post-war Europe) who knew his way around the mountain labyrinth of British Columbia. One place Gmoser didn’t know well was the Bugaboos, a relatively unknown rock-climbing area in the Purcells located just beyond the checkerboard of national parks that would, in any event, make heli-skiing in the Rockies difficult. That spring, Gmoser ski-toured into the Bugaboos with a crack team and liked what he saw.

With Dodge still keen on the big lift and Gmoser feeling he’d now found the perfect isolated place to execute it, Dodge and his wife shepherded their ski club west to B.C. in 1965 on what was guaranteed to be a no-money-back adventure. As it turned out, the first week of heli-skiing in the range, whose name would forever be synonymous with the activity, was seven days of perfect powder and bluebird skies. For all, the experience was clearly transcendent.

Man has always wanted to fly, and when he invented skiing—often lauded as the closest thing to flying without leaving the Earth—he came damn close. But Gmoser’s vision of wings to soar through the mountain wilderness and experience true freedom on skis linked both these ideas.

Gmoser’s idea was as grandiose as the mountains in which it was conceived: the dream of a perfect powder day in spectacular mountains with friends may be an ideal that has existed since skiing’s beginning, but it was enshrined in the three tenets of the CMH experience: the epic joy of skiing powder; the camaraderie forged therein; and the restorative power of mountains. Gmoser passionately conveyed as much as a mountain guide, whether evangelizing with clients or to a crowd viewing his movies. When he eventually employed a helicopter to re-imagine skiing in the service of these concepts, it changed everything—and nothing. It was now possible to deliver the dream continuously from a lodge-based wilderness setting in an epic snow zone. But that dream—the skier’s ideal—never changes. Fifty years later, experiencing that dream can still change your life, perhaps more than ever. And CMH continues to be at the forefront of its delivery.

For his own part over the years, Gmoser’s deep connection to the alpine world saw him elected an honorary member of The Alpine Club of Canada (1986), awarded the Order of Canada (1987), given the Banff Mountain Film Festival Summit of Excellence award (1989), elected to the Honour Roll of Canadian Skiing (1989), named an honorary member of the International Federation of Mountain Guides
Association (1992), and elected Honorary President of the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides (1997). Gmoser’s storied career in the mountains, unfortunately, would have a sad end.

On July 3, 2006, the always-active 75-year-old was cycling alone, as he frequently did, when he collapsed on the side of the road at the Muleshoe picnic area near Lake Louise, breaking his neck. Despite witnesses calling emergency services and Gmoser being evacuated to hospital, all hopes of recovery evaporated when he passed away two days later.

The outpouring was immediate. Many mourned the loss of the pioneer and visionary who laid the foundation of modern mountaineering in Canada and created a new way to access the mountains to boot. “It’s a staggering loss,” said luminary climber Barry Blanchard. “He was a father figure for a whole couple of generations of young mountain guides.”

Chic Scott, author of Deep Powder and Steep Rock: The Life of Mountain Guide Hans Gmoser, eulogized him as the “the éminence grise of Canadian mountaineering.”

As CMH spokesman at the time, Marty Von Neudegg, noted, the entire company was stunned. “We’re profoundly sad… Hans was an incredibly great man, the reason we’re all here. Thousands have worked at CMH, tens of thousands have enjoyed what he created… this is really hard on us.”

Although the loss was particularly heartfelt throughout the CMH family—a large one these days with 11 lodges, 20 million square miles of tenure, and 9.5 million runs skied for some 18 billion vertical feet of powder bliss—numbers are only one measure of success. In the end, Gmoser’s own enthusiasm for getting more people into the mountains honors his legacy best: “What were we trying to do?… Inhale and breathe life again… We were rebelling against an existence full of distorted values, against an existence where a man is judged by the size of his living room, by the amount of chromium on his car. But here we were ourselves again: simple and pure. Friends in the mountains.”