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Every turn is spectacular when sieving through 15 centimeters of fresh snow that's as light as sifted flour. (Eric Berger)

Christian Bégin is leading a gaggle of heli-skiers through a forest in British Columbia’s Coast Mountains. The trees are spaced generously, allowing the gang to coast through the gaps as snow falls lightly. Carefully planted ski poles provide just the right amount of support.

Bégin, one of Bella Coola Heli Sports’ three founders, stops and crouches down. He brushes away some snow, revealing an ancient mystery.

A face – lips, eyes, the whole bit – stares back.

“I’ve never seen that one before,” he says. “It looks like a clown.”

And then Bégin carries on, as if it is no big deal he just discovered a head covered in snow in a remote forest in a remote slice of B.C.

We’re heli-skiers on foot, exploring Bella Coola’s valley rather than its peaks. The snow and fog grounded our ride for the day, but the area’s petroglyphs, such as the clown, old-growth cedar forest, totem poles, longhouses, fly-fishing and cross-country skiing keep us entertained. Down days at Bella Coola Heli Sports are nearly as enchanting – and pleasantly exhausting – as days spent, you know, actually heli-skiing.

We find dozens of petroglyphs, with frozen facial expressions ranging from comedic to war-ready, in this rain forest. These engravings were etched into the mountainside somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago. Experts are fuzzy on who created them, but the petroglyphs have a Polynesian flair similar to carvings on Easter Island. For the area’s Nuxalk First Nations, this is a special spot.

We hike carefully around the carvings, as if we’re sidestepping graves. The glacial water rolling through Thorsen Creek provides a mystic soundtrack to our adventure, and soon our scavenger hunt for curious antiquities starts to feel more like an archeological expedition for spiritual faces. I almost forget that Bégin, wearing a puffy green winter jacket and black tuque topped with a pom-pom, is our heli host rather than history professor.

Almost.

The mossy valley and its secrets are nice and all, but the best days on heli-skiing trips are spent heli-skiing.

(Eric Berger)

Bella Coola – the name for the valley, village and region – sits on an inlet about 1,000 kilometres north of Vancouver. Take the hour-long flight on a puddle-jumper from Vancouver; hold on tight during the descent into Bella Coola’s interpretation of an airport. (The drop into the valley can be turbulent – either thrilling or sickening, depending on your stomach’s reaction to bumpy approaches.) Ambitious skiers can wake up early in Toronto or Los Angeles and be tearing through powder in these Coast Mountains after lunch.

The area is known for its alpine fields – wide open bowls so vast they look like oceans turned silky white. Some slopes are gentle enough you could knit a tuque as you ski down. But Bella Coola Heli Sports’ founders – Bégin from Quebec, Beat Steiner from Switzerland and Peter (Swede) Mattsson from Sweden – first came here looking for a place to shoot extreme-skiing movies. That means you’ll also find plenty of terrain that can terrify pros: narrow couloirs, daring curtains, steep spines. Filmmakers still make ski porn here, and Bella Coola Heli Sports runs an experts-only program where ropes and crampons are as necessary as boots and bindings.

I stayed a few days in March at Bella Coola Heli Sports’ Tweedsmuir Park Lodge, which hosts a maximum of 16 guests in private log cabins and offers an infinite supply of fresh smoked salmon and gourmet meals in the communal building.

On the worst day, I fail to catch any fish while wading through the Atnarko River steps from the lodge. On the best, I look up at a see-through-blue glacier while cooking it down a run named Beeker on my snowboard.

Neil Caldwell, our ski guide, is trying to keep our gang of four away from a crusty layer of ice hiding beneath the day’s fresh 15 centimetres of powder. Richard Lapointe, Bella Coola Heli Sports’ ace pilot and former Canadian Snowbird, solves his problem. He lands the A-Star B2 – a spicy sports car of a chopper – on a peak with the dimensions of a Juicy Fruit wrapper crammed between two rock outcroppings.

“He’s my secret weapon,” Caldwell says.

The run is named after Chris (Beeker) Romeskie, a hard core Whistler local who died in an avalanche while ski-touring near Pemberton a decade ago. The guides and owners here were his pals, and this run is for him.

Adventurous types can blaze their own trail – one that no person has ever set foot on before. (Carrie Tait/The Globe and Mail)

It is alpine perfection. No matter how hard I lean into my turns, the edges of my snowboard can’t dig deep enough to scrape the icky ice below. The powder is as light as sifted flour. My board sends it flying to the left, to the right, to my face, all without effort. We do it again. The sun shines.

Amanda Carey, a 35-year-old professional mountain bike racer who calls Wyoming’s famed Jackson Hole ski resort home, spends the day knocking off similar runs.

“There wasn’t a single turn today that wasn’t literally jaw-dropping,” she says as our groups reconvene at the lodge. “Every turn. You couldn’t even imagine getting into terrain like that, and we’re just doing it again, and again, and again. You’d have to walk for days to get this kind of stuff.”

I’m unwinding on the deck as other groups jump out of their helis and walk the few metres up to the lodge. I’m eating smoked salmon when Jia Condon, another guide, comes lugging a block of ice the size of a toddler. Staff bust a slice of this morning’s glacier and turn it into tonight’s cocktail-hour essential – ice cubes.

I order scotch on an ancient rock.

Fly fishing the Atnarko River in Bella Coola, B.C. (Eric Berger)

The Coast Mountains’ sharp peaks and fierce angles make them look more like the Himalayas than the Rockies. Seven Years in Tibet and K2 were filmed here just for that reason. Mount Waddington, with a peak that looks like a deadly spearhead and B.C.’s highest mountain, calls this place home.

Bella Coola Heli Sports’ has dibs on about 1.1 million hectares of terrain. (By way of comparison, Vancouver Island spans 3.2 million hectares.) The company operates out of three bases: its flagship Tweedsmuir lodge, with a sauna teepee and an outdoor hot tub where drinks are ordered over a radio; its Pantheon Heli Ranch, where a maximum of eight guests can gather each week and have exclusive access to a smidge less than half the company’s total terrain lease; and its Big Mountain Lodge, which hosts between eight and 10 guests who sign up for specialty programs such as extreme skiing or heli-assisted touring.

The company’s land tenure is so expansive that lucky skiers and snowboarders can collect one of the rarest and most prized claims a mountain-goer can capture: a first descent. Imagine, standing where no one else has ever stood. Booting down a stretch of snowy wilderness before anyone else in the world. Looking back at your tracks, knowing you were first and few will follow.

“This place is on steroids,” says Steiner, one of the owners, describing how he felt as he and his partners first sussed out the area. “Everything about it is big. The trees are big. The mountains are big. The glaciers are big.”

And the fjords, too. Superluxury hounds on a private package can whip through powder in the morning and heli to remote hot springs for a soak at lunch. This is a place where guests can buy or stumble upon experiences they didn’t even know existed.

Prime example: pulling a calf. That’s farmer-speak for manually extracting a calf by reaching up a cow’s birthing bits. It’s happened by chance at Pantheon, a legit cattle ranch. Some guests were skiing during calving season, wanted to see the action, so the lodge manager hauled them out of bed at 5:00 a.m. when a cow was on the verge of delivering a young one.

“Some of the city people love it,” Steiner says.

And that’s Bella Coola Heli Sports’ stealthy shtick. Powderhounds come to cruise down wicked mountains, but the place adds an extra scoop of adventure heli-skiers can’t find anywhere else: Learn to fly fish in waist-deep water, feed carrots to Icelandic horses, wander through a forest of giant old-growth cedars or chat with First Nations artists. The list goes on.

“We’re here for the skiing, of course, but it is so much fun to meet people,” Kristina Enquist, a Finnish tourist, says after a day of not zipping around in a heli. “The intimacy of it – the [number of guests] is small. We’ve been well taken care of.

“It is different than shiny service luxury. You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to, but without the guilt, without the bow.”

Guests can wander through a forest of giant old-growth cedars or chat with First Nations artists. (Carrie Tait/The Globe and Mail)

IF YOU GO

Bella Coola is 1,000 kilometres north of Vancouver. It’s just over an hour flight from Vancouver on Pacific Coastal Airlines. The basic all-inclusive package is $6,080 a person for four nights at Tweedsmuir Park Lodge. The most lavish experience is a semi-private booking at Tweedsmuir for $118,580: up to eight people for seven nights and 14 hours of flight time. The most exclusive package is a trip to the Pantheon Heli Ranch for $114,880: up to eight people for seven nights and 17 hours of flight time. Specialty programs include the Steep Skiing Challenge, where guests attack some of the steepest terrain in Canada; heli-assisted ski-touring; and a lodge-to-lodge heli-ski safari covering 200 kilometres. For details, call 604-932-3000 or visit bellacoolaheliskiing.com

Carrie Tait has Level 1 training from the Canadian Avalanche Association and is a certified snowboard instructor. She travelled courtesy of Bella Coola Heli Sports, Cariboo Chilcotin Coast Tourism Association and Destination British Columbia. They did not review or approve this article.