Points North Heli Skiing Trip, Cordova, Alaska
Last week Mike and I headed up to Points North Heli-Adventures for a week long heli skiing trip. We arrived at the lodge on a Saturday afternoon and had a potential window to fly for the next 6 days. Before booking the trip, we had been advised that skiing 3-4 days would be considered a good week. We managed to time our trip with a big storm that was coming through so our first 5 days were down days where the helicopters weren’t allowed to fly, followed by a 6th day that was looking pretty iffy, but ended up working out in our favor, allowing us to get in some runs that day.
The skiing we got in was fantastic, with great snow quality and solid snow stability from an avalanche perspective. I’ll let my pictures and videos do the talking. I also posted a reel on Instagram with the trip’s highlights.
What did we do the first 5 days? A lot of hanging out. We read, we took a sauna and jumped in the ocean (it was cold!) nearly every day, played a lot of ping pong, and I got the blog all caught up on blog posts. We also skied a few runs two of the days at the local resort, Mt. Eyak. This ski area has just one lift - a single chair lift from 1939 that we were told was originally installed at Sun Valley. One of the tough parts of having 5 down days in a row was that our room did not have wifi or cell service (the main lodge did, but this required sitting in the main lodge). This is great for a day or two to disconnect, but after a week of it, we were missing the ability to easily feel like we were staying up to date with things. I probably would have found this even more frustrating if I were working right now. That was probably my biggest knock on the accommodations.
Would we go back? Frankly, we aren’t sure. We got a little taste of how fun the skiing can be, but it was very mentally draining to be on standby to ski for 5 days and not actually get to ski. It’s also a pretty expensive trip to take to ski just one day like we did (and we nearly skied none). At PNH, you are in a rainforest where it rains 12-14’ per year. It’s a big gamble to go sit in a rainforest and wait for a sunny day so the helicopters can fly. It’s a high risk, high reward equation. Time will tell if we make it back up there or not.
