Forbes: Inside One Of The World’s First Carbon-Neutral Heli-Ski Operations

Guests skiing in Northern Escape's alpine terrain.
It’s raining down at the lodge at Northern Escape Heliskiing in northern British Columbia. A couple weeks ago marked the coldest stretch of days, by far, any of the staff here can remember. Yesterday, guests heliskied in the alpine on stable slopes that hadn’t seen new snow in days, (although the guides were magicians in sniffing out good turns). This week, all of British Columbia is on a special avalanche warning as the province gets hit with an unseasonably warm storm that’s dropping a load of heavy, wet snow up high. Guests will still be skiing today—Northern Escape is one of the only, if not the only, heliski operation to offer a full catski backup on storm days for its guests. But the whiplash in the wild weather swings is disconcerting, to say the least.
It’s a huge reason John Forrest, General Manager and one of Northern Escape’s founders, undertook the massive process to turn this into one of the first carbon-neutral heliski operations in the world. He’s watched winter in these mountains change over the thirty-five years he’s been guiding. “It’s not that things are getting warmer, or wetter,” he says. “It’s just that the extremes are tremendous. It gets tremendously cold, and then tremendously warm. It snows more than I’ve ever seen it snow in my life, and then it’s dry for two weeks.”
Some might argue that we shouldn’t be heliskiing at all with the planet facing a climate crisis. A day of heliskiing for a single person emits only slightly less carbon than an economy seat in a cross-country flight, after all. But Forrest counters that argument with the inevitable fact that demand for what’s become the pinnacle adventure in skiing isn’t going to suddenly disappear; around 44,000 people going heliskiing each year in B.C. alone, according to HeliCat Canada. And so if people are going to heliski, the least he can do is offer a carbon-neutral product as part of the solution, and hope the rest of the industry will follow suit—and that someone will eventually design an electric helicopter. “Having a long view in a business that depends on winter can be really impactful,” he says.
To learn more about how we pulled off our impressive feat of off-setting our carbon emissions, head on over to the full article at Forbes.