Hang On To Your Toque
IT’S 8 A.M., SATURDAY, AND OUR WEEKEND BEGINS with a helicopter ride. We snap together harness buckles and don headsets as the engine of the Airbus EC130 whines to life. The rotors accelerate, catch, and push the ground away at a startling rate. We huck into a rare February bluebird sky. It’s easy to imagine that this is just a typical weekend out for Jacynte (JC) Leroux and Scot Keith, the well-swaddled couple in the back seat. As it turns out, they have gone heli-hiking before, but this is their first trip out to an ice cave. We’re taking off from the decidedly upscale municipality of Whistler, B.C., only a 20-minute drive—maybe a five-minute helicopter hop—away from their Pemberton retreat in the mountains. We might have even seen their place but for all the peaks in the way.
The Whistler heliport turns into a model train-set-sized version of itself, and we tilt around to thump up a forested valley. We’re soon out above the white expanse of an immense ice cap. The terrain is vast and otherworldly. Below us sprawls 250 sq. km of the Pemberton Icefield, some of the southernmost glaciers in Canada. Our objective is a set of ice caves that the tour operators will only identify as being “on the doorstep of Whistler.” Our guide in the front seat points out the flattened-top tuya volcanoes, black sentinels from the ice age, reminders of the epic sweeps of geologic time that shaped this topography. And just like that, we settle down into a vast bowl, kicking up swirling plumes
