The whole helicopter experience was just as I remembered it; the sheer isolation, the silence and the quality of the snow were just as I'd been dreaming about for the last 364 days. The hot pickups were still as big a buzz as ever; I don't think I'll ever tire of having a helicopter land next to my head. The terrain we were riding wasn't much different to a lot of the stuff I've ridden in and around resorts over the years, but the heli experience has several obvious advantages over that approach. The vast amounts of untracked snow and the length of the runs available will simply blow your mind as will the minimal amount of effort required to access such areas in a helicopter. You could wait all season for a powder day on a par with a heli day and you'd be fighting your way to the front of the lift queues with every other powder hound for 100 miles just to get there. The heli experience gives you instant access to that sort of snow every day of the season and there's only 30 other people out there with you to track out your snow.

All 3 groups met up for lunch near the base of the now tracked out Blockhead, where we swapped tales of daring and expertise (and who'd fallen over the most). The other two groups had done 2 runs each and seemed amazed that we'd done 3. The main reason for this was that groups are chosen by their ability levels, rather than the number of runs they had booked, allowing for a much faster pace in our group.

The Cauldron Glacier: As seen from Blockhead

My video buddy, Kev.

After lunch, all 3 groups transferred to the Cauldron Glacier, a short distance from Blockhead where we found even better snow. Cauldron is a similar sized run to Blockhead, standing at around 3200 feet, but with not quite as many crevasses to fall into/avoid. The snow here was deeper than that on Blockhead and yielded the best runs of the day by far. During the afternoon our group was constantly changing as people transferred to and from groups in order complete the number of runs they wanted (at one point we had a 12 year old kid and his Dad sat next to us in the heli). Most of our original group decided on a 6th run to top the day off, before catching the heli back to the bar where we spent a pleasant couple of hours boring everyone with our videos and tales of epic powder runs.

Another 11 satisfied punters arriving back at base. Thanks to my Dad for injuring his knee in order to take the whole day off to take this picture ;-)