This is the insight that Claire and Tom Jeffery are
taking one step further with their Pook Heli-Lodge.
Their guests and day-trip heliski clients can either be
picked up from the Lodge, where a huge field at the front
doubles as a convenient helipad, or from other spots
around the Tarentaise.
They’re then flown to a choice of one of 30 or so
landing spots just across the border in Italy, as we were.
Essentially, the Jefferys have pioneered a form of
affordable North American-style heliskiing in the
French Alps. As we’re among the first to take advantage
of it, you could say we’re pioneers too.
It’s good news for snowboarders and skiers like me,
for whom the idea of doing a similar trip to a traditional
heli stronghold, such as Canada or Alaska, will always
remain lottery-winning fantasy fodder.
powder-riding intermediates would enjoy. Even our
guide, mercurial local farmer Ottobon, is impressed,
stopping at the bottom to phone his brother as we wait
for the helicopter to pick us up and ferry us back to the
Pook Heli-Lodge, our base for the week in the tiny
hamlet of Les Laix, midway between the Tarentaise
resorts of Ste Foy and La Rosière.
“ONE OF THE B ES T DAYS
OF THE S E ASON .
JUST INCRED I BLE SNOW, ”
WE HE AR H I M SAY,
“AND NOBODY E L S E ON
THE ENT I R E MOUNTA I N . ”
An hour later, as we sit on the deck at Pook and enjoy a
BBQ cooked by Ottobon’s brother Julien, I’ve begun to
understand what the fuss is about when it comes to this
heliskiing lark.
It’s also a day that overturns one of the biggest
misconceptions in skiing - that you can’t go heliskiing in
France. It’s easy to understand how this idea took hold.
After all, the intricacies of the French rules on heliskiing
have been baffling people for years. The confusion began
in 1985, when the pursuit was banned on French peaks,
a move that drove the market across the border into
neighbouring Italy, where a lucrative industry based
around the Aosta Valley soon evolved.
Recently, however, some bright spark realised that a
loophole in the French lawmeant that, while people
couldn’t be dropped off at the top of French mountains,
they could be picked up and dropped off at the bottom.
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