Peak time

摘要

On a cloudy February day in 1963, Austrian mountaineer Hans Gmoser ferried a group of skiers in a small Bell 47 helicopter to the top of a Canadian peak to start their day on the slopes. Gmoser certainly wasn't the first to have such an idea, but this pioneering adventure in Alberta is generally considered to have marked the beginning of commercialized heli-skiing. Fast forward nearly 60 years and an increasing number of superyachts are being delivered with both ice-breaking hulls and a helipad - or two - on deck. They follow in the wake of a converted logging tug named Ocean Explorer (no relation to OceanXplorer, also featured in this issue), which expedition company Elemental Adventure used in 2003 to experiment with heli-skiing from a yacht in the same country Gmoser started in four decades earlier.