Blade Runner
By: Mark Schatzker
Helicopters offer surprisingly low-impact access to spectacularly daunting landscapes like Canada's eight-million-acre Great Bear Rainforest. Mark Schatzker travels to nature's cutting edge
An A-Star helicopter has 779 horsepower, burns through eight gallons of fuel every ten minutes, and can reach a top speed of 169 miles per hour. Its rotor blades spin at 591 miles per hour, sending down a gale-force gust and generating ninety-one decibels, about as much noise as a subway train. A machine like this does not inspire thoughts of environmental sensitivity. Odd, then, that it should be such a gentle means by which to explore the wild.
But consider the alternatives. Roads are certainly a more populist form of transportation; however, they cut rudely through the wilderness, bring tar, litter, toxic exhaust, and gas stations to a fragile environment, and literally pave the way for thousands, if not millions, of sightseers. Hiking may seem benign, but hikers light fires and produce waste, and their scent sends animals bolting in every direction. The fact is that when it comes to treading lightly, it is hard to do better than a five-thousand-pound helicopter.
If you're standing on the side of a mountain two hundred miles north of Vancouver, treading lightly is rather the point. That's because the wilderness on all sides happens to be the largest temperate rain forest on the planet. It is known as the Great Bear Rainforest, and it extends across the innumerable valleys of the Coast Mountains, like a thick green blanket of life settled among icy peaks.
The mountains are notable for two reasons. They make for stunning scenery, and they are all but inaccessible to humans. By land, the route is either up or down. Where there isn't land, there is water—deep and salty or fresh and flowing. Traveling by boat, one can penetrate the rain forest's seaward edge. There is a loose patchwork of logging roads, and the odd town with a fanciful native name like Bella Coola or, my favorite, Bella Bella. But the vast majority of the forest is unnavigable. After a helicopter, your best bet for getting around would be a NASA jet pack.
For this reason, there are three helipads at Nimmo Bay Resort, which is located on the rain forest's southwestern edge. As resorts go, it is small and nearly as delicate as the landscape that surrounds it. There's a floating lodge and, next to it, a floating bakery, both of which rest on aluminum pontoons that bob up and down with the tides, just as the float houses built by local loggers and fishermen have for generations. And there are nine raised guest cabins that sit on the constantly fluctuating boundary between land and sea called the intertidal zone. Behind these cabins, a frigid river drops into a plunge pool, bringing down the melted snow from the top of Mount Stevens, which stands mightily at the head of a long and winding sound that terminates at Little Nimmo Bay.
Everything you do at Nimmo Bay you do by helicopter. There is little choice in the matter. If you wish to spend the morning hiking on an alpine summit forty miles away, where you can amble through a field of wildflowers and drink from the little rushing creek that slices right through it, you get there by helicopter. If you then feel like eating lunch next to a glacial lake 180 miles away, you fly there in a helicopter. And if you fancy heading out to the coast to spend the remainder of the afternoon exploring a crescent of golden sand—well, you get the idea.
In truth, you could experience just such a day without a helicopter, but it would take more like a year—a grueling, likely fatal year. The first fifty miles alone would require at least a week, since walking through a temperate rain forest can be like swimming through cake batter: It gets so dense that you have to inch along on your stomach, at which time thoughts of the resident grizzlies would surely enter your head. After the first fifty miles, you'd have only twelve six-thousand-foot mountains, eleven rivers, and six glaciers to go before you arrived at that alpine hiking spot. Not that you'd be in any mood to hike after several months of bushwhacking and mountaineering, fighting your way through salmonberry brambles, getting raked by blackberry bushes, all the while laden with hundreds of pounds of supplies.Nimo Bay - Book a Heli Fly Fishing Trip | | |
