Jeremy Bekken has always been a powder hound so he couldn't get over his good fortune when stepped out of the helicopter into fresh knee-deep snow on a mountaintop on Spearman Glacier at Whistler-Blackcomb.
That was on Oct. 3, and it made for a memorable start to Bekken's ski season.
The 32-year-old former member of the Prince George Alpine Ski Team was the winner of photo contest sponsored by Whistler-Blackcomb Ski Resort and made trails that afternoon with professional skiers Mike Douglas and Eric Hjorleifson, and professional snowboarder Annie Boulanger. Bekken skied at early-season glacier camps when he was with the alpine team but never experienced conditions like that in October.
"It was awesome, the snow was as good as it is in the winter, and that was pretty surprising and to get to share that with some of Blackcomb athletes was fun," said Bekken. "They do that all the time and Mike said it was definitely the best they've ever had for that.
"It's pretty much the best way to ski. I'd been in a helicopter before but never around Whistler. After skiing there for so long you see all these other places you'd like to go to and it was fun seeing that from the air."
The photo that won him the #WBFirstTracks social media contest was taken by Bekken last year while skiing one of the steeper runs at Blackcomb-Whistler. Once he found out his photo had been picked, Bekken had less than a day to drive to Whistler, a 10-hour trip from his home at Sinclair Mills.
Bekken's heliskiing adventure was filmed by the ski resort and is being used as a promotional video on the Whistler-Blackcomb's Facebook site.
The helicopter trip was the first of many Bekken intends to take this ski season while working for Bearpaw Heli-skiing, a business his mother Amber Shipley and stepfather Kevin Taylor started last year.
Based at Sinclair Mills, an abandoned sawmill town about an hour's drive northeast of Prince George, Bearpaw has tenured access to 1.23 million acres of territory in the McGregor, Dezaiko, Misinchinka and Hart ranges of the Rocky Mountains.
Bekken grew up in Prince George and rose through the ranks with the Nancy Green program before joining the alpine team in the late 1990s. He was racing at the J1 level when he moved to Whistler at age 18, then worked 12 years at various jobs at the Whistler-Blackcomb resort. He's now the photographer/vidoeographer at Bearpaw and has been helping build the cabins and plow the territory for the resort.
Shipley used to own an outdoor equipment retail store in downtown Prince George -- Island Alpine -- and Taylor is a former forester who started out as a heli-skiing guide with Crescent Spur Heli-skiing.
"Seeing all the hard work they've done to get here makes you want to work that much harder," said Bekken. "They've been skiing out in these mountains since their teens and they know the area pretty good. I'm going to try to ski as much as I can this winter."
The ski season at Bearpaw won't begin until after Christmas. While he's an excellent skier in great health, Bekken is not quite ready to become a guide for the family business.
"It's there in front of me but I'm not sure if I want the responsibility of people's lives in my hands," Bekken said. "It takes a lot of the fun out of it when you're having to be responsible."
