Peak time
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 commercialised heli-skiing.
Skip forward nearly 60 years and an increasing number of superyachts are now 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 it four decades earlier.
The 73.2-metre Admiral SilverYachts’ 85-metre and Damen’s new 77-metre are just some of the expedition yachts launched in recent years that are equipped for such activities. They share the common features of ice-classed hulls and commercially certified helipads; some are also kitted
