The flip side, is that this isn’t a luxury lodge – no plumbing, mattresses on the floor, and there’s mice in the walls of the sauna.

It’s not super expensive (about $60/night/person), it’s got everything you need to be comfortable, but not much in the way of luxuries. Access in is by helicopter (about $1000/load) and you can either fly out or ski out (though it’s a bit of a slog).

Like I said, pretty much perfect as far as I’m concerned. You see, I like comfortable, but luxury means expensive and if a trip gets expensive, that means I can’t afford to do another trip for a while. I like doing a lot of trips.

Of course a great hut doesn’t mean anything if the skiing is shit. Luckily, it ain’t.

Planning

There’s a group of us who do a ski trip every year for New Year’s. The general format is one of us books a hut that looks interesting and we fill it with whomever wants to come. I’ve done this four years in a row now with the core group of Matt, Charlie, Reb, Kyle and Brad. Not everyone makes it every year and some years, like this year, we have some extra spots we fill with a few more people. I’m pretty lucky to be a part of a great group like this.

This year, Kyle booked us the Discovery Cabin months in advance at which point we figured out who was coming and then promptly forgot about the whole thing until just a few days before. Realizing we were only days away from flying into a remote hut, there was a panic of figuring out food, how many heli flights we were going to need, and pouring over topo maps trying to figure out the ski terrain.

The Trip

To access the hut, we were flying out of the Yellowhead Helicopters base just south of Clearwater. Before we even left the hotel we’d stayed in the night before, we got an email from Ian, the hut operator, letting us know that the weather was too socked in to fly, so instead of rushing to the heli base, we stuffed our faces at a diner while we waited for a weather window. A couple of hours of twiddling our thumbs later, the clouds cleared enough that the pilot figured he could give it a shot.