On an early spring afternoon in 1969, John Gow climbed into a Cessna 140 fixed-wing airplane on the runway of the tiny airport in the rural logging town of Golden, British Columbia. His friend Bernard Royle sat in the pilot’s seat, preparing the little plane for flight. The snow-capped teeth of the northern Purcell range stretched out gleaming before them.
In the decades that followed, this rural region would become famous as the world’s mecca for heliskiing: downhill skiing in wild terrain only accessible by helicopter, now one of the world’s most coveted adventure experiences. But in 1969, those mountains represented a vast wilderness, and heliskiing called for pioneers to lead in this whole new sector of skiing—ones willing to accept mortal risk in excha…