Snow of tomorrow | "Green heliskiing" - are they serious?

The area is known for its high rainfall and the great distance to urban centers. Apart from snow, there's not much here in winter. When we spoke on the phone shortly before Christmas, John reported 10 meters of snow at higher altitudes. The reason for our phone call was a marketing email that we received from an agency that John uses. Subject: "Can heliskiing be green?" The email touted the company's certified carbon neutrality, which is achieved through offsets. At first, this sounds a lot like greenwashing, after all, hardly anything screams "decadent climate sin" louder than heliskiing. After a few rather critical questions by email, the enthusiasm for an interview on the part of John and the agency was unbroken and because I am curious, there is now an interview.

John's reasoning is broad: As a heliskiing provider, he is not going to abolish himself, but he wants to run his business in as climate-friendly a way as is possible given the premise of "heliskiing". At the end of the article there are a few excerpts from an emissions report from John's company compared to figures for ski vacations in Austria.

PowderGuide: Let me be blunt, when I got that email from your marketing team about green heli skiing my first response was, "are they serious"?

John Forrest: Heli skiing exists here in Canada and elsewhere. That's a given for us, it's how we make a living. We're part of an ecosystem. Heli skiing is a trip people take, not unlike other kinds of luxury vacations. There are definitely impacts from its existence, there's no doubt about that. We are trying to make it better and I think your readers might be interested to understand that it's substantially less impactful than many people think. The emissions report we did brings it in line with going to many other luxury type destinations.

You say your business is carbon neutral. Is there more to it than offsets?

Well, we started out partnering with a consulting group that worked with us to identify what our carbon footprint is. We looked at everything our company did, whether it was flying to Europe to do marketing, or our staff driving to work, or generators that produce power, the lodges, helicopter usage, everything that we do as a company.

I saw that even the toilet paper is in the report.

Yeah, everything! Single use plastics, everything. We weighed our garbage. It was a very, very comprehensive audit of our carbon footprint. That basically gave us a starting point to become carbon neutral. At this stage, the only way to do that was to purchase carbon offsets, which we all know isn't the solution. But it's a start, I would say an improvement. The carbon offsets that we purchase support many initiatives. The majority of them go to the Great Bear Rainforest here in Canada and there are a few others around the world that we invest in. Offsetting is not the end game. It's the starting point. Our true goal, now that we understand our footprint, is to figure out how we mitigate and reduce that as much as possible.

Everyone jumps on the helicopter usage and says, "Oh my gosh, you fly helicopters around all day, you're producing so much carbon". When you look at the total carbon footprint of the company, the helicopter usage is only about 30%. Our usage is not as intensive as most people think. The typical helicopter might fly two or three hours a day of actual engine running.

In my lifetime, we probably won't be able to ever eliminate the carbon usage from the helicopter. Unless Tesla's got something secret going on with an electric helicopter that we don't know about! But as I said, the carbon footprint from the helicopter is actually a fairly small piece of the puzzle. By looking at the rest of our carbon footprint, we can make dramatic reductions.

Some of your readers may simply be against heli skiing, and I understand that. The principle that we're working on is that heli skiing exists and will keep existing. So how do we improve things? How do we do better? How do we reduce our carbon footprint?

The largest contributor to our carbon footprint is one of the lodges. We have two lodges, one is on the power grid. In British Columbia all electricity is generated by hydroelectric plants. The second lodge runs on generators with diesel fuel. That is the single largest contributor to our carbon footprint. We're looking at investing a little less than half a million dollars into a solar system that will reduce emissions from the lodge by 60 to 70%.

Vehicle usage is another big one. We drive guests around. We're replacing all of our vehicles with suitable electric units as they come due to be replaced. Again, in BC our power is generated by hydro electric. So electric vehicles actually do have a positive impact as opposed to electricity that's generated by coal elsewhere.

Another example is our staff flying to work. Some of them fly in for shifts, some of them live in Terrace. If we change our scheduling so that they don't have to fly as often, we can mitigate some of the impact of flying. We can change how and where we hire them from. There are all those steps that we can take before we get to the helicopters, which we really can't do anything about.

In the report you talk about emissions per skier day. Is that a day of heli skiing for me as a guest, or is that the operation of the company per day?

On a typical day, we'll have 30 people, which represents 30 skiers, or 30 skier days.

Does that include the travel the guests do to come?

It includes everything from when they arrive in Terrace. They're given links for purchasing carbon credits for their travel if they want. That's really the only option that they have to offset their travel here. A jet flying from LA to London uses twice as much fuel as we use all season. I'm trying to demonstrate that the carbon usage of the helicopters, again, is actually a very small piece of the equation.

If I were to come to your operation from Europe, my personal biggest source of emissions would be the flight over there?

Absolutely, yeah. Like 10 times of your usage once you're here.

Then the scope three emissions in the report have nothing to do with the guests, that's you and your team traveling around?

Yeah, exactly.

You are planning to invest about half a million in solar power for the lodge. How long would it take to break even on that investmenr?

The initial investment would start to save on the fuel costs, generator usage and all that. But with the maintenance of that programming, the return period is probably 8 to 10 years. But of course you would see an immediate return on investment for reducing your carbon.

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Is being "green" also a selling point of sorts? Have guests ever mentioned they'd like to know the details of the company's footprint?

The vast majority of our guests are probably not thinking of their carbon impact on the world. But I don't think that's just our guests. I think that's pretty much people in general. Our guests have seldom, if ever, asked about the carbon footprint. It's something that we took on as a company, driven by myself but also everyone else. The end goal is to reduce the amount of offsets we have to purchase. That's where we'll make real changes. The carbon offsets are just a kind of bandaid. I feel that we can probably reduce our carbon footprint by 50% in the next three to five years. Mainly the goal is cutting the diesel and installing the solar for the lodge.

You have snowcats too, right?

We have several snowcats. The technology is not yet sufficient to replace them with electric vehicles. But we can replace the snowmobiles. We do have to be a little cautious because depending on which lodge they're based at, using electricity for those may not actually create a reduction if it's the lodge that uses the generators. But at the lodge that uses the hydro power there is a significant reduction.

You say most of the guests don't particularly care. Some people I discussed this with here said that if they were going to go heliskiing they might pick the guy trying to be green.

It certainly wasn't the driving force behind it, but if it is a positive advertising point that's not a bad thing. I think if people start to think about it, maybe it will help drive their choice. Where can I go that's not as bad as someplace else?

In the Alps, resort skiing is really central to the local economies and quite defining for life in the valleys. Is that similar for the heli industry in the remote parts of Canada?

In the Alps the ski resorts are very much in the public eye, everyone sees them every day. If you walk through the city of Terrace and ask someone about heli skiing, they don't necessarily know what it is we do. We spread out over a large piece of terrain and we have maybe 30 guests all week. It's not a massive operation. And we're away from town at the lodges, so most people don't even know we exist. But we buy all of our groceries and fuel in town, we're the largest employer in the winter and we do bring in tourism.

Around here, there is a lot of discussion about overtourism and expansions of ski resorts. Sometimes there is a divide between people in the resort villages who rely on the ski industry economically and folks from further away, who tend to be more critical of expansions. Do you see any parallels?

It's not a good comparison since there are so few people here. 90% of the population of Canada lives within 100 kilometers of the Canada-US border. We are 800 km north of the border. There's nothing here. In Terrace, the nearest town is more than a two hours drive away. And that's a tiny town. The nearest town that has more than 20,000 people is six hours away. It's very, very industrial here - forestry, mining, logging. I see tourism as a positive thing for the region. We bring tourists in and we develop tourism products, which are far greener than the resource extraction based industries.

So more tourism increases the incentive for protecting the natural environment?

Yes. Here, everything is mining and logging. There is a very significant trend towards tourism in the north right now. Mountain biking, fishing, and hiking in the summer and ski touring and snowmobiling in winter. That displaces or replaces much resource based extraction in terms of employment and use of the land. It is a good thing to see tourism coming north.

Do you expect the heli industry to continue more or less as it's operating now in the next, say, 10 to 30 years?

The heli skiing industry is typically run by advocates like myself. We've all grown up and lived in the mountains and have a connection to them. I think all of the operators will start to look at their current usage and at how to mitigate it or reduce it. I think it's a natural trend in the industry. We are not the very first to do so, but one of the first. (Editor's note: Bella Coola Heliskiing was the first provider to advertise similar measures.) It's a very big financial commitment for us to go in this direction, but it's also a company philosophy. You know, I've asked all of our managers, right down to housekeeping, how do we reduce single use? How do we get better?

What's your take on weighing individual responsibility against corporate or government responsibility?

Well, change has to be embraced. I think people have to decide that they want change and I think that's going to start with the bottom rung on the ladder, which is just people. There's a lot of people that preach and make a big deal out of wanting to reduce things, but they still walk into their house and turn on their lights and get in the car and drive to work and they're not really doing anything. I think if we're gonna see change, people actually have to start making changes.

And again, it's kind of a continuum. There's living in a snow cave and cooking over a fire, but even that fire causes emissions. There's a middle ground that people should strive for.

There's the argument that creating political pressure just by talking about it and lobbying is action, because we as individuals can only do so much and there has to be top down pressure as well.

I agree with that. But I would like to see the people that are advocating for change walk the walk as well. I'd like to see that they're not just pushing for change to be forced upon them, that they're actively doing something. I feel I'm actively doing something. I made a conscious decision to reduce my impact personally and at a corporate level as well. We've downsized our house. No one's gonna go live in a cave, I totally understand that's an extreme example. But if everyone would get a carbon audit of themselves, and then made an effort to reduce it where they can without destroying their lifestyle, we would all be far better off.

Thank you for talking to us!

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The carbon audit from NEH puts a "skier day" at 0.62 tons of CO2 emissions, fuel for the helicopter accounts for around a third of this (0.2 t CO2). The figure includes the accommodation and all other sources of emissions from the arrival of the guests in Terrace, but NOT the journey of the guests to Terrace. The journey of the NEH team, on the other hand, is included in the calculation.

A paper published by the Austrian Federal Environment Agency in 2018 indicates 33 kg of CO2 emissions per person and day for "ski vacations in Austria when traveling by car from typical countries of origin", i.e. 0.033 t CO2. This is based on a journey of approx. 500 km and accommodation in a hotel. Energy consumption for piste equipment, lifts, etc. are included in the ski vacation analysis. Emissions from the initial construction of the area are not mentioned and presumably not included. According to the Federal Environment Agency, the choice of means of transport (train, plane, car) has the greatest influence on the CO2 balance of the vacation.

NEH assumes around 30 guests per day in its calculation. This also results in the value for a "Skier Day" (all emissions of the company divided by 30 guests). I have not found absolute figures for a local ski resort. In the overview of the Federal Environment Agency, 17 kg of CO2 per person per day are given for "activities" on a skiing vacation and accommodation together. As an estimate, this means that around 35 days of skiing in Austria equates to one heli-ski day at NEH, with accommodation but without travel (600 kg CO2 / 17 kg CO2 = 35.3).