Earlier this month at the Manhattan
Brandon Darnton, 32, the company’s director of partnerships and employee number 2, was manning the check-in desk. He looked around the gathering of young men in flat-brimmed hats and office-casual Oxfords and observed: “We’re going to need a bigger venue next year.”
Heli-skiing is not everyone’s idea of fun—getting airlifted to remote mountain peaks to spend the day sluicing down untracked powder without another skier, or anything like a trail, in sight. Beyond the money to pay for it and the vacation days to enjoy it, the sport requires relatively high levels of skill, fitness, and risk tolerance, which means it appeals mostly to skiers at the high end of the passion spectrum rather than the average resort goer. But Heli’s founders are betting that there are more potential heli-skiers out there and that by making this niche hobby a bit more accessible, they might just be able to find them.
