MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall / Winter 2017

FALL/WINTER 2017 MLCM 51 Glacier landings are easy, Bushy discovered. “You commit to it and it’s like landing on skis but with wings too, so it’s soft. I have done some of the soft- est landings ever. The take off is another story, there are a lot of variables. You can’t stop not facing downhill, but you don’t want it to slide away either. The skis can punch through and hook up, the tips are kinda low… there’s a reason people don’t do it that often – the skis really could be called ‘scares.’” With a precedent set and a deep, late spring snowpack, Bushy enlisted photographer/snowboarder/co-conspirator Mason Mashon to establish a teepee high camp for extended alpine missions. “A week later, we flew ev- erywhere and tapped a bunch of touch-and-goes looking for our camping spot. We didn’t stop though, because I was so scared to get stuck, there had been a ton of snow.” After eventually choosing a spot with good ski lines nearby, plans were made for a heli drop of snowmobiles and supplies. The morning dawned clear, cold and beguilingly perfect. “But, by the time we got organized, the sun had gone behind high cloud and it was flat light,” Bushy says. “With flat light and no sled tracks on the glacier, it’s hard to even know when you are close to the ground, it’s almost like IFR [Instrument Flight Rules – a set of regulations for the times when flying by visual navigation is not safe.] You just look at the gauges and keep it level.” Essentially landing blind with no idea of the wind direction, Bushy was broadsided by a gust and hooked one ski deep in the powder. “It felt like I was gonna fall over. I punched it back into the air, but it was close. From where I sit in the plane I can’t see the right ski, so I didn’t know if it was broken or what. But I had a GoPro on my right wing and the app on my phone so I watched the footage. I still had my ski and I could see from the video that I had landed with the wind totally wrong. So I went back and landed perpendicular to those tracks and it went perfectly. The heli showed up with Mase and the gear, we built the teepee, and then it stormed for four days. We had just enough time to sled off and gather firewood before the glacier went total whiteout.” Very much like his trusty canine sidekick Dex, Bushy doesn’t idle very often. He sits down to take a crap and lies down to sleep, the rest of the time he’s on the move. Luckily, being snowbound in a 15-foot (5 metre) diameter tee- pee in a blizzard at 7,000 feet requires constant fire tending. Bushy honed his skills at chopping and stoking ‘jindle sticks’ (small pieces of kindling that burn fast and produce less smoke). The rest of the time they used the snowmobiles to pack and maintain a runway even as the snow kept falling. “We were nervous. By the end of the storm we were almost out of wood and the plane was kind of buried,“ he says. “Then the sun came out and it was game on. That teepee camp stayed set up until late June and we had a ton of good days. Some really nice skiing.” CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Marrying Sarah. BLAKE JORGENSON. Pinning it. Bushy's older sister is not sure if he stole her Camaro or not when he was 12. But she knows his best friend did for sure. BLAKE JOREGENSON. Prepare for take-off. MASON MASHON.Another day, another jump in the lake. MASON MASHON