60 FEBRUARY 2020
T
R
A
V
E
L
Five hundred
square miles of
snowy slopes
beckon skiers and
snowboarders at
Mica Heliski.
O GET TO THE SKI LODGE MICA HELISKI you must
first make your way from the Canadian city of
Calgary to Revelstoke, a five-hour, white-knuckle
drive over Rogers Pass, one of the most avalanche-
prone pieces of highway in North America. (Its
steep mountainsides are famous for taking a bat-
tering by howitzers, which the Canadian military uses to control
avalanches.) Then you must keep driving for another two hours
to the end of a mostly abandoned road hemmed in by glaciers.
After that, there’s a helicopter flight over the Columbia River,
which delivers you to the lodge, spectacularly perched on the
edge of the Rockies.
Most heli-skiing lodges—even those with ambitious culinary
programs—rely on a system of ordering ingredients in bulk at
the start of a season so that they can easily produce a repetitive
menu. But the restaurant at Mica rarely repeats a meal during
the entirety of a season. To the contrary, the ski lodge has upped
the ante, offering something fairly unique in the industry: five-
star food with a commitment to seasonal and locally sourced
ingredients.
“What we’re doing here with local food is not out of the norm
in an urban setting,” says Benoit Pageau, the 30-year-old head
chef at Mica who hails from Montreal. “But when local food
has to be flown in from the nearest town 200 miles away in
the dead of winter, and you have to load it onto a toboggan just
to get it into the kitchen—it represents a beautiful challenge.”
These days, the luxe lodge is coveted as much for its legendary
powder as it is for its elevated culinary offerings, which include
T
