The purpose of helifreewasatch.com is to create an on-going public record of the Wasatch Powderbird Guides in action. What they say and what they do are two very different things.
The conflict between the Wasatch Powderbird Guides (WPG) and other backcountry users goes back over 30 years to the very day the WPG started flying. There are three parties involved in this conflict – the Wasatch Powderbird Guides, the backcountry users and the Forest Service, who is caught in the middle, but heavily favors the WPG and the fees they collect from them.
The Wasatch Cache National Forest is administered by the Forest Service, and in turn, once every five years, they review and issue the WPG permits. On a national level, the Forest Service has mandated that helicopter skiing is a viable use of public lands. In general, this is a good idea as helicopter skiing provides recreation for those who can afford it, without building roads or other infrastructure.
The key issue of the WPG conflict is one of appropriateness.
When the WPG started in the 1970′s, helicopter skiing in the Wasatch Mountains may have been a marginally appropriate use of public lands as there were not many people out touring in the backcountry and the Salt Lake valley was still a sleepy little 3.2% town.
In the 30+ years that WPG has been in business, the Salt Lake City population has grown exponentially and there are many, many more backcountry users now, as well as increased ski area development. Each year there are more people using the Wasatch backcountry for skiing, snowshoeing, camping and hiking, and each year the WPG continues to ride roughshod over the mountains as if they were the only people using them. While most of the Wasatch is off limits to motorized vehicles, the Forest Service has made a special exception by allowing the WPG to fly helicopters, drop bombs and rip up trees as needed so WPG can remain “economically viable,” ie, making money, which in turn goes back to the Forest Service as user fees for issuing the permit.
As a measure of how far the conflict has escalated, it is hard to imagine that the Forest Service would even entertain the idea of permitting a new heli skiing company in the Wasatch Mountains nowadays, yet they continue to renew the WPG permit for no other reason than they have been doing it for years.
And that brings us to this website.
According to the Wasatch Powderbird Guides (and thus the Forest Service), WPG is a perfectly quaffed model business operating with the utmost respect for the environment, other backcountry users and the skiing community as a whole. The purpose of this website is to show that nine times out of ten, this is not the case. What the WPG says they do, and what they actually do in the backcountry are two very different versions of reality. WPG has gotten away with this for years, but with the advent of digital cameras, cell phone cameras, small video cams and the Internet, the WPG misdeeds are being recorded on a daily basis and presented here as a historical record of a company whose time has come and gone.