The class, held in December, was put on by Alpine Initiatives (AI) in partnership with Vail Resorts and Backcountry Access. AI, the brain child of J.P. Auclair and heli-guide Mikey Hovey, was conceived as a way to get the skiing community together to do good in the world. As J.P. tells it, “Mikey and I were talking one night and realized that we could really do something good. We could get our community to work on things together.”

Seth Koch, another long time AI member, puts it a slightly differently: “We live the dream. I get paid to take people helicopter skiing. JP is a pro skier. Mikey was a ski bum who’s now a heli guide. Skiers tend to live selfish lives; at all cost they’ll do whatever they need to do to ride powder. So we thought we would use that snow sports community to give back rather than take.”