Deep snow and dumplings: heli-skiing in Georgia

We were a motley crew, brought together in a tiny airport by the promise of adventure high in the Georgian Caucasus. A forestry consultant and a vet from opposite ends of Switzerland were getting to know each other, while a jet-lagged Italian entrepreneur from Manila caught up with his father, a robot-lawnmower tycoon from Vicenza.

As we waited for a window in the weather at Natakhtari airfield, which sits opposite a chocolate factory just outside the Georgian capital Tbilisi, the airport’s dog snoozed in the seat next to mine. It was snowing heavily where we were heading: a medieval mountain town now emerging as a new frontier in skiing.

After a few hours, the storm eased and we piled into a Czech twin-propeller plane of uncertain vintage, faced the wind and soared into the clouds.

Mestia, which lies in a steep-sided valley about an hour to the north, is best known for its medieval watchtowers. More than a dozen of the structures still rise above cobbled streets like fortified skyscrapers. The town of no more than 2,000 people sits at the heart of the Svaneti region, home to the Svans. They proudly guard an ancient culture and language — and some of Europe’s greatest mountains.

I was part of an east-meets-west experiment in 21st-century heli-skiing. A new partnership between mountain guides from Canada and Georgia promised to combine the expertise of a heli-skiing heavyweight with the youthful ambition and national pride of local guides.

I had first met Matt Edwards, who lives on Vancouver Island with his wife Angela Bueckert, at Last Frontier, a heli-skiing operation in British Columbia. Edwards and Bueckert, who run their own travel company, Expedition Engineering, sought wilder adventure and had heard about two hotshot young guides in Mestia.

Misha and Alexei Margiani, who are brothers in their early thirties, had built up contacts with helicopter leasing companies and pilots through their other work as volunteer mountain rescuers. Together with Alexei’s wife Tatiana, a former marine engineer, they were planning their own heli-skiing business when the Canadians got in touch. Could they help?

Our helicopter for a trial week late last March — a new, $2.5mn Airbus in stealthy black — cut an incongruous figure on a farmer’s field as we mustered for our first pick-up just out of town. A cow idled past. Its bell, which had been fashioned from an old truck engine piston, jangled as it went.

Soon we were flying above Mestia towards Svaneti’s mountain giants. The forbidding twin peaks of Ushba (4,710m) dominate the view north from the town, while the great pyramid of Tetnuldi (4,854m) sits to the east. Ushba, which rises 20 miles south of Elbrus (5,642m) near the Russian border, has long bewitched climbers. In his 1940 book Ten Great Mountains, the English mountaineer Graham Irving described the peak alongside Everest and the Matterhorn.

Skiing is much newer to Svaneti. In the past decade, a few grizzled tourers, as well as sponsored ski movie crews, have begun to travel to the mountains in Ushba’s shadow. There have been recent investments in local ski resorts, too, and some heli-skiing run by a German operator, but much remains unskied; a Slovakian adventurer only made the first descent of Ushba in 2017.

Everywhere I looked, great peaks and snaking glaciers repeated into the distance. This was high-alpine skiing, with helicopter drop-offs at 4,000m and long descents. We were divided into two fast-moving groups of four skiers plus a guide. After one drop on the flanks of Tetnuldi, Misha (Alexei was out of action with a newborn) disappeared into a steep, unnamed couloir. He soon shouted up for me to follow, his voice bouncing off rock walls.

Surface snow cascaded down about me in a wave of slough that I kept moving left to escape. Below the couloir, I grinned at Misha like an idiot. He did the same back. The guide, who had an impish smile, told me he learnt to love the mountains above Mestia while taking the sheep up with his grandmother. “Each time I went, I walked a little higher,” he said.

So recent is the ski scene in Mestia that a young Misha had mastered the sport on wooden skis equipped with bull-skin bindings. Now, he was leading an international group of heli-skiers, high above his home town. He brimmed with excitement; many of our descents were new to him. He wasn’t sure if one bowl we ventured into had ever been skied, and he could only translate its name as “pirate of the land”.

Edwards, meanwhile, was keen to fill what he saw as a gap in the market. For years now, helicopters have opened up remote terrain in the former Soviet states. Lower costs than, say, a luxury lodge in Canada have not always included the greatest sense of security, yet a growing demographic of seasoned heli-skiers are itching for adventure. “People want to be safe but they also want to feel like they’re doing something real and unscripted,” said Edwards. “And this is about as unscripted as it gets.”

Edwards, in his early forties, watched Misha with a slightly older head and skipped the couloir with his own group, not because of any risk of more serious movement in the snow, but because, one time out of 100, that slough might push a skier too close to the rocks for his liking; the wisest guides assess risk not just in the moment but across a career.

Edwards and Bueckert were wary of stepping on toes. But they were also keen to school the Margianis in a business model that has been evolving in Canada since the first commercial heli-ski trip in 1965. Safety was only part of it. Edwards was also advising David Kaadze, our pilot, on how to string runs together in the most fuel-efficient way, and training Misha in the administrative art of the end-of-day debrief.

Edwards was stunned by the mountainscapes around Mestia, but saw equal potential in the town itself. Down days because of bad weather are a feature of any heli operation. There are no luxury spas in Mestia (I was staying in a three-star hotel on the main drag), but the town is blessed with distractions, including for those unwilling to sacrifice ski time: the two lifts of the Hatsvali resort rise from the southern edge of town and the bigger Tetnuldi resort is a short drive away.

Mestia’s charming cobbled main street, where scrawny cows nibbled at the thawing grass verges, is full of restaurants offering mainly Georgian cuisine, including its wonderful khinkali dumplings and khachapuri, a cheese-filled bread. The town wears its cultural heritage on every corner. The watchtowers are protected, and one of them, which is part of the Margianis’ old farmhouse, or machubi, has been restored as a small museum. Misha led me to it one cloudy afternoon, up a steep winding road — and back in time about 1,000 years.

A raised slate hearth sat above a fire in the middle of a large windowless room with thick stone walls and soot-stained timber beams. Livestock pens with elaborately carved timber openings faced the fire. As recently as Misha’s great grandparents’ time, animals spent nights inside, feeding through the openings and warming more than a dozen family members on sleeping platforms above them. With its patriarch’s grand throne closest to the fire, the home felt like a cross between an English medieval farmhouse and an old Swiss cow herder’s chalet.

Misha then bounded up increasingly rickety ladders as he scaled the interior of his family’s 30-metre watchtower. They were built as status symbols, and as lookouts in case of invasion. From the top, Misha surveyed the valley before looking down at the family chapel. “It’s where I will be buried,” he said. Mountain life was perhaps always his destiny; he was named in honour of Mestia’s most famous son, Mikhail Khergiani, a climber known across Europe as the “Tiger of the Rocks”.

Another museum in town is dedicated to Khergiani. A third museum, the Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography, stands on the other side of the river. Rebuilt in 2013 with state and foreign funding, it boasts ninth-century Christian iconography and Svaneti artefacts, including a ritual cauldron big enough to boil three cows and an early pair of wood-and-leather snowshoes.

I could have spent a week in Mestia without skiing at all. We gathered one evening for a Georgian wine tasting, and ate at different restaurants most nights. My favourite was Lushnu Qor, a low-key timber diner where a steady stream of beer and steaming khinkali landed on the tables of young local guides.

The town buzzed with a sense of energy and potential. A tiny new ski rental shop with a bare chipboard frontage was beginning to ship in big-mountain skis. It had not yet acquired a name. “Maybe next year,” said the shopkeeper as he adjusted some bindings. (I had borrowed my own skis from the only rental shop in Tbilisi, in a converted family garage behind a Soviet-era housing block.)

People want to be safe but also to feel like they’re doing something real and unscripted. This is about as unscripted as it gets

Low clouds threatened to end the week with a day at the local resort. But as I was skiing laps of Hatsvali after lunch, word came in via radio of an unexpected weather window. Misha called in the helicopter to a clearing in the woods at the top of the resort. We were soon flying towards a line of 3,500m peaks for two valedictory runs in snow that was turning creamy with the approach of spring.

The experiment had been a triumph of big-mountain skiing in a fascinating region that bristles with promise. Edwards and Bueckert would later sit down with the Margianis and agree to join forces, starting with four weeks this winter. “This place has the potential to be like a Georgian CMH,” Edwards said, referring to the pioneering Canadian heli-skiing outfit. “There are just mountains and mountains and mountains here.”

There are legitimate questions about the sustainability of heli-skiing. Edwards has considered quitting but at the moment prefers to limit and mitigate the impact of his trips, and encourages guests to offset their emissions (he and Bueckert offset their own). He estimates each guest is responsible for 250 litres of jet fuel during the week — equal to about four refills of a large family car (though jet fuel contains about 10 per cent more carbon than petrol).

The economic impact of the enterprise on a place like Mestia, meanwhile, became clear on the last night, when, over a table crowded with local dishes for our last dinner, Misha led a Georgian ritual known as the supra. Zealously topping up glasses of chacha, a fierce grappa, he ticked off a series of toasts. First came God, then peace, then Georgia, with a round of “gaumarjos!”, or “cheers”, before each gulp. By the 10th toast, Misha had begun to freestyle. “We are trying to find something new in Mestia — it’s something other places did maybe 20 years ago,” he said, before raising his glass. “Thank you for this . . . Gaumarjos!”