Why Choose Pulseline Adventure
Our Guides
Our guide team is the life-blood of our operation. These talented men and women have dedicated their lives to bringing you the best skiing experience, while doing so safely. It takes many years of dedication to hone one’s mountain craft to the level we expect from our guides - from expert-level skiing or snowboarding skills, to professional-level avalanche forecasting, to risk management, to communication and interpersonal skills. We have hand-picked an incredible team from the multitude of guides who we know to bring you the best guide team in the business.
As guides ourselves, we understand that guiding at the highest level takes substantial dedication and financial investment. As a result, we strongly believe that guides should be well-compensated. We are proud to pay our guides substantially higher wages than most heli-skiing operations.
We also help our guides pay for their continuing education and training, and we offer the possibility of equity compensation for our long-term employees. This means that our overall prices aren’t the lowest in the market (but certainly not the highest). However, we believe in the adage that you get what you pay for.
Our guides are full-time mountain professionals, and it shows. We have been chosen repeatedly as the go-to guiding operation for numerous professional athletes in the last three years – luminaries including: Travis Rice, Travis Ganong, Mary Rand, Colby Stevenson, Elyse Saugstad, Lea Bouard, Mikkel Bang, Malou Petersson, Elena Hight, Kimmy Fasani, Ben Ferguson, and more.
These professional skiers and snowboarders trust our guides to keep them safe and find the best terrain and snow conditions while filming in the most demanding and extreme circumstances - that speaks volumes about the trust they have in our guides and operation.
We have also been the lead guide and logistical operation to support the Natural Selection Tour in Alaska for the last two years: https://maestro.tv/natural-selection-tour
Supporting Local Businesses
One of our key goals is to support the local Valdez economy and partner with other local small businesses in Valdez instead of doing everything in-house when possible. For example, we use a local company to provide our amazing lunches (Magpies on the Fly); we host our dinners at a local brewery (Thanks, Growler Bay!); our dinners are catered by a local chef (thanks, Matthew Kress!); our guests stay in a local hotel (the Totem Hotel), which is centrally located; we operate out of the local airport (thanks Andrew and Jeremy!); we hire local residents as employees; and we offer support to the local community as a search and rescue resource - in April 2022, Pulseline responded with its helicopter and guide resources to rescue two snowboarders caught by an avalanche; one was seriously injured, and our guides provided care and extracted the individual via helicopter to the Valdez hospital. We also have some of the most robust radio communications capabilities in the state of Alaska, including a radio repeater located on a peak that greatly enhances our communications; we share emergency channels with the Valdez Fire Department and Valdez Police Department.
Supporting Our Natural World
We understand that our company is based upon our natural environment. As a result, we practice Leave No Trace (LNT) ethics; we have strict avoidance policies for wildlife, and overall we try to reduce our environmental footprint. As part of that commitment, we purchase Carbon offsets through TerraPass each year to offset the carbon footprint of our helicopter fuel usage.
Given the size of our operating tenure - most of which has no road access, helicopters are a necessary, and the most efficient, means to access this ski terrain. We believe that visiting these amazing pristine lands are important as it inspires our guests towards environmental action - and by offsetting our carbon emissions, we feel that the benefits far outweigh the costs. We believe people need to experience these wild places, so that they feel in a personal sense why it is so important to protect these places.
We also provide educational material to our guests - sharing how climate change has impacted Alaska. You can see how quickly glaciers have been receding - and we have personal experience with the shorter ski seasons in Alaska even over the last twenty years.
Multiple options to access the Chugach
We are currently the only heli-ski company that also has a deep experience guiding backcountry ski trips – including weeklong fly-in base camps in the Chugach. We also offer full ski touring trips (without the helicopter), and heli-access trips. We understand that not all customers want (or can afford) a full week of heli-skiing, and we try to find opportunities to expand our reach to other types of clients.
We believe that heliskiing and backcountry skiing work together so that we can offer the opportunity to more people to experience these amazing mountains.
At the same time, by choosing to backcountry ski (or for heli-assisted backcountry skiing), you will have a world-class Pulseline guide, as well as the same safety support system that our heliski program uses. This includes radio communications with base, safety gear on hand, and real-time satellite tracking by our flight following team. This substantially increases the safety-net in the event of an injury or an incident in the field.