Why Choose Pulseline Adventure

Our Ownership

We are a guide-owned & run company. Gabe and Geoff, our managers and primary owners, started guiding in the Chugach Mountains in 2001 and 2006 respectively. We have dedicated a large part of our lives to guiding and skiing in the Chugach Mountains in Alaska - it is simply the best skiing on the planet. With this long-term experience, we could have easily joined another company as guides. However, we decided that we wanted to build something really special for our guests and our fellow guides.

We desire to create the best guided heli-skiing company out there – one that we want to work for, that does good in the world, and that genuinely supports our guide team and employees. We have strived to create a company that we would choose if we were a customer seeking the Alaska heli-skiing experience.

Our goal is simply to be the best ski guiding company in the world, while improving the lives of our clients, employees, communities, and being a steward for our natural world.
We are not a large corporate entity, nor are we owned by a billionaire. We are guides first and foremost who simply love skiing. We have built this organization to share our love of these unique, wild places with our friends and family, and to create a sustainable place to work for our guides.

Premium Helicopter for Heli Skiing - Pulseline Adventure
Our Alaska Heliskiing Team

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

Alaska Terrain and Permits

The Chugach Mountains surrounding Valdez in south-central Alaska are, on average, the snowiest mountains in the United States and one of the snowiest places on the planet, with some the most glaciation in Alaska. These mountains also have a unique microclimate that provides for a much deeper and generally more stable snowpack but also features all three climatological snow zones in a short distance – about 80-100 miles. These are truly unique mountains. The terrain in the Chugach is vast and diverse – featuring everything from spine lines to steep ramps, to gentle and rolling, long glacier runs. The Chugach Mountains surrounding Valdez were the birthplace of Alaska heli skiing, and it is still - in our view - the premiere heli-skiing location in the world.  

We have permits for guided heli-skiing in all of the available zones around Valdez; this includes a State of Alaska DNR Commercial Recreation Permit, a US Bureau of Land Management Special Recreation Permit and last, but most remarkably, a Special Use Permit for the Chugach National Forest (aka the “Holy Grail”). Our permits combine to offer us more than 3 million acres of ski terrain –larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, and almost as large as the state of Connecticut. And it really is a very special place that we love to share with our guests. 

There are only three permit holders for over 800,000 acres of the Chugach National Forest.  This Forest Service permit was awarded in a competitive permit process that took us months to complete. 

Our permitted terrain is substantially greater than the other heli-ski operators in Alaska – it truly offers a lifetime of skiing, adventure, and exploration. No other single heli-ski tenure in the world comes close in size, snow quality, snowpack depth, variety of terrain, and overall snow stability – which is why we keep coming back!  

Access to all of this terrain gives us so many options for great skiing – we have access to higher elevation terrain even during early May; terrain that is protected from north winds, which can provide better snow after wind events; terrain further from the coast when there are large storms from the Gulf of Alaska that create snow instabilities; and terrain closer to the coast, with generally deeper snow.

While we can’t control the weather - we can control the amount of options we have to find great skiing.  As we have been skiing here longer than almost any other guides - we have a vast amount of historical experience for reference to maximize fun, and help mitigate risks. 

Pulseline Alaska is based out of the Valdez airport, a few minutes from town. However, we also have a mobile fuel truck and fuel trailer plus several strategic remote staging areas. This gives us the flexibility to get fuel closer to more remote terrain and stage skiers along 80+ miles of the Thompson pass road corridor. We enjoy more opportunities to go where the skiing is best, while reducing flight times for refueling, simultaneously reducing unnecessary travel time. We have excellent and virtually unlimited heli-skiing options in every direction.

At the end of the day, you get to experience Valdez, a small authentic Alaska town with a plentitude of amenities, instead of being isolated in a remote lodge, while still accessing the vast amount of terrain as efficiently as possible. 

We believe it really is the best of all worlds.  

Welcome to Valdez Alaska

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.

Antarctica Ice Axe Expeditions 08
Alaska Heli Skiing Options

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.