Last winter, FT journalist Simon Usborne visited our 7-day heliskiing tour (https://svanetiheliskiing.com/tours-and-pricing/semi-private-7-day-tour/ ) and reported on the experience in his FT article.
Simon was invited by our friends and partners from Canada, adventure tourism company Expedition Engineering, who are helping to open heliskiing in Svaneti to tourists from North America looking for new and undiscovered destinations.
The group of tourists was very diverse: from Switzerland, Italy and other parts of Europe and America. 8 people in total. 8 people, ready to discover an unexplored and so far away corner of Georgia - Svaneti with its historical center - the town of Mestia, proudly preserving its ancient culture and its own language, as well as some of the greatest mountains in Europe.
As Simon said:
«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.»
Simon and other tourists were surprised by the contrasts of Svaneti - a new $2.5 million Airbus helicopter, on which heliski flights take place, landed in a farmer's field with cows walking next door. And so it is in everything in Mestia - historical sites neighboring with a modern ski resort. You can enter the Svan tower, built in the 10th century, and afterwards go for a delicious cappuccino on coconut milk. All because Svanenia is a very young resort, it has a lot of potential, Simon writes about it many times in his article. Our heliski company is only 5 years old this year, and the colleagues Simon came with shared their experience, as heliski has been developing in Canada since 1965. It was an opportunity for us to show the unexplored Caucasus to our North American friends and to get valuable advice and experience of our colleagues. We discussed many aspects, of course we also touched upon safety, which is important in this sport.
Here is what our Canadian colleague Matt Edwards said:
«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»
And that's what we give our tourists - safety thanks to experienced local guides, new and quality equipment, professional pilots and at the same time mountains that almost no one has ever been to.
As Simon himself observed:
«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.»
To summarize our guests' impressions.
«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.»
This sounds very inspiring to us to keep working and growing the heli-skiing scene in Svaneti!
If interested to read more about Simon's and our guests' experiences, read the whole article on FT: https://www.ft.com/content/e2241256-996f-4d74-b52b-3d5f6415787b
Read more about the tour Simon was on: https://svanetiheliskiing.com/tours-and-pricing/semi-private-7-day-tour/