On the fly

By giles whittell

There are enough snowfields on Earth for the search for the ultimate snowboard ride to go on more or less for ever, if you want it to. But if you want it to end—if you want to stake a claim to having left your stomach farther behind and carved more sinuous bends on deeper, steeper slopes than anyone in history—there is probably only one place to go.

A couple of years ago a group of extreme snowboarders went there. They piled into two helicopters and a ski-plane in Anchorage, the northernmost city in the United States, and flew west for an hour. They landed at the foot of the Tordrillo mountains, which rise from America’s last truly untracked wilderness to about 11,000 feet (3,350 metres), and waited ten days for the cloud to lift.