Choice lifestyle: Family business flourishes in tough love for backcountry skiing

Grace Yancey might someday write a book about her childhood winters – the igloo playhouse, a breezy three-sided latrine and visitors from around the world at her Little House in the Purcells.

She lived like other kids at home in Sandpoint most of the year. But during winter, she and her family were dropped off by helicopter to survive at 6,500 feet in the snowbound mountains of British Columbia.

When I flew in for a week to write their story in 2009, they slept in a 10-by-13, wood-heated cabin, where 4-year-old Grace bathed in a Rubbermaid basin. She shared a top bunk with her 17-month-old brother, Alden, perched above the Labrador retriever (trained for avalanche rescue) and parents who’d made a wild career choice.

Four years earlier, Mark Yancey was 37 and Sarah Yancey was 31 when the couple bought a small but long-established Kimberley, British Columbia-based backcountry skiing business called Boulder Hut/Ptarmigan Tours.

“It’s very much a lifestyle choice,” Sarah said at the time.

They honed skills working for the Crystal Mountain Ski Patrol, where they’d met, and Mark had a stint as assistant to the Schweitzer Mountain avalanche forecaster. Mark’s Sandpoint-based custom-home building business complemented their venture in the backcountry, where self-sufficiency is key to survival. They also tapped local expertise by hiring Canadian certified ski guides.

By the time I met them, the business was purring, and the couple also were raising two children.

Each day, Mark and one or two staff guides would lead as many as 12 clients into their “product” – world-class skiing in the chutes, basins, larch-studded parks and passes of the stunning alpine wilderness.

Most days, Sarah stayed back with the camp cook, herding the kids from their tiny sleeping cabin to the more spacious Boulder Hut.

Mark and Sarah had bodies honed to competition-quality fitness. If he wasn’t breaking trails and traversing the mountains all day, Mark might take a “day off” to cut and stack firewood, with a break to ski with Grace.

Sarah would dash around the cluster of cabins all day to run the business and the family. She used a satellite internet connection to coordinate clients, staff, helicopter flights and grocery lists between cooking, cleaning, nursing Alden, doing indoor projects or spending outdoor time with Grace, tending what at that time was the highest-elevation wood-heated hot tub in Canada – and countless other chores.

Grace sometimes donned a skirt and pink plastic heels in the hut. “But I always put on snow boots to go potty,” she said.

The Boulder Hut, perched just below the timberline, is surrounded by some of British Columbia’s most rugged and scenic peaks. Even in summer, the original hut – plus three newer cabins for guests and staff – is a four-hour hike from the nearest logging road. Everything must be brought in by muscle power or helicopter.

During my visit, skiers and snowboarders from the United Kingdom were set to fly out on the helicopter that was bringing in a group of skiers from Seattle, Spokane and Calgary.

That night, the Yanceys enjoyed a family dinner with new friends who collectively could speak five languages.

“I want to thank you all for supporting my ski habit,” Mark said, hoisting a toast to the guests sitting at a Thanksgiving-quality feast.

“And I want to thank you guys who postponed cocktails after a full day to join Sarah for one last ski run while I stayed with the kids. It’s good for our marriage when Sarah gets to go skiing.”

“She made us climb up for two extra runs,” one client blurted as the muscle-weary group settled into an evening of laughter, music and conversation.

They had a kindred spirit down the valley in Kimberley.

“I feel like turning over the business to the Yanceys was the best thing I ever could have done for that place,” said Margie Jamieson, who built the Boulder Hut in 1984 with her late partner, Art Twomey. “I spent over 30 years of my life up there; a lot of blood, sweat and tears.

“Believe me, it isn’t without issues to run a small business that’s so remote, and in this economy,” she said, as though 2009 was 2026. “It’s an incredibly valuable time for them as a family right now. It’s got to be a crazy love affair.”

The Yanceys call it Boulder Hut Adventures.

20 years later

Last week, the four Yanceys and their latest Labrador retriever shuttered the Boulder Hut and helicoptered out to close their 20th season. “We’re already getting reservations for next winter,” Mark said Wednesday when I caught the busy family in a phone call for an update. “Something’s still going right.”

A few things have changed over the years. The name Boulder Hut is an understatement in its expanded form. A bit more space was created for the growing family to occasionally have privacy from the guests. The mini hydro system that supplies power was updated, and the famous hot tub was replaced by an easier to sanitize sauna and much-loved shower room.

And the kids have grown up.

Grace, 22, was instrumental in the operation the past year. Alden, 18, is a graduating high school senior. Both could assume partnership in the business if they eventually choose to do so.

“No pressure,” Mark said. “But they both truly love it.”

While the kids attended school in Sandpoint during fall and spring, they were home-schooled by Sarah at the hut during winter, where, among other activities, they polished their powder-busting skills.

“The return clients enjoyed watching them grow through the years and the kids got through it pretty well,” Mark said.

“And without too many scars,” added Sarah.

Blindly dove in

Asked if maintaining a backcountry business in another country for 20 years has been easier than they expected, Sarah immediately blurted, “Harder!” and laughed.

“We were young and we just jumped in,” she said, noting that they didn’t know anything about the challenges of across-the-border commerce or raising a family in the backcountry. “Thank goodness we didn’t know how much work it would be or we might not have done it.”

Keys to success, they said, include clearly defining their roles, learning what each of them can do and can’t do, and zeroing in on their market.

In a high-tech world, perhaps more than ever, the backcountry experience attracts people to Boulder Hut Adventures, they say. The number of backcountry lodges throughout British Columbia has increased from about 30 to more than 35 in the two decades since they stepped in.

“The more antiquated backcountry huts have been superseded by facilities with more amenities, which broadens the clientele,” Mark said.

“Marketing used to involve going to trade shows, making displays and sitting in booths,” he said, noting that most of that has been replaced by the internet.

“Social media can take a huge amount of your energy,” Sarah said. “The best marketing in our business is being good at what you do, and word of mouth. I think at the end of the day having satisfied clients is our strongest marketing strategy.”

After the helicopter drops off clients for the week, they travel by muscle power. This is where location and terrain separate the most popular skiing bases from the others. “How much terrain you have, how much time you spend hiking vs. skiing is key to what sets us apart from a lot of other lodges,” Mark said.

“Once skiers and boarders find a piece of ground they resonate with and they have some intimacy with, they like to return,” he said. “Terrain speaks for itself.”

After 20 years, the Yanceys and their guides are still exploring and discovering new routes and runs in their 15,000-acre guiding area. “We’ve only scratched the surface of what’s available,” Sarah said.

Going unplugged

Through the years, they’ve found ways to deal with fickle winter weather and sitzmarks in the economy, but like most of us, the Yanceys were blindsided by the COVID-19 pandemic. They couldn’t operate Boulder Hut Adventures for the entire 2020-21 season.

“We had to send refunds to those who had booked,” Mark said. “Fortunately, I was able to provide for my family by ramping up the contracting business with jobs that allowed us to work outdoors.”

They reopened the next season but hired Canadians to operate the hut because of concerns about getting through the border.

“We look back at those two years as a striation of geological time,” Sarah said.

When the Yanceys returned to the Boulder Hut, they had a list of customers eager to join them. “More and more people are looking for the experience we provide,” Mark said.

Although they have satellite internet service to help with weather and avalanche forecasting – and the kids’ schoolwork – the Yanceys don’t generally offer it to their guests.

“Of course, there are new devices that allow them to get their own internet in the wilderness, but we express our values that this be a refuge away from all of that,” Sarah said.

The Boulder Hut experience caters to the group camaraderie generated by discussions around the table and in the field. Even clients who balk at first appreciate their escape from online bombardment by the end of the week, Mark said.

“However, mainly, the Boulder Hut experience is about skiing,” he said, noting that whatever the weather brings, they have plenty of varied terrain to keep customers excited, whether they’re into glade skiing or amped up for the steep and deep.

“We picked up some heli-skiing clientele over the years as heli-skiing got more expensive,” Mark said. “They’re not disappointed.”

Safety is priority

It’s no accident that backcountry skiers at reputable lodges are coming home alive after pillaging the powder in the highest and most remote reaches of British Columbia’s rugged mountains.

Guests at Boulder Hut are involved in the short training session in avalanche preparedness at the start of each trip and the avalanche gear and beacon checks that start each day. But guests may not even notice that the guides are up an hour before everyone else, getting satellite weather reports and recording temperature and precipitation measurements in the roped-off snow survey plot near the cabins.

“The conditions change every year – heck, every month, day, hour,” said Mark.

During the day, the guides often carve out snow profile pits to closely examine snow stability on the slopes and change their travel plans accordingly.

The guides set boundaries for every run so no skier will venture out into more dangerous terrain that might imperil themselves or the rest of the group.

All groups come into the hut prepared to skin up and climb for their downhill turns, although some groups have hired a pilot for a day or two of heli-skiing during their weeklong visit.

“We know skiers have arrived when they realize that going up is as much fun as going down,” Sarah said.

Even the foot-soldier skiers can easily bag 3,000 to 5,000 vertical feet of downhill a day; some get more.

“Our advanced skiers really like the Chute of Death,” Mark told me in 2009, “but the Boulder Hut marketing department advised us to change the name to the Gully of Happiness.”

Another series of popular runs includes Cardiac Arrest and Coronary Bypass.

The Yancey kids took part in all of this over the years, rubbing elbows with clientele ranging from nurses to CEOs. “Our kids understand that they missed some things and gained some things by spending winters in the backcountry,” Sarah said.

“They faced challenges and reaped benefits. But going forward, I think they’ve got a wonderful story.”