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no question who won.

-What do you have to say, Doug?

-Yeah, Doug!

Thanks, Valdez.

Doug won WESC in 1991 and again in 1993.

But it wasn't the competition

that drew Coombs and his wife Emily

back to Alaska year after year.

Well, when he came back,

he just said, "Em, you got to come.

"You got to go to Alaska.

It's just unbelievable."

He was just, you know, on fire about Alaska.

So we all went.

We'd all sort of found

this ultimate part of skiing

that we'd all dreamed about,

but never really imagined.

I mean, I had never imagined any places

like Valdez ever existing.

Just the vastness

and the enormous variety of terrain.

That's what attracted me the most.

It looked like a lifetime to ski.

And I said, "Oh, I love that."

It truly is, I think,

the best skiing zone on the planet.

And I can't believe it was only 15 years ago.

Like, why didn't someone find that

in the '80s and bring a helicopter up there?

It was like this gold field

in Alaska that just lay there

for hundreds of years,

but was never discovered.

The snow in Alaska is unique.

In the Chugach,

wet snow falls and sticks to everything.

Then cold, dry air comes in from the north,

pulling the moisture out of the snow.

What's left is light, soft powder

that sticks to even the steepest faces.

The velvety texture of snow in Alaska is...

There's no other.

Alaska's all about the velvet, that feeling,

the way it feels brushing up against

your legs and your thighs and stuff.

You don't get that

anywhere else in the world.

In the Chugach, the light surface snow

can slough off and follow the skier down.

It's like being on a giant wave at the ocean

and the thing's just tickling your back,

same thing up there.

You know,

the wave's about to crash on you,

but if you keep skiing hard

and you keep skiing the right way,

it's going to be there,

but it's never going to get you.

And that to me is the ultimate. I just loved it.

Doug was really one of the people

who pioneered literally

hundreds of runs up there.

And to think that you could actually ski

down these things,

you know, before anybody had done it,

is pretty phenomenal

because they are really steep.

Doug found the place

that he was meant to be.

It was the place that he had been...

Maybe he didn't know it,

but had been looking for his whole life.

It was the right place,

the right time and the right guy.

The helicopter pilot who took Doug

and his friends into the mountains

was a Vietnam veteran

named Chet Simmons.

I'd strap on my pistol,

put my helicopter on like a jacket

and go out into the wild unknown.

And it was great.

Things like this haven't happened

since the cowboy days.

I mean, you know,

you get on your horse, put your gun on

and go out and fight some lndians.

Well, I'd go out and fight some mountains.

You know, when you start skiing in

that kind of terrain up there,

you've got to have some sort of,

something going on in your brain.

Maybe it's a little bit of chemical imbalance

and Chet had that.

All of us had that.

He had a great eye for ski lines.

He knew what we wanted.

He would be flying up and he"d say,

""I don't know why you guys haven't tried

that peak yet. ""

And we'd look at it

and just get shivers up our spine.

And then we'd look at him

and he'd already be flying at it.

And you knew you were going to ski it.

Chet was a Vietnam vet pilot

that had been shot down 13 times

and he would come into these LZs,

landing zones,

and he would kind of look at you and say,

"You know, I'm not nervous at all."

He says, "Nobody's shooting at me."

We were the first, like, the pioneers,

and in Alaska pioneers are a big thing.

Nobody had been to these peaks.

Nobody had skied them.

Nobody even thought about it yet.

That first run I took in Alaska

was life-changing.

I've never been more scared than the time

when the helicopter took me to the top

of the summit and I'm looking at this

unbelievable peak below me going,

"Wow, we're going to ski this?

Is this safe? Am I going to die?"

I just thought, "Well,

either I'm going to die on this run

"because it's going to avalanche,

or it's going to be the best run of my life.

""So I'm just going to do it. It's worth it. ""

And I skied down and it was just effortless

and just got to the bottom and it was like,

""I can't imagine that I just did that.

""You know,

I would love to just do that again. ""

So we did.

No one could tell me where I could ski,

what I could ski, when I could ski.

Any of those rules, thrown out the window.

That was a really big freedom

and I think that freedom led

into all those first descents.

You know? There was nobody

telling me that lifts close at 5:00.

We made it happen because we couldn't

get enough of that kind of skiing.

The combination of endless lines

that hadn't been skied before

and just the adventure in this great snow.

It's where the craziest times

of the early '90s went down in skiing.

In 1995, Doug and Emily launched

Valdez Heli-Ski Guides

and together began taking

paying clients to ski in the Chugach.

The goal was just to keep skiing

with our friends out in the mountains.

And that's the only reason that we did it.

I mean, that was our plan,

was to take other people's money

so we could go skiing

in the greatest place in the world.

We just started out really bare bones

and it was just for the pure excitement

of being able to go skiing

in these big mountains

and to share the terrain with each other.

She knew how I thought

and we wouldn"t even have to talk out there.

Somehow we had some kind of

telepathic communication.

I don't know what it was, but it just worked.

I just felt very comfortable

with Doug in the mountains,

that was where we were together.

That was what I fell in love with,

was Doug in the mountains.

Skiers from all over the world came to be

with Doug and Emily in the Chugach.

They took them to the tops of mountains

where no one had ever been before.

You've gotten out of the helicopter,

and you are just afraid

to even stand there

because it"s just so completely intimidating.

And there's Doug, you know,

so casual and so calm about it.

It's just completely crazy. Completely crazy.

It's beautiful, but crazy.

We took heli-skiing to the extreme level.

It was amazing because we had the funds

from our clients to go further

and further back.

It was big-game hunting,

basically, up in Alaska.

Everybody has to ski Valdez once.

When you have a guy

from Kansas skiing 50 degrees

in perfect snow,

I mean, there's nothing like it.

He'll never forget that for the rest of his life.

Valdez became the North Shore of skiing.

Just like Maui is the North Shore of surfing.

You go there when you're

at the highest level of your game.

It's the total Mecca.

I can still visualize almost every

single first descent, every run I've done.

If you just transported me there

by a magic transporter on top of a peak,

I would tell you exactly where we were.

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