WE ARRIVED IN A LIGHT drizzle, summer in full swing—flowers, hummingbirds, thick green grass. In 2003, Steiner and the Swede had set up shop at the Tweedsmuir Park Lodge, an 80-year-old refuge just inside a provincial park 40 minutes up the Bella Coola Valley from the airport, and started taking clients. Most of the winter guests stayed in private cabins around a clearing, where the helicopter picked them up each morning. But as the guinea pigs for the Swede's June skiing-and-fishing experiment—Springs & Corn, he'd dubbed it, in deference to Kings & Corn, a nine-year-old similar program in Alaska—we felt, amid these lush surroundings and our mounting meteorological apprehensions, a little like suckers.

The weather forecast was not good. A gigantic low had stalled off the coast, threatening to send clouds and rain our way all week. All the rain had swollen the rivers, as we discovered that afternoon, when we went out in a small fleet of driftboats to fish the Atnarko, which flows past the lodge. It was muddy brown, running hard. The fishing holes were washed out, salmon nowhere to be seen. Casting with spoons and back-trolling plugs, we thrashed at the water with a mounting sense of hopelessness, and when I looked over at my father, who was gazing glumly up at the mountains, it occurred to me that he hated fishing. I had never before seen him with a rod in his hand.

Before long he began badgering our guide, a sardonic Bella Coolan named Jim Knudsen, about getting a turn rowing the boat. "Sloppy, Jim, sloppy," he said, as Jim struggled to catch an eddy. My father has been an avid, if occasionally battered, whitewater kayaker for 20 years and was a champion oarsman in college. He wanted a shot at the Atnarko. "Not going to happen," Jim said. It had the makings of a maxim. So did the sign in the lodge that greeted us the following morning, along with the dispiriting sound of rain dripping from the eaves: NO SKIING TODAY.

Our luck turned the next morning. The helicopter let us off on top of a snowy ridge at 8 a.m. Droves of clouds and fog drifted along, obscuring and then revealing spectacular massifs—Tetons, everywhere!—and a dizzying sprawl of skiable territory, ranging from benevolent to just plain nuts. Massive glaciers, great granite spires, dozens upon dozens of chutes and bowls. The landscape was an endless and disorienting patchwork of white and brown; the mountains, laid bare, somehow look more complicated in summer. The helicopter flight, which had taken us through holes in the clouds and past several drainages and peaks, had spun me around. We grinned at one another like monkeys. Yes, skiing today. Going to happen.

Up high, there had been an almost imperceptible dusting of new snow. The surface was firm but buffed, groomed by the elements; on the first pitch, it felt as though we were skiing on pumice, but the southeasterly aspects, the patches facing the morning sun (or what little of it there was), had a granular consistency, portending corn. Spring skiing can get tricky. When you fall, it can be hard to stop, once you get going. Fifteen years ago, while skiing one June morning in the backcountry near Bozeman, I saw a friend lose a ski and go careering down a steep couloir. She cartwheeled through a boulder field and into a snowless patch of woods. It was a horrible mess, requiring a helicopter evacuation. She turned out all right: another lucky one. But still.

My father skis like an eagle, arms outstretched, in the classical manner. He considers sloppy ski style to be a sign of poor character. On our second run, a 3,500-foot drop called King Richard, he was swooping down a vast and moderately pitched snowfield when his ski popped off. He very rarely falls, but this time he went down as though he'd been shot. He began to slide. The other ski whipped off. Little bursts of snow kicked up as he tried to stop himself. There was nothing around to collide with or fall into, and yet the sight of him hundreds of yards away, gathering speed, helpless and prone, summoned up the old recognition—the worry more often experienced by parents than by their children—that you cannot always control what happens to others. The universe will do with us what it will.

After a while, he stopped sliding, of course, and gestured that all was well, and the rest of us laughed and wondered if anyone had gotten a picture. It was really no big deal. And yet it demonstrated that, even in spring, with stable snow and no trees, some little mistake in the vicinity of rocks or cliffs could have outsize consequences. Our guide, Paul Berntsen, kept us away from the technical routes. Later that day, near the bottom of a long and spectacular run called Vishnu, we came around a corner and one at a time nearly skied into a gaping hole—out of nowhere a river, pouring from under the snow and then tunneling back under it again.

Unlike the standard trips at more traditional and better-known heli-outfits, such as CMH and Mike Wiegele, at Bella Coola the helicopters are small and nimble, the program flexible, the guides amenable to suggestion. It is a more customized experience, more extravagant and decadent in many ways—totally obscene, really—and yet also more rustic, more alpine. The terrain is so vast and the number of customers so low that there is no need to farm snow, as they say: no call to keep the tracks tight. Within reason, you can ski the line you want. The groups are small—four or five passengers per flight—so you need not experience the anxiety (unpardonable though it may be) of jockeying with a dozen other jonesers for fresh tracks.

On our trip, one helicopter, an AStar, piloted by a wily Quebecer named Richard Lapointe, who whipped his craft in and out of tight spots as if it were an extension of his body, served two groups. The other group consisted of two British Columbian mining entrepreneurs and a father and son from Scotland, who were there with a Scottish friend, and the son's Icelandic mother and grandmother, who didn't ski. The two groups leapfrogged from one remote drainage to the next, hardly ever having to wait. We took turns giddily crawling in and out of the tight confines of the AStar, jostling one another for the ends of our seat belts. That first morning, in a few hours, we skied a leisurely 20,000 feet.

The day had an otherworldly feel. The light shifted constantly, flattening and then clearing suddenly. Distances were hard to measure. Bergschrunds—crevasses formed where a glacier breaks away from the snowpack—appeared suddenly underfoot. The runs ended in rotten snow, dimpled with what are called sun cups or furrowed by the rain. Often, while we waited for the helicopter, mosquitoes closed in, and the air felt muggy and hot. Our last run was on a rolling glacier snug against a pair of granite towers at the head of the Tsini Tsini Valley. My father and I stood on a hump, savoring the sight of this crazy-awesome amphitheater and my brother sailing through it, a thousand feet below. One minute in such a place can make your year.