All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Snow

When the chalet is booked but the aircraft isn’t.

After the sweltering heat of the summer, it’s hard to believe the first snow reports are only a few weeks away. To help you plan, SHY has curated four winter itineraries that our clients are booking right now. Stretching from the entirely familiar to the genuinely remote, each destination is paired with our Aviation team’s recommended routing and suggested aircraft to get you there.

Seven Michelin-starred restaurants — more than any ski resort on earth — including Yannick Alléno’s three stars at Le 1947. Six hundred kilometres of linked runs across Les 3 Vallées, the largest connected ski area anywhere. And a village that puts you on snow from the door.

Getting there

Be Bond: the shortest, highest and steepest runway in Europe, five hundred and thirty-seven metres on an eighteen per cent incline. No lights, no instruments and no changing your mind once you’ve committed to the approach. It’s the strip everyone photographs from the piste above. Only pilots trained specifically for Courchevel land here, and only a handful of aircraft: the Vulcanair P68 TC Observer and AVIATOR TP600 and helicopters can operate to Courchevel as a charter.

For three weeks each winter the lake freezes hard enough to carry a polo pitch, a concours of cars, and a horse race that has been run for a hundred and twenty years. Snow Polo takes the ice from 22 to 24 January 2027. The I.C.E. concours follows on the 29th and 30th. White Turf races the Sundays after — 7, 14 and 21 February — and 2027 is its 120th year. Behind all of it sits the Cresta Run, still one of the few things in the Alps that money alone can’t buy.

Delivering the driest, arguably deepest snow on Earth, Japan is legendary for its powder. Freezing Siberian air sweeps across the warm Sea of Japan, picks up moisture, then meets the mountains of Hokkaido and dumps fine, dry snow almost daily from mid-December to mid-March. Ski the silver birch below Niseko just once, and the European Alps will never feel quite the same.

Because Japan operates on day-by-day weather windows rather than the week-long heli-skiing lodges typical of Canada, your luxury is flexibility. High above the resort boundary lines, your private helicopter delivers you to the untouched faces of Shiribetsu-dake, a striking 1,107-metre volcano a short flight from the village, with Mount Yotei filling the horizon behind you.

To experience the breadth of Japan’s winter landscape, combine Hokkaido’s deep fields with the steeper alpine terrain of Hakuba on the main island of Honshu, pairing both regions in a single itinerary.

No lift, no road, no lodge. Instead, an ice-class expedition yacht with a helicopter on the aft deck. Through April and May, as the fjords open and the landscape is still white, you lift off after breakfast and ski from summit to sea — wide, treeless snowfields and steep couloirs flanking glacier-cut peaks, finishing at the water’s edge above iceberg-choked bays.

These are waters where no heli-ski lodge exists and a yacht is the only way in. Expect to be the only vessel there. Runs end on shorelines where the only tracks will be yours, and the yacht is a considerably better place to spend an evening than any lodge. Very few vessels anywhere carry a certified helideck, ice classification and the range for Greenland, so they are chartered a season ahead — whole-yacht or, on some voyages, by the cabin.

Opportunities to ski are not restricted to northern hemisphere seasonality.

June, in Alaska.  Tordrillo Mountain Lodge runs a dedicated June season: corn snow by helicopter in the morning, king salmon in the evening, and twenty-two hours of daylight to fit both in. Anchorage on a long-range aircraft, then forty minutes by floatplane, which is the only way in.

July and August, in the Andes.  Puma Lodge sits deep in the Chilean Andes at the confluence of the Cipreses and Cachapoal rivers — a five-star lodge with exclusive heli access across more than 3,000 square kilometres, IFMGA guides, and descents averaging 1,200 vertical metres. Roughly three hours by road from Santiago, or thirty minutes by helicopter from a rooftop helipad in the city. Portillo sits alongside as the cult option: one hotel above the Inca Lagoon, running seven-night Saturday-to-Saturday weeks since 1949.

August and September, in New Zealand.  Peak southern winter, flying out of Queenstown and Wanaka into the Southern Alps. Queenstown airport operates 07:00 to 22:00, with only four non-scheduled airlines certified to fly in and out after dark, so private arrivals are daylight only. What you need here is the right operator and handler, which we take care of.

November to January, in Antarctica.  The same expedition charters that run Greenland turn south for the Antarctic summer — ski mountaineering and heli-skiing from the deck, on peaks that in some cases have never been skied. The furthest anyone reasonably goes to keep skiing.

Whether you need to book flights for one ski trip or for every season on this page, we will build the itinerary around your dates — aircraft, transfers and ground.

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