Golden Alpine Holidays, anybody have experience with them?

[zion zig zag]

Not us unfortunately. A crew from Meadow lodge got a heli bump over there.

Looked like a good trip regardless.

[meter-man]

Friend has some spots at Vista Jan. 26-Feb. 2 - self-guided and self-catered (but I imagine he's organizing food). He's a ripping skier and all-around excellent human. I was at Vista with him last February. PM me if you can guide yourself, don't suck, and are interested.

Costs and details are on the GAH website...

[North]

Updating this for those with Golden American Holidays (CMH guide joke) curiosity. Prime dates are booked through the 27/28 season so perhaps irrelevant. I recently got on a trip that our group leader/applicant got via a cancellation from another group.

Tenure: The most important consideration for these huts IMO. The huts are stacked in 4 adjacent valleys, and share a border with Great Canadian Heli tenure. Because of this they have a strict policy requiring groups to stay within mapped boundaries for each hut. No problem if you have storms and favorable avy conditions, but in certain circumstances your terrain options will be limited. I've never seen this policy mentioned in any of the documents guests receive prior to the trip. This feels a bit bait & switch to me given that it's a unique setup from an American perspective, but perhaps its more typical and not worthy of mention for Canadian ops.

We had big problems with the tenure thing on our first trip (not informed until we violated the policy, tough conditions) and no problems on the second (informed by custodian day 1, better conditions). YMMV. There are posts here explaining the situation in greater detail from both my perspective and XXX-er, who was in Sunrise during my 1st trip to Meadow.

Terrain:
Sunrise: Varied terrain with many options for different conditions. The closest highish peak to the hut (Avalanche) has good ATL & NTL skiing of N, S, and W aspects. Alpine peaks higher up valley (Cairn, Corn) offer quality but shorter runs. The S aspect of Cupola has a few big alpine lines. Plenty of high quality NTL and BTL skiing down valley and near the hut (Panorama Dome). Pillows are available but not abundant, and not especially close to the hut (off W aspect of Avalanche down low), aside from the short runs above the lake and off of the Ridge of Melting Faces. My group consisted of very strong skiers with varying levels of fitness (dads). ~1/2 the group was able to log ~5K/day, and the other half started to fade halfway through the trip. We got 1 quality reset on fly in day. There was enough terrain to ski quality untracked pow all week under these circumstances. With no snow and a strong group of 14 you might have to get creative.

Meadow: Varsity level pillows and big slidepaths and not much in between. I agree with the prior comments in this thread that while the terrain here is high quality, it is very limiting if conditions are unfavorable. Accessing the mellowest terrain requires undercutting huge paths. High ceiling, low floor. The pillows out the front door are truly film quality (and difficulty). There are some couloirs close to the hut, and big slide paths to ski down valley.

vs. Fairy Meadows
In comparison to Fairy Meadows, the terrain at Sunrise and Meadow is scaled down in both quality and quantity. FM has massive peaks, glacier routes, and an insane number of pillows (including more variety for different skill levels). Hard to beat, but GAH terrain is still excellent. GAH huts are in better shape due to consistent maintenance and upkeep from the custodians, and sleeping in private rooms is far better than FM (one shared room for 20 upstairs). FM sauna holds more sweaty bodies than GAH saunas.

[XXX-er]

Its amazing that you have to put up with that kind of shit when Canada is pretty much the 51st state, you should have just called in an air-strike