Adventure Collection

A conversation with Marty von Neudegg, Director and General Counsel of Canadian Mountain Holidays.

DG: How did Canadian Mountain Holidays get started? 

MvN: Well, the company was founded by a terrific fellow named Hans Gmoser. Hans was an Austrian immigrant mountain guide who came to Banff in 1952, after a long, circuitous route across Canada in search of the mountains.  He came into town in the middle of the night, pitched his tent on what he thought was an empty piece of grass and fell asleep.  In the morning he woke up being kicked in the feet by some lady who said, “Hey, you’re camped on my lawn.  What the hell do you think you’re doing?”  The woman was Elizabeth Rummel, and as it turned out she also was an Austrian immigrant, and she owned a lodge called Mount Assiniboine Lodge. Assiniboine is the Matterhorn of the Rockies.  It’s the tallest mountain in the southern Rockies and it looks like the Matterhorn, and there’s this incredible lodge at the base of it -- and she owned this place.  

So she said, “Oh, boy, you’re a mountain guide.  How would you like to come work at my lodge?”  So the next morning, after he’d been in Banff all of a day – boom! -- he’s on his way up to Mount Assiniboine to begin his career as a mountain guide.  Seven years later, he started his own guiding company and called it Canadian Mountain Holidays. Canadian Mountain Holidays was really designed as a ski touring company, with some climbing-guiding, and it continued from 1959 to 1965 like that.   

The heli-ski business, which is really what we’re known for, began in May of 1965.  That started with a guy named Brooks Dodge, who was an American Olympian ski racer.  Brooks was very well known in the American ski world in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and he said to Hans, “Well, ski touring is kind of fun, but maybe we should see if we could put a group together and fly around with a helicopter.” Coincidentally, Hans had also been approached by a Calgary geologist, by the name of Art Patterson, who was using a helicopter to do seismic work, and who had said to Hans, “You know, maybe we could find some good skiing using the helicopter.”  So Hans put two and two together, and in 1965 he had two small groups of nine people go into the Bugaboos, where he found this old, abandoned lumber camp, and that’s how it all got started.   

He started with eighteen guests in 1965.   By 1968 the word had spread so fast that he was able to build Bugaboo Lodge.  By 1971, he had four heli-ski areas.  And it just kept growing. 

Was that the first time anyone had done heli-skiing?  

Yep. That was the first heli-skiing in the world. And the other interesting part of the story is that Hans was both an incredible mountaineer and an incredible filmmaker, and during those years he had done some amazing stuff, like the first ascent of the North Face of Mt. McKinley, the highest mountain in North America, and the first winter ascent of Mt. Logan in the Yukon, the highest mountain in Canada. And he had pushed up all kinds of fantastic technical climbing routes in the southern Rockies that had never been climbed before.  So he was incredibly well known in the mountaineering world.   

But while he was doing that, he was also making films of these exploits, and these films were so far ahead of their time.  I mean, I look at them now, and I still think they’re some of the best mountaineering films ever made.  He would take those films on the road, and he would do 100 venues in 120 nights, all across the eastern United States, promoting the mountains of western Canada through his movies.  So then in ‘65, when he took around his first movie about heli-skiing, the word spread incredibly fast among skiers -- especially the college crowd in the eastern United States, who were always looking for the next great ski adventure.  And that’s how it all got started and how it grew so quickly. 

That’s a great stort.  So he started the company in 1959 and then started heli-skiing in 1965? 

That’s right. And then he began heli-hiking in 1978. So next year will mark 30 years of heli-hiking.   

At this point, which is the bigger part of the business, the skiing or the hiking? 

Oh, the skiing by a long shot.  The ski business generates 85 to 90 percent of our total revenues.  The reason for that is, of course, that our winter season is much longer.  It’s 20 weeks.  And the other reason is that the average length of stay in the winter is seven days as opposed to three days in the summer.  And the third reason is is that the per day cost for heli-skiing is substantially higher than the hiking costs. 

What’s the season for hiking? 

It begins in the last days of June and continues to the middle of September, about ten weeks. 

What’s the ski season? 

Ski season starts as early as the 10th of December and goes until the 5th of May.  About 21 weeks. 

Is Canadian Mountain Holidays the only company doing this, or have other imitators come along? 

For a long time there were very few companies, but there are many imitators now. Between 1999 and now, so eight years, it’s grown from 16 helicopter- and cat-skiing competitors to 42 -- in eight years! 

Wow! 

Yeah, it just went nuts.  But CMH still has over 60 percent of the total market, and the other 41 split up the difference.  So, you know, we’re doing OK. 

You’re doing very OK, I would say. 

Well, yeah, we now have twelve heli-ski areas, we have 500 employees, and we own seven beautiful, remote mountain lodges.   

That’s great.  When and how did you and CMH come together? 

I joined CMH in 1986, when it had only six areas. I was practicing law in the same building as CMH’s headquarters – the same building we’re still in -- and the fellow who was the general manager then was named Mark Kingsbury, and he worked for Hans. Mark and I had been friends, sport buddies, for quite a while, and the guy who had been doing marketing at CMH was leaving, and in the hallway on a Friday night at 5:00 I said, “Hey, how do I get that job?”  And Mark just laughed and said, “Well, apply for it.”  And so I went home that night and thought: Why not?  It’s more fun than practicing law.  So Monday morning I applied for it, and Wednesday they interviewed me, and Friday they gave me the job.  That was 22 years ago.  And of course, during that time my role has expanded and changed and morphed into all kinds of things.  But that’s how it started. 

I'm guessing that you haven’t regretted it at all. 

I haven’t regretted it at all.  You know, there’s tough days and there’s great days, but the great days outnumber the tough days by a magnitude of many to 1. 

What would you say is the special allure of the job or of the company, what’s the juice of your everyday work for you? 

Well, I’ll tell you by anecdote.  A couple of things happened to me right at the very beginning that were pretty amazing. One of them was that in my first few days at CMH, I went to one of our lodges called the Monashees.  The Monashees is the most difficult of all of our heli-ski areas; it’s lots of very steep skiing in the trees all the time, and the guests who are real fanatic tree skiers just love it; there’s nothing else like it -- it’s mecca in their world.  So I'm in this place. I’ve been at CMH for like four days, and I'm sitting at dinner with a bunch of guests, and Hans Gmoser, the founder, walks in.  He’s just arrived from some other area, and he comes walking in, and 44 guests stand up and give him a standing ovation.  And I'm sitting there looking at this, and thinking: Now wait a second.  All these guys have paid him thousands of dollars to be here, and they’re giving him a standing ovation?  Shouldn’t it be the other way around?  

And so, you know, what I realized was that somehow Hans and CMH unlocked the passion box for thousands of people.  And I was one of them, right?  I grew up on skis.  I grew up in Banff.  I'm an old ski racer, ski instructor.  And I just thought, if you’re a skier, this is what it’s all about, this is where you want to be.  And the juice that they got out of it was so incredible.   

Then, a couple of days later, I was skiing on a run in another area called the Bobbie Burns. We have a run there called Conrad where the total distance from the landing to the pickup in skiing distance is probably close to seven miles. It was a beautiful, blue sky day.   I was in deep snow, nearly up to my knees, very nice skiing, and I was just thinking: I’ve just died and gone to heaven. I'm getting paid to do this! 

So that was my first week. Let me put it this way: It sure beat practicing law.   

What does it feel like out there?  What are the words that come to mind to describe the sensation of being out there on your skis? 

Well, the first thing is magnitude.  People don’t understand the size of the terrain.  They have no clue.  People have been in the mountains.  They’ve been on a mountain.  They’ve been to a ski area.  Let’s say they’ve been to Aspen.  And they know what Aspen ski area is like.  So they feel, oh, I’ve been skiing, I understand that.  No, they don’t.  Aspen ski area is about 1/250th the size of the smallest CMH ski area. So you take 250 of those areas, and you put them all next to each other, and then you’ve got a small heli-ski area.  But in Aspen on any given day there might be, say, 15,000 people around.  With us there’s you and 43 other people in an area 250 times bigger than that.  There isn’t anybody else.  There’s no roads, there’s no villages, there’s no towns, there’s no nothing, except mountains, mountains, mountains, mountains, and snow, snow, snow, snow, snow.  So the incomprehensible magnitude is something that you don’t get until you’re there, and you see range after range after range of mountain.  All available for you to go skiing on.  Today.  You know, it’s incredible.   

So that’s one thing: You’ve got this magnitude.  And then the next thing is choice, just endless variety of choice.  If you’re a really powerful skier and you want to ski big, steep stuff, we’ve got it.  And if you’re a weaker skier, and you want to ski gentle stuff, we’ve got it.  If you love skiing in the trees, we’ve got it.  If you love skiing on glaciers, we’ve got it. And that’s, again, so different from a normal ski area.   

So that’s the terrain.  And then the snow itself is another thing that people don’t get.  Our average snowfall is eighteen meters at tree line.  So eighteen meters is about 60 feet at tree line annually.  You know, it’s an incredible thing.  We have a settled snow pack on average of between fifteen and 20 feet.  And it’s this beautiful, light snow -- where we are in the interior ranges of British Columbia, it’s not affected by heavy moisture, like coastal snow packs; not affected by big wind like coastal snow packs; not affected by big sun temperatures like in Colorado and in the southern parts of the U.S., which Colorado really is compared to where we are.  And so you have this perfect storm of mountains, huge snowfall, the right latitude, the right distance away from oceans.  And you’ve got this perfect, perfect snow pack in southeastern B.C.  And there’s just no other place on the planet that has all that stuff.  In conjunction with infrastructure. 

Right.   

Ease of access.  We’ve got good airports, good hotels, good food, and good stuff.   

What’s a typical day in the life of a CMH heli-skier? 

Well – oh, let me back up before I come to that.  The other stuff, the other sensation we didn’t talk about, is the skiing itself.  The skiing itself is really about freedom.  One of the big problems we have in the ski business now is there’s all these new ski areas with lots of uphill capacity, and they all brag about, well, we’ve got all these lifts that get you up the hill really fast.  Well, sure, that’s great, but it also puts a lot of people on the mountains.  So in a regular ski area you’re constantly watching other people and you’re never truly free.  Heli-skiing is like water skiing on a perfectly still lake.  It’s like being the only surfer on a wave.  It’s like being the only golfer on the golf course, and you don’t have to wait for anybody.  You can do everything at your own pace.  That sense of freedom in the mountains is really an incredible thing.  And then the sensation of just being in deep snow is, again, the best feeling in the world.  It’s always being in the sweet spot.  So, anyway, that’s the sensation. 

OK. You’ve got this virginal, pristine powder, out in the middle of nowhere.  You’re alone in this incredible terrain with about 43 people on your group, and that’s your world. 

That’s your world.  And it’s your world for a week.  And then at the end of the day, you fly back to these lodges.  So I’ll tell you how your day works.  In the morning, you get up.  In the lodges we have no alarm clocks, no TV’s, no radios, no newspapers.  None of the worldly garbage that infects our lives.  We try and keep that away.  So one of our staff comes down the hall with a bell in the morning, and rings the bell outside your door and wakes you up.  The wake-up call is usually at about a quarter to 7:00. At 7:00 there’s a stretching class, so everyone who wants to can go for a stretch, and most people go and do that.  Then we have breakfast, which is, of course, like all of the Adventure Collection companies, it’s got to be world class food.  Otherwise we don’t live very long.  So we have this fantastic breakfast.  And then we have four groups of eleven skiers.  The first group lifts off at 9:00, and each will ski anywhere from eight to fifteen runs in the course of a day.  And, remember, what we call a run can be miles and miles of skiing.   

At midday we have lunch out in the field someplace. The helicopter brings hot soup and great sandwiches and chocolate and fruit and all kinds of goodies, and hot tea, and unless the weather is very inclement, we stay out; people really enjoy the lunch in the field.  Then we keep skiing for the afternoon.  The last group is usually home by about 4:30, 5:00 o’clock, and then we have more food.  We have what we call our tea goodies, which is usually some fantastic aperitif presentation from the chef. Some people go for a massage, because we have multiple massage therapists in each lodge.  Some people go to the Jacuzzi.  Some people go to the sauna.  And some people go and have a rest, or read, or whatever.   

Dinner is at 7:00.  And, of course, dinner is always another great creation.  We have chefs and pastry chefs in each lodge, and great wine cellars.  One important thing: The way we eat is different, it’s not like in a restaurant.  We serve our meals family style, which means that there’s a creation of the chef, and it’s served at a family style table with about 10 people.  It’s served by the guides that you skied with that day and the staff of the lodge.  And all the staff and guides and guests eat together.   

And people love it.  They just love it.  It sounds kind of weird. At first people might think, oh, God, I just want to eat with my wife, or my friends, or whatever.  And then they find out that one of the great attractions of this business is the people that you get to meet.  And, of course, the people who come on our trips are not your usual bag of donuts.  They’re pretty interesting folks who have accomplished something in life. But the thing that brings them together is that they all have this passion for skiing.  So the conversation will start about skiing, and what a great day they had.  Then you’ll get around to, you know, “What do you do?” And you’ll find out that you’re sitting next to – well, I’ve done this, I had dinner once with Bob Noyce, one of the co-inventors of the microchip at Intel, and another time with  Dick Marriot. I sat at dinner last winter with a guy who was General Counsel to the State Department of the United States.  So these people are fun, and they’re lively, and they’re interesting, and so your day tends to conclude with this great conversation, and then, by the time dinner’s over, about 9:00, 9:30, most people start heading to bed, and the rest continue their conversation over a glass of port or sherry at the bar, and that’s a CMH day.   

That sounds pretty good to me! A typical trip is a week? 

Yeah, Saturday to Saturday.  Though we do now offer three-, four-, and five-day trips as well, because people are finding that their time is so pressed that we’ve had to adjust and offer more people shorter trips.  We also have really cool family trips that we started two years ago, family Christmas and family Easter.  Those are really great because the kids come for half the price of the adults.  Last year we had kids as young as 10 out heli-skiing with their parents, and they were just absolutely blown away by their experience.  And, of course, when we have Christmas at a lodge, it’s a real tree with real candles in it, and we have presents from CMH under the tree for everybody, and it’s just a wonderful experience. 

How many lodges are there in your network? 

We have twelve all together.  Twelve areas.   

Now, the price tag has got to be pretty hefty to pay for all of this wonderful freedom and solitude.  What’s the price range? 

Well, people can come for a three-day trip for as little as $3,500, or they can go for a regular seven-day trip for about $9,000. And then we have private group trips that are, per person, about $18,000.   

OK.  And do people have to get to a certain place where you pick them up? 

Yeah, people fly to Calgary. 

So the price starts in Calgary.   

That’s right.  And -- well, here’s another little tidbit we can talk about.  Seventy percent of our guests in the winter are repeaters, which is pretty amazing.  And in some lodges in the summer up to 30 percent of our guests are repeaters.  We have over 3,500 people who have skied a million vertical feet or more with CMH.  Now, to ski a million vertical feet with us you’ve had to have made anywhere from eight to ten trips with us, because we guarantee 100,000 feet in a week.  And most people ski a little more than that, so that’s about eight to ten trips. Some people have skied over 200 weeks with us.  If you divide that by 52, they’ve spent over 4 years of their life heli-skiing with CMH.   

Amazing! What would you say are the biggest challenges for CMH and for the industry as a whole these days? 

There’s a bunch of challenges. Obviously one of them is environmental factors.  You know, what’s going to happen as climate change continues?  Is it going to affect us detrimentally?  So far it hasn’t.  We’re at a latitude and an elevation that a couple degrees warmer actually gives us more snow and better snow.  But it could also shorten our season at the beginning and the end.  We don’t know.  So that’s certainly a concern.   

Another one is the attitude of guests, where they become sort of collectors. It’s a bit like in Africa, with people collecting the Big Five: They say, “Oh, well, I’ve seen that elephant.  Let’s move on,”  instead of really appreciating the magnificence of what it is they’re seeing. 

The checklist mentality. 

Yeah.  I think that’s such a tragedy in the travel business.  So for us, we work really hard at trying to get people to appreciate the nature of where they are and how fortunate they are to be in that environment.  I think most people get it, but sensibilities change over time.  So we have to work on that.  The other stuff that can certainly affect us and is affecting us is the decline of the American dollar.  It’s now worth less than the Canadian dollar.  Five years ago the Canadian dollar was 50 percent of the U.S. dollar.  So for an American in the last five years, their trip cost has gone up 40 to 50 percent, simply on currency exchange. 

That’s frustrating.  Two of those three factors you have absolutely no control over, the climate and the currency. 

That’s right. So those are big ones.  And then, costs for us are certainly a factor, and those are driven by world oil prices – so that’s another thing that we can’t really control, the price of our fuel. I touched on two environmental factors, the global warming and fuel, and it would be easy for people to say, “Well, better not get too high on your high horse there, pal, because you’re burning a lot of carbon, flying those helicopters around.”  And there is some truth to that, for sure.  We are definitely carbon consumers.  As much as lots of people are.  What we are trying to do diligently is we have just completed a comprehensive analysis of what our carbon footprint is. This was really hard to do and took over a year to complete. But it gives us a baseline so that we can now say, “OK, here’s where we are, and here’s where we can start reducing.”   

So there are some tangible, measurable things that we’re doing on the ground, which are far more important than just offset programs, which are good ways to help a traveler’s guilt about traveling, but may have very few significant effects. But we’ve got micro-hydro projects in place, and we’re building more of them.  We are looking at the way we move people around.  We’re trying to use suppliers that use bio-diesels instead of regular diesels.  We’re looking at what we can do with bio-diesel ourselves, what we can’t replace with micro-hydro.  We’ve got full composting programs in places in our lodges, so we’re not hauling out stuff that’s going to create a bunch of methane.  We’re very careful with where we fly in wilderness areas with regards to animals, so we spend a lot of time avoiding known animal populations.  We provide significant population herd counts to the government in places where they wouldn’t get, so we’re involved in species management.  These are just a small part of the things we are doing, but we take those duties seriously.   

The people that we hire are people who are dedicated to conservation.  Two things are really important for us: sustainability and conservation.  It’s one thing to be sustainable.  That’s great.  But it’s another thing to try to conserve and see where you can reduce, and actually prove reductions, on the ground.  And our challenge the next couple of years is really going to be trying to reduce our carbon footprint.   

That’s a big one. 

Yeah. 

One thing I think is that on the plus side you’re stewards of the areas where you ski, in some sense you’re protectors of those areas.  It’s in your best interest to make sure those places stay pristine and in as great shape as possible. 

You’re absolutely right. Those areas that we’re in are not national parks.  They’re multi-use areas.  And many of them have had histories of mining and logging in the valley bottoms. Of course, we’re up in higher elevations, but what we do with the forestry companies, and we work really closely with them, is to say, “Look, we have a big valley here that has its value by keeping the trees, not by denuding those trees.”  And the forestry companies are really good, generally, in working with us on that.  We feel that we’ve made a significant input in those areas where we operate in keeping the forests intact.   

On some level, I guess, there has to be an economic incentive for preservation to occur, and it sounds like you’re a big part of that equation.  You can let people see that by keeping a particular area pristine, that area will actually generate more money.  In the big picture that’s a really good thing for everybody involved.   

Right. That’s it. You know, they can take a tree out once, and until that forest re-grows in 30 or 40 years, it’s useless.  But we can generate revenue for the province of British Columbia on a consistent basis out of that forest. 

So yeah, we’ve had pretty good success.  And actually, we’ve won a number of environmental awards, and we feel that those awards recognize the efforts that we put into our stewardship programs.  

What’s on the horizon for CMH? 

Well, one of the things that’s really important for us is to be able to tell our guests that it is our sincere hope that as future generations come to these places, they’re going to be very, very similar to what they are today.  We’re not going to be adding condominium villages in the middle of our heli-ski terrain, and we’re not going to be adding multiple helicopters in large magnitude, or adding tons of skiers to take away from the experience.  So at any given heli-ski area, like in the Bugaboos, we have one lodge that holds 44 guests, and it’s close to a thousand square miles of terrain.  It’s been that way since 1968, and within a few skiers one way or the other, it’s probably going to stay that way. We think that’s really important.  So what we would love to do would be to find more terrain where we can add new areas.  But those are pretty hard to find now because there’re so many competitors out there. 

So it’s hard for us to grow our business that way.  What we are looking to do is to change our delivery mechanism, meaning we’ve added all these three-day trips, short trips, and family trips.  And then this other thing that’s really cool is called the Pay As You Play trip, where you can come in heli-skiing, and the price of entry is very, very low.  Basically you’re just paying for room and board.  So next year a four-day pay as you play trip starts at 1800 bucks.  And then you just pay for your skiing as you go.   That’s sort of a revolution in the heli-ski industry. 

So you have kind of a menu, and you can say, “Today I want to go there,” and then CMH will say, “All right, that’s going to cost you $2,000”? 

No.  It’ll be more, you wake up and say, “Today’s a really great day and I want to go ski,” and then you pay for the amount of footage that you ski in the day -– which is how we calculate all of our stuff, because it really relates directly to the cost of the helicopter.  And then tomorrow, let’s say it’s half raining or something, and you wake up and say, “Boy, it’s a really crappy day out. I’m going to stay home,” and you don’t have to pay. So we have assumed the risk on those weeks on behalf of our guests.  And that’s a pretty big deal.   

That’s a very interesting new wrinkle. When did you introduce that? 

Last year.  And let’s see, what else is out there?  We’ve added women’s heli-ski weeks, and then we’ve added this other program called Powder Masters. As people get older and as the demographics change, well, sometimes the mind is willing and the legs are a little less able.  So these programs are about giving people quality without worrying about quantity.  And that’s really fun for guys who thought they were going to have to hang it up, to know that they can keep going.  The other new program we have is called Nomads’ Week, where we travel with one helicopter and a private group of only eight skiers and we ski in six separate heli-ski areas in seven days.  No other heli-skiing company can offer anything like it. 

So you’re adapting to the changing needs of your audience. 

Right.  There’s old guys and young guys, and we’re trying to cater to everybody, people who have more time, people who have less time, families, women, it’s all in there now.  And that is a big change in the heli-ski business.  I mean, when I started here in the mid-‘80s, it was really pretty much like the army, you know?  It was a bunch of guys, and if you couldn’t hack it, you went home. 

Right. Turning the focus on hiking now, I'm imagining a day in the life of a hiker is probably not that different from a ski day:  You get up in the morning, you go to a spectacular place, and you spend the day hiking.  Is that the case? 

That’s exactly the way it works.  And the lodge experience is the same.  The food experience.  All that part is the same.  But we fly to multiple mountain environments in the day.  So your first lift in the morning might be into a flowered meadow, with hundreds of square kilometers literally of meadows in front of you, and flowers.  And then the next lift might be up onto a high ridge, where you’re right on a mountaintop and you walk along the ridge for a couple of hours.  And then the third lift might be to right onto the toe of the glacier, where you actually go and walk on a glacier for two or three hours and just explore that environment, and the fourth lift in the day might be to go and walk around a big hanging lake someplace.  So the idea is in three days to have taken people to multiple alpine environments, and in my way of thinking -- and I'm not saying it to be arrogant – this is the only place in the world that has this complete, comprehensive mountain experience in three days.  Where you can experience everything the mountains have to offer on their own terms.  If the weather’s inclement, we don’t care.  We still go and we have a lot of fun. We outfit everybody with great gear, and they stay dry and have a great time. 

And just as with skiing, it’s basically your world.  You’re not running into a lot of other hikers out there. 

There’s nobody else out there. And then in some areas we have Tyrolean traverses across raging rivers that are really fun, and zip lines, and, you know, great, really wonderful adventure trails, and all kinds of stuff that people just can’t experience anywhere else.   

Do you have family hiking programs as well? 

Yeah, absolutely.  Full family trips, from little, little kids, you know, basically still in the diaper stage, all the way up.  And those are really great. We have childcare specialists with the kids, and they do everything from building volcanoes out of stuff on the front lawn, to counting tadpoles in the ponds, to climbing little places where they can get their hands and feet on a rock and learn how to climb a little bit. Kids just love it. 

I bet. Listening to you talk, it seems to me that this experience of being out in spectacular nature pretty much by yourself could really change people’s lives, could turn them around.  Have you heard that from guests? 

Totally.  It absolutely turns them around.  We have so many letters…. One of the things I’m particularly proud of is this one letter from a guest, who wrote to us: “I went hiking with you, and I had no idea that there were so many beautiful places left in the world.  It’s inspired me to begin a recycling program at home.” You know, that’s a lasting impact.  Here’s somebody who, prior to our trip, threw their newspapers in the landfill and threw all their crap away, and now they’re not doing it because they believe that there’s still beautiful places in the world.   

And we see that all the time.  We have so many people who write us letters of appreciation about how we’ve changed their life.  One great article was written by a journalist last year.  She had some very sad personal tragedies prior to the trip, and she went and found this incredible solitude and connection with God in those mountains.  For people who are religious, there’s no greater cathedral than that one.  For me, the greatest time in the summer is to go off by myself and sit for ten or fifteen minutes on a high ridge and look down on those incredible valleys and just feel how relatively insignificant we humans are on this planet.  It really makes you appreciate the time that you’ve got: Go home and enjoy it. 

Marty, I just got goose bumps listening to you!   

That’s what CMH delivers: Goose bumps!