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RUBIES A Utah State University Student Chases ‘the Best Day Ever’ As Heir Apparent to the Nation’s Oldest Heli-skiing Outfit Story and photos by Matthew D. LaPlante
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and stories told because they want to be. Joe Royer’s story is both. It has to be told because the people who come here — exposed to the vast desolation of this place and keenly acquainted, after a long day of travel, with just how remote it is from everything else in the world — are instinctively curious as to what the California-born adventurer could have possibly been thinking when he decided to put down roots in Lamoille, Nev., in the mid 1970s. The snow? That they understand. There’s usually 300 inches or more of it each year in the higher elevations of the nearby Ruby Mountains, which slash across the barren planes of Elko County and feature dozens of peaks above 10,000 feet, with 10 of them rising above 11,000. There are 200,000 skiable acres out here (by way of contrast, the newly combined Park City and Canyons resort in Utah’s Summit County will be the nation’s largest resort at 7,300 acres.) It’s good snow, too, in the way that skiers and snowboarders tend to think about such things. Dry enough, after traveling across the Sierra Nevada range, to legitimately be called powder. Dense enough that a skier or boarder can float across its surface. The rest of the equation is far less obvious. The nearest city, Elko, had all of 8,000 people living in it back then (and only about 20,000 today.) The nearest metro area, Salt Lake City, is three hours away; Reno is an extra hour in the opposite direction; and the folks who lived in both of those places back then were already spoiled rotten with ski resorts and glorious backcountry access. Joe knew the Rubies could never support a resort, but he also knew that a few intrepid entrepreneurs were making heli-skiing work in Alaska and British Columbia. Perhaps, he thought, it could work in the Rubies, too. The story of how the Ruby Mountain Heli Experience got started wants to be told because Joe — a rather stoic chap in most other regards — is proud of what he’s built here are stories told because they have to be
SUMMER 2015 I UTAHSTATE
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