The nightclub in the basement of the Riksgransen Hotel is full of surprises. The first is the US$24 bill for two pints of lager. Then the barman pulls back a curtain to reveal that, even though it's 10pm, because it is May and we are so far north, outside it's broad daylight. But the coup de grace is when a helicopter lands right outside and four weary but beaming skiers unfurl themselves from its cramped cockpit and clomp inside for a drink.
Riksgransen is the world's most northerly ski resort, a frozen border post between Sweden and Norway, 300km north of the Arctic Circle. Such latitude gives it a key selling point - a ski season extending until late June. When the snows melt in Chamonix, St Anton and Verbier, the ski bums who can't face heading home migrate here to prolong winter for a few more precious weeks.
But there is another, lesser-known, reason for making the pilgrimage this far north. Ironic as it may seem given Scandinavia's reputation for ruinous prices, Riksgransen is probably the cheapest and easiest place in the world to get a taste of heliskiing.
For any skier or snowboarder who has ventured off-piste and felt the addictive thrill of floating in light powder snow, heliskiing is the stuff of fantasy. Rather than queuing for busy cable cars and chairlifts, heliskiers are whisked away to remote peaks, below which kilometer after kilometer of virgin powder awaits. The only drawback is that the cost of chartering helicopters means that it's an activity pretty much reserved for those who work in banking. The majority of Britons who go heliskiing do so in British Columbia, Canada, signing up for a week's package that costs around US$8,000 per person, plus another US$2,000 for flights, transfers, drinks and so on.
In Riksgransen, however, things are far more low-key. You can do as many helicopter lifts as you like, typically paying just US$100 a time, including a guide and hire of transceivers, shovels and probes. Most take a three-lift package, which will take a full afternoon and allow you to ski the biggest peaks of the area.
There's no need to book months ahead either - you just sign up at the hotel reception desk in the morning, leaving your mobile number, then head out to the pistes. An hour before your helicopter slot, the guides ring to call you back to the helipad, right outside the hotel.
SMALL-SCALE RESORT
It has to be said that the pistes here are rather limited - there are only six lifts - but then Riksgransen isn't really a resort in the conventional sense. There's just one hotel, around which a cluster of red wooden outbuildings have grown up, and a maximum capacity of about 600 people. The whole place owes its existence not to skiing, but to the single-track railway that runs through its center, built to transport iron ore from the mines of Kiruna in the south to the port of Narvik, on Norway's Atlantic coast.
The railway was completed in 1902, when rails being built from the Swedish and Norwegian sides finally met at Riksgransen. To celebrate, a hotel and elaborate wooden station were built, and the railway company started trying to promote it as a tourist destination. Initial attempts foundered (there was, after all, no real reason to get off the train) until the country's first ski school was established here in 1934. Its popularity has slowly grown ever since, although today it still feels more like a frontier outpost than a town.
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