MY FATHER HEALED UP WELL. He got a new nose; the old one had acted as a kind of airbag, softening the blow, and could not be deployed again. The forehead, it turns out, is especially thick between the eyes. He emerged from the whole thing virtually unchanged. Maybe he looked a little older, and he'd lost his sense of smell and taste, but the wattage and the wise-assery remained intact. He felt very lucky to be alive and newly appreciative, as if he hadn't been already, of how dangerous skiing can be.

He learned to ski when he was three, in Austria, where his father was from. My grandfather was a ski racer and alpinist who competed for Austria in the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics. He came to the United States after the Olympics. While teaching skiing in New Hampshire, he met a woman from Philadelphia; they married and had five children. After the Second World War, he bought a house in St. Anton, Austria, and brought his children over during the winters. My father, the youngest, spent two winters there, skiing with his father and his aunt, who also was a racer—a world champion. But when he was six, his father, skiing by himself in a steep gully in St. Anton, was killed in an avalanche. Two decades later, in 1972, one of my father's sisters, a mother of two, died in another avalanche, in Aspen. She, too, had been skiing alone; a search party dug her out after dark. There is a sense that bad mountain luck hounds us; it can feel reckless even to mention it.

I also learned to ski at three, first on a dog run in Carl Schurz Park, behind Gracie Mansion, in Manhattan, and later in the hills of Vermont. My parents did all the teaching; they never put my younger brother or me in ski school. Some years later, they started taking us out west and then to Europe, where we all acquired a taste for skiing out of bounds, first by our own wits and then—after my father, while skiing with me one morning in Verbier, got caught in an avalanche—in the company of a guide. This did not always keep us out of trouble—I'm still haunted by my memory of dangling in a weakling's version of an iron cross over a crevasse near Zermatt—but it enabled us to try more ambitious and remote runs. This became our favorite thing to do. Over the years, we have had many sublime days and weeks in the mountains. It is hard to think of anything that brings us as much pleasure or as close together. We live for it.

So it was that my father and I returned to British Columbia late this spring, 17 months after the accident. We'd had lunch the previous fall in New York with Beat Steiner and Peter Mattsson, the owners of a heli-skiing operation called Bella Coola Heli Sports. I'd heard a lot about Bella Coola in recent years and marveled at many photographs and ski films shot there. It had gained a reputation for having some of the best alpine terrain on earth: nearly one and a half million acres of jagged wilderness in the Coast Mountains, 270 miles northwest of Vancouver. In light of recent risk-tolerance adjustments and a few other considerations (e.g., time, money), I figured, as Mattsson and Steiner talked about their paradise, that I'd never get to see it. Mattsson, who is Swedish, is an accomplished guide, known far and wide in skiing circles as "the Swede," and he seemed totally nuts: ebullient, brusque, and unaccountably persuasive. He began to talk about June in Bella Coola. The mountains, he said, were still covered, the snow firm, and, if you timed it right, you could find perfect spring snow, also known as corn, for 4,000 vertical feet at a clip. You could hit the high-country steeps without fear of avalanche.

"And no trees!" he bellowed, jostling my father. You skied almost exclusively above tree line, until the snow got too soft. In the afternoons, you'd fish the local rivers, which were teeming with king salmon on their spring run.

"I'm there," my father said. To the dismay of most of the people who love him, he had already started planning ski trips; and, as in autumns past, he'd been laying out his array of ski clothing, in neat little piles in the guest bedroom of my parents' house, on Long Island. Now he was talking Bella Coola. I found myself, despite earlier pledges to the contrary, insinuating myself into this plan.

My brother, Xander, who is 36 and sells real estate in Stowe, Vermont, had decided that my father and I, when skiing together, had a tendency to get into difficulty; that is, he kind of blamed me for having been there, and himself for having not been, when my father hit the tree. He came along to Bella Coola, too, to alter the voodoo.

This trip, like so many others, gave my mother the creeps. She was staying behind. She's a strong skier but is terrified of heights and has great faith in the power of intuition, so she tends to entertain portentous thoughts. And, anyway, skiing in June? It seemed preposterous. But as we flew from Vancouver to Bella Coola over the sprawling icefields of Mount Waddington, we saw that there was plenty of snow. We'd never seen terrain quite so vast. It looked like the Alps, but Jurassically free of any human trace. It all belonged, in a manner of speaking, to Steiner and the Swede, and so, for the next week, it would also belong to us.