This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
Being dropped off by a helicopter 2,200m up a snow-covered mountainside is a rush of noise and chaotic motion. “I can’t be sure what’s underneath, so I’m not going to land,” our pilot, Detlef Gensel, says over the radio as we approach.
Instead, he says, he’ll hover with just the tips of the helicopter’s skids touching the snow, leaving the engine running. We’ll have to move quickly. As the door opens, the high-pitched whine of the cockpit is replaced by the full-throated jackhammer thwack of the rotors. Scrambling out of our seats, we step down the six inches that separate the skids from the snow and huddle in a low crouch, covering our faces with goggles and gloved hands to protect them from the stinging flakes whipped up by the downwash. The guides wrestle with the metal basket strapped to one side of the helicopter, pulling out skis, snowboards, poles and avalanche safety packs. And then with a Top Gun-style thumbs up, Detlef lifts off, upwards, backwards and away. The helicopter pivots 180 degrees, dips its nose and clatters off down the valley, leaving us completely alone.
Detlef, the skilled German pilot, can put skiers almost anywhere they want to go in the mountains. Photograph by Aaron Rolph
We’re on an unnamed peak in one of Europe’s most remote regions: the Accursed Mountains (aka the Albanian Alps), which straddle the border between Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro. Quite how they came by this name — ‘Bjeshkët e Nemuna’ in Albanian; ‘Prokletije’ in Montenegrin — is disputed. Some say it’s because the Devil himself created the mountains; others insist it derives from a curse placed on the fearsome peaks by a group of Slavic soldiers who’d lost comrades on the slopes. Whatever the truth, they’re seriously inaccessible. Wolves, bears and lynx roam freely here, occasionally intruding on the isolated farming settlements that dot the valley floors. Tourists are few and far between, even in summer. And in the depths of winter, with many of the mountain passes blocked by snow, visitors are almost unheard of. Yet the terrain here is ideal for the kind of backcountry skiing we’ve come to seek.
We’re staying in the Valbona Valley, in the eponymous national park, on the Albanian side of the range whose snaggle-toothed peaks remind me of Italy’s Dolomites. We’ve access to 1,500 empty square kilometres of high-alpine bowls, steep-sided gulleys and well-spaced trees. Our first run, a warm-up of ‘just’ 500 vertical metres through fresh powder, takes in all three. There’s no infrastructure in this part of the Accursed Mountains. No lifts or pistes, and not even many access roads. And that makes it ideal for heli-skiing.
“The zone really is incredible, you’ll see, it has everything,” said Seb Fleiss, co-founder of Heliski Albania, during our safety briefing, the evening before that first flight. “It’s so big, we’re still exploring.” A former pro snowboarder from Croatia, Seb knows the Montenegrin and Kosovan sides of the Accursed Mountains from his days spent on the former-Yugoslav competitive circuit. But it wasn’t until 2017, when he was hired as a local fixer for the US ski film company Teton Gravity Research, that he happened upon the Valbona Valley National Park. After six weeks of exploring with four pro skiers, two helicopters and enough fuel to clock up serious hours, Seb called up Viktor Vlashi, the Albanian owner of the local heli rental company. “I said: ‘We need to try and commercialise this, because this place is so awesome.’”
Snowboarders are dropped at secluded and beautiful spots to scout the best off-piste powder conditions. Photograph by Markus Rohrbacher
Back on board, we cruise above the snow between drop zones. Detlef, who’s piloted for Victor Vlashi for over a decade, points out some of the lines the pro skiers picked out in 2017. One, in particular, ‘Fabi’s line’, by Austrian mountain freerider Fabian Lentsch, involves a series of death-defying, blind drops down a steep ridge. Had we not watched the footage on Seb’s laptop the previous evening, I’d struggle to believe anyone could ski down it and survive. “And of course, he had to do it on the first take for the camera,” says Detlef, grinning.
We don’t tackle anything nearly as gnarly during our trip. But it’s impossible not to feel a bit like a pro as we ski a series of virgin faces through fresh, fluffy snow. This is one of Heliski Albania’s greatest assets — and one of the things that first attracted Seb and his friends to Valbona. “It was pouring snow when we were first here,” he says. The highest peak in the national park, Mount Jezercë, is only 2,694m above sea level. But the proximity of the Adriatic, where winter storms scoop up moisture, means the Accursed Mountains “can get up to 15 metres in a good season”, Seb says. That’s the same amount as Niseko in Japan.
A skier carves in the late afternoon light. Photograph by Tristan Kennedy
The Valbona River flows through the mountain villages of Margegaj. Photograph by Tristan Kennedy
Bunkers & blind drops
Setting up a heli-ski operation in a place as wild as Valbona wasn’t easy. Like most guests, I flew into Pristina in Kosovo, a three-hour drive across the border, which gave Seb plenty of time to fill me in on the area’s troubled history. “We thought there wasn’t much freedom growing up in communist Yugoslavia, but here in Albania it was next level,” he noted. The country was almost completely cut off from the outside world from 1945 to 1991, under the Stalinist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. A murderous tyrant with a penchant for regular purges and, curiously, the films of Norman Wisdom (the only Western movies allowed into the country), Hoxha cultivated a paranoid, siege mentality. The evidence of this was visible through our car window, in the crumbling concrete bunkers littering the landscape — as many as one every kilometre in places. Over 175,000 were built across Albania, according to Seb, to defend against an imagined invasion that never came.
The regime collapsed in 1991, and the Albanian economy followed suit. The country narrowly avoided the kind of civil war that ripped apart neighbouring Yugoslavia, but its people suffered — especially in the Tropojë district around the Valbona Valley, where conflict spilled across the border from Kosovo.
Yet we also see encouraging signs of the region’s more recent recovery. On the streets of Bajram Curri, Tropojë’s biggest town, there are plenty of new cars, many of them large SUVs with UK number plates. When someone jokes that they must be stolen, Onur Decani, Heliski Albania’s logistics manager, gently corrects them, saying they’ve more likely been driven back by the diaspora, who are increasingly choosing to return. Hotel Margjeka, which serves as the company’s operations base, is one of several establishments that have sprung up in the Valbona Valley in the past decade.
“When we opened in 2012, there was just us and two others,” explains Janet Margjeka, matriarch of the enterprising local family who runs the 19-room property. “Now there are many, and we added a new floor with extra rooms in 2015.” Since 2019, when Heliski brought its first guests, they’ve been able to stay open in the winter, too.
The atmosphere in the hotel is warm and welcoming, with Margjeka’s kids wandering in and out and occasionally practising their English on us. Her staff, meanwhile, serve up a constant stream of delicious, local food — including homemade ajvar, a roasted red-pepper spread that’s omnipresent in the Balkans, and flija, a northern Albanian dish made of layered crepes and sour cream.
One evening before dinner, we walk down the road for a drink at the Valbona Resort & Spa, the valley’s newest hotel. Launched in 2024, it’s one of several that have opened here in the last year alone. The eight-storey glass-fronted building offers a flashier alternative to the Margjeka and is tangible evidence of how tourism is helping transform Valbona’s fortunes. “It’s great, we’d love more skiers and winter visitors,” Ervin Ponari, the manager, explains.
Helicopters can navigate the unexplored shoulders of the Accursed Mountains. Photography by Markus Rohrbacher
Fields of powder
Mountain guides Paul Swail, John McCune and Will Sim are consummate professionals, and excellent company. It’s their first season in Albania with Seb but they’re seriously excited about the potential. “The terrain here is amazing, and Seb’s got a solid crew,” says Paul. “Literally, in Ante’s case.” Ante Pasalic, the heli-ops liaison manager, fills any room he enters — both with his 6’7” physique and the warmth of his personality. While each member of the team plays their part, however, the main man of Heliski Albania is undoubtedly Detlef Gensel.
If piloting a helicopter is a little like being a drummer — with each limb moving completely independently while simultaneously remaining perfectly in sync — then watching Detlef fly is like sitting stage-side with the late, great Charlie Watts. He clearly has all the chops of a master jazz musician, but he’s never showy — managing the rhythm and pitch of the rotors with restrained movements and always remaining calm over the radio. Trained in his native Germany, where he also learned to ski, he is by some distance the best heli-ski pilot I’ve ever had the pleasure of flying with.
After heavy snowfall keeps us confined to base for a couple of days, we set our alarms for 6am on the morning it’s supposed to clear. We wake to find clouds still lingering. Flying looks unlikely. But when our camera drone punches through the low-hanging layer to reveal clear skies above, Detlef comes up with a plan. Taking off, we fly low over the trees on the valley floor until we reach Bajram Curri. There, as he predicted, the skies are clear and we pull upwards into glorious sunshine.
The morning passes all too quickly, whooping as we throw up clouds of fluffy snow each time we dig our edges in. “A lot of this is still unskied,” Detlef says, as we buzz over to the next drop-off. “Not just this season, but ever.”
Our final run takes us down the rolling shoulders of a peak on the southern side of the Valbona Valley. From up here, the low-hanging cloud that so frustrated us in the morning looks beautiful — a frothy sea of cappuccino foam blanketing the valley below. Somewhere beneath it lies Hotel Margjeka, the rest of the crew and the real world. But up here — once again — we’re completely alone. There’s just a field of untouched powder ahead of us. And at the bottom, perched on a rocky outcrop, the bright red shape of Detlef’s helicopter, waiting to fly us home.
Published in the Winter Sports guide, available with the December 2025 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK).
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