As I scrabble out of a tiny six-seater helicopter and onto the summit of 1,100-metre Mount Kerahnjukur on Iceland's Troll Peninsula, I wonder just who's having more fun here - the skiers or the pilot.
The laconic man at the controls of our craft, Snorri Steingrimsson, has been displaying his masterly flying skills. He hovers with only one skid on the ground, while the other hangs in space over a drop of several hundred metres above vertiginous crags. When we all tumble out of the dragonfly-like craft onto a summit little bigger than the average living room, he takes off in a blizzard of rotor-driven snow before plummeting down towards the sea.
Three other skiers and I are guided down and around northern Iceland's wild and pristine mountains by Jokull Bergmann of Arctic Heli Skiing - or 'JB', as he's known around here. Bergmann grew up on this very peninsula and is Iceland's only internationally qualified mountain guide.
He and his family know the Troll Peninsula as well as any humans could - their Viking forebears rolled ashore here in their longboats in the 9th century, took one look at the snowy 1,500-metre peaks thrusting up from the North Atlantic and decided that this was for them.
Over a millennium later, Bergmann set up his unique heli-ski operation at the Klaengsholl Lodge, the family farm in the wild, windswept and appropriately translated as Ski Valley, just a few kilometres from the ocean. It lies in the shadow of the mighty walls of rock and snow that make up the region and can be accessed in minutes by helicopter.
It was from here that we'd flown around mid-morning after a leisurely breakfast of magnificent local meats and fish. There's no rush to get up into the mountains. Unlike most heli-ski destinations, which operate around the short daylight hours of winter, here you can enjoy the sport from April to June. As we are located just 50 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, we enjoy about 22 hours of sunlight each day.