TELLURIDE – The guides at Telluride Helitrax kept repeating one word all morning: Relax.

Don’t do something stupid like heave your skis over your shoulder and get them chopped off in the blades, they warned. Relax.

Don’t run around taking pictures when the bird comes in and get whipped into a human smoothie by the tail rotor. Relax.

Helitrax has guided thousands of guests through millions of vertical feet of skiing in more than 30 years of business and has an almost spotless safety record. The guides know what they’re doing.

Still, when they say “relax” — while handing out release forms covering everything that can go wrong, including avalanches and chopper crashes — a lot of nervous eyes dart around the room.

My fists were balled up in my mittens like panicked armadillos on the morning of my trip. But because I was about to realize the ultimate snow slider’s dream of air-assisted carving through untouched snow, I cajoled one of the armadillos into gripping the pen, and signed my life away. After all, this could be the best skiing day of my life.

The back bowls of Vail are great. Aspen Highlands on a powder day is epic. But nothing can compare to the sensation and subsequent bragging rights of a day on some of the world’s highest heli-served terrain.

Most Colorado snow-lovers assume heli-skiing happens only in distant lands at prices that put it out of reach. But Helitrax is just a day’s drive from the Front Range, and although it commands a premium price, a good chunk of its clients are working-class powder hounds who save up for the splurge. (Heli-skiing also is offered at Silverton Mountain.)

As I waited at the landing zone, I kept picturing a commando team of pros leaping out of the chopper onto the irrationally steep slopes and dashing down the mountain, dodging cliffs and outrunning avalanches while still managing to make perfect, braided tracks.

Would I ride like the guys in the Warren Miller movies? Would this be the best skiing day of my life? Or would my attempt be more fitting for the part of the film where humorous music mixes with skiers making horribly painful mistakes?

I looked to the three middle-aged men assigned to ride with me, hoping one of them might know, but I had no time to ask. The helicopter roared in, kicking up a halo of snow.

“Relax,” I told myself. “Relax.”

And we raced toward helicopter, bumping into each other like the Marx Brothers.

IT’S JUST SKIING, AFTER ALL

“Helicopters are very sexy, powerful machines. They can freak people out,” said John Humphries, a guide and operations manager for Helitrax. “Customers often get nervous, their hearts are beating fast. It’s usually halfway down the first run before they start breathing again and realize, ‘Hey, this is just skiing.’”

The majority of clients are men.

“I think a lot of women are apprehensive. They think they can’t do it,” Humphries said.

A persistent misconception is that customers have to jump out of the helicopter, ski-movie style.

“That was in an old Warren Miller film all the heli-operators still joke about. The fact is that we have landing zones,” he said.

The helicopter roared out of town into the jagged white aisles in a marketplace of peaks. The San Juan Mountains have some of the best terrain in the state, and two days before the trip, a storm had doused them with five feet of snow. The view from the window looked like a scene from an IMAX film where the camera zooms over a frosted crest and swoops into a valley until the audience feels like it is moving.

We really were moving, and I wasn’t going to just watch people ski this, I was going to do it.My nervous, armor-plated-mammal thoughts were joined by a new eagerness.

In 10 minutes, the chopper settled gently on a saddle at 12,500 feet with endless undulations of white unrolling on all sides.

A day of heli-skiing, which costs about $795 for five or six runs and about 12,000 vertical feet, seems pretty steep compared with the $71 lift ticket at Telluride Mountain, but the experience is a world apart. As soon as I coaxed my armadillo-balled-up hands to unfurl and strapped on my snowboard, our group of four (the standard group size for Helitrax), with Humphries as guide, headed down one at a time through a gorgeous alpine cirque.

When it was my turn, I pointed my board downhill and picked up speed. The rounded nose planed up and skimmed across the powder. Without a thought, I cut down the mountain, shooting up rooster tails of snow that never gave a hint of anything solid below.

My fists relaxed. I took a breath.

“Hey,” I thought. “This is just skiing.”

I cut back and forth over the snow in perfect cosine curves, as if controlled by a sublime force. It was easy.

That’s the secret of heli-skiing, Humphries said. “People who have done it like to brag about it like it’s something extreme.

“But powder skiing is just about balance. That’s really the thrill of it. With powder this deep, you’re riding above the earth, literally floating — a pretty amazing feeling.”

REALIZING A LIFELONG DREAM

We slid up to the landing zone at the valley’s bottom just as the ’copter arrived from dropping off one of the three other groups skiing that day. For 10 minutes we goofily stared at each other in the chopper’s cramped cabin, offering insightful opinions like, “Dude, that was . . . awesome.” Then we were back at 12,500 feet on a new face of pure, untouched heaven.

At $133 a run, this is the caviar of skiing, so it’s not surprising that conversations at the landing zone ranged from the next around-the-world business trip to local real estate deals.

Brian “Speed” Miller, a guide and one of the founders of Helitrax, said a lot of the clients are “the totally affluent who just fly around the world heliskiing.”

But Helitrax also has a steady stream of meat-and-potato clients for whom one day of heli-skiing might be the realization of a lifelong dream.

“They’re good skiers who have been going to the resorts for years and they always wanted to climb in a helicopter,” Speed said. “Sure, they have to save up to do it, but afterwards, a lot of them tell me it was the best day of their lives.”

If you can have the best day of your life for $795, he said, “that’s a pretty good deal.”

For run after run, our guide took us through terrain never steeper than a mild black, with no bumps and few trees. We would stop to catch our breath and enjoy the supreme satisfaction of seeing neat rows of tracks undulating for thousands of vertical feet.

At the end of the day, the guides often have to convince their exhausted clients that there isn’t time for “just one more ride.” The helicopter swings back toward Telluride, and in a brilliant, if unintended, marketing move, swings low over the groomed, skier-dotted trails of Telluride Mountain.

After a day reveling in the fluff of the San Juans, the people on this chic ski hill look like serfs fighting over crumbs. I pitied them.

When I hit solid ground again, I was so worn out that I slumped back to town and fell into bed, the whole time repeating, “That was the best skiing day of my life.”