High country is a metaphorically perfect backdrop for a family vacation. In a way, families are geological formations, shaped and sculpted over time as surely as any mountain peak or creeping glacier. Some families are as strong as granite. Others shatter like shale. The Clifford clan falls into the former category. Eleven of them were staying at Adamant Lodge; enough to command their own dinner table. Betsy, a feisty double widow who for years ran ranches in California and Wyoming with her husbands, is celebrating her seventieth birthday. The trip is a gift from her son and two daughters, their spouses, and four grandchildren.

I tag along with the Cliffords on one of their day hikes. The helicopter deposits us in the vicinity of Triangle Peak. Guide Ian Campbell surveys the lumpy, slightly melancholy topography and mutters,"It looks like the first hole on St. Andrews golf course." That thought triggers a typical Campbell (bad) joke: "If there's man in the forest and there's no woman to hear him, is the man still wrong?"

No such bickering would fill the air today, despite my best efforts to instigate trouble. "There's a lot of variety in this line," Betsy's son-in-law Ted tells me as we work our way toward higher ground. "We have everything from conservatives to ACLU members, but we all get along."

Indeed. Team Clifford scrambles up staircases of rock together, navigates a slippery ice field together, falls into an impromptu conga line and gives each other soothing neck massages. The entire clan—70-year-old Betsy included—does butt slides down a snowy slope. A properly executed, multi-generation butt slide can almost bring tears to your eyes. They're beyond the von Trapp family. This is the von Perfects.

"I guess because we don't live close together anymore you learn not to sweat the details," says Ted's wife, Katie.

Ted attributes the mutual affection to mutual compromise. For example, he and Betsy have a pact. "She doesn't mention the word 'Republican', " says Ted, "and I don't use the F word."

Hans Gmoser, the Austrian immigrant who founded Canadian Mountain Holidays, is credited with breaking the backwoods time barrier. But he didn't do it for the sake of family fun. It was basically a guy thing. In 1965 Moser hit upon the idea of ferrying hardcore skiers to virgin powder by helicopter. Thirteen years later he expanded into hiking. Hans initially ran a tight, even Spartan ship. It's said that CMH cooks weren't allowed to reach for any spice more exotic than salt and pepper. No alcohol was sold at the lodges. Elite skiers will gladly endure such deprivations, but, as a CMH guide observed at dinner one night, "Hans was soon to discover that the best skiers in the world had no money."

Hans wisely lightened up and expanded his market. Winter and summer, CMH now offers a full complement of luxuries: bar, sauna, gift shop, Jacuzzi, massages, gourmet meals. Only what's dubbed "electronic pollution" (television, radio, phones, and faxes) remains verboten except in emergencies. Today's skiers are accustomed to lodge life and lodge amenities. Hikers, on the other hand, come from a background of coffin-size tents and campfire-cooked mystery stew. Some are wary of pampering.

"The ability level we can cater to is so broad," says Jane Hay, CMH's director of marketing, "but there is that extreme [element] that says, 'You use a helicopter. That's for lazy people.' "

I once climbed Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro with a group of trekkers that included an electrician from Oregon. Whenever the going got especially tough, Lloyd would cheerily proclaim, "That which is too easily obtained is lightly esteemed." He was right. The outdoors does pay a high rate of return on sweat equity. Thus, I had qualms about CMH. Is this the Cliff Notes version of hiking? Is it another creature comfort that we can well do without, like automatic garage door openers, drive-in banking, and baseball stadium skyboxes?