Golden moments: Kicking Horse
British Columbia mountain resort bucks back to life: Huge snowfall, planned infrastructure livens area
Trent Edwards, CanWest News Service
Published: Thursday, April 12, 2007
GOLDEN, B.C. - Kicking Horse Mountain Resort just got back its mojo.
After a few years of losing momentum both locally and internationally, a whopping 10 metres of snowfall this season has brought back skiers and excitement to the young resort near Golden, B.C.
Smacked with storm after winter storm, the resort opened two weeks early on Dec. 1. Since then, it's been buried under regular lashings of flurries. Meanwhile, as European resorts languished in warm days, skiers from across the Atlantic scrambled to re-route their December vacations to the little-known Kicking Horse.
Michael Dalzell, a spokesman for the resort, says the area has experienced a snow year for the record books -- almost 11 metres when the season ended this week, about two metres more than they usually get all year.
"It's basically the perfect storm," Dalzell says.
And with great gobs of snow come great numbers of skiers.
While resort management wouldn't provide any hard numbers of skiers or revenues, they say visits from Europe and the U.S. have doubled. Western Canadian skiers living between Calgary and Golden have increased their visits to the resort by half.
Dalzell says Kicking Horse saw an overall increase of 15 per cent in operational revenues, which includes lift tickets, accommodation, rentals and retail sales, every season before this one (except 2004-05 when there was no increase, but more on that later).
This year, he says, operational revenue will jump 26 per cent.
In other words, since deep-pocketed Dutch developer Ballast Nedam took over the mountain from locals in 1999, the resort has gone from child prodigy to black sheep and is now back to a favourite son.
When a new gondola started whirring in 2000-01, many avid skiers hopped on the Kicking Horse bandwagon as international ski media heaped praise on the first four-season resort to open in North America in 25 years.
With its natural assets, gleaming gondola, new day lodge and fine dining at Canada's highest restaurant -- the much-praised Eagle's Eye at the summit -- and an ambitious master plan for a sprawling village, Kicking Horse was North America's next big thing.
But the hype, as it often does, overshot reality. Kicking Horse had many inconveniences for skiers accustomed to established ski resorts. On-mountain accommodation was sparse, there were few places to eat, few lifts and terrain that most skiers found daunting.
Kicking Horse is almost unrelenting in its steepness from top to bottom.
Only 15 per cent of the mountain is skiable for beginners. Another 15 per cent of terrain is intermediate, or blue, runs. But the running joke here is that these are "dark blues" many resorts would colour black or advanced.
"It's true big-mountain skiing," Dalzell says.
At first, the steep pitches worked in the resort's favour as word spread that this is the place to go in the advanced skiers' never-ending search for steep runs coated with ski-swallowing snow. But with few lifts, skiers had to hike to most of the alpine bowls and ski exhausting mogul runs from summit to village.
Over its first four seasons, these flaws were forgiven by skiers excited to ski the steep 'n' deep. And the resort experience got a bit better every year. Lifts were added (there are now five), a few condo apartment hotels and lodges were built, and summer grooming made many of the resort's 106 runs easier to ski.
But then came the disastrous winter of 2004-05. Just as the honeymoon phase was ending for local skiers, the resort had its most dangerous flaw exposed. Mid-winter rains melted Kicking Horse's lower mountain snow, exposing bushes and then grass.
Visitors had to ride the gondola down to the village after enjoying the high alpine.
Resort management plans to avoid future gondola descents by installing a $2.5-million snowmaking system over the summer to beef up the snowpack on mid- and lower-mountain runs in wonky weather years.
After that, all Kicking Horse needs to become a world-class ski resort is a finished village, more on-mountain beds and a range of groomed mid- and lower-mountain runs for beginner and intermediate skiers.
These are the goals of the resort's new president, Steve Paccagnan, who comes from 20 years of experience with the Intrawest ski resort chain.
"It's time to get the moms, kids, families," Paccagnan says.
After investing $40 million in resort infrastructure over its first seven years, Paccagnan says Kicking Horse is now "coming out of the mud."
Over the next few years, Kicking Horse plans to spend another $15 million fine-tuning its guest experience.
Expect more hotel rooms, restaurants and family-oriented improvements such as a beginner area on the lower mountain, extensive summer grooming and a new winch cat to soften some of the resort's steepest runs.
A village bar and live weekend entertainment are also in the works.
Geoff Kernick, a 39-year-old visiting the resort from Wanuka, New Zealand, with his wife Maureen for the third time in six years, says he's shocked at the pace of development.
"It's phenomenal. There was nothing but the day lodge and the gondola the first time I came here," he says. |
