October 2006

After a heady decade of growth, British Columbia's other mountain resort focuses on its skiers.

Last night was a big one for Fernie Alpine Resort. The ski area held its annual "Snow Dreams" party, and even in driving graupel, the outdoor porch of the slopeside Griz Bar was packed with hardy locals fixing for a good time. Inside, the humanity was jammed even tighter, downing pitchers of beer and vying for audiences with Snowflake and Sniffles, the shiny and shapely, fur-and-silver-lycra clad Kokanee Beer Glacier Girls.

Sometime after I went to bed, the partiers revived a dormant resort tradition-naked table sliding. To naked table-slide, you splash a long wooden table with beer, take your clothes off, and then see how far you can skim across the surface. The table, once a Griz Bar institution, was back after a two year hiatus, its first appearance since a particularly grisly employee party during which an old nail caught a slider's body-piercing and the resort's management decided it was time to give the table a facelift.

That may be the only major facelift we'll see in Fernie for a while. After an era of breathless expansion, the British Columbia resort has taken a break to refill its coffers and lick its wounds. When Canadian rancher and oil-and-gas mogul Charlie Locke acquired it in 1997, he moved quickly to transform the powder-rich but amenity-poor ski area, perched in the stunning backdrop of the Canadian Rockies above the gritty mining community that shares its name, into a competitive destination resort. In his second season at the helm, Locke added two chairlifts at Fernie and effectively doubled the area's lift-accessed terrain.

To finance the expansion, Locke, who had formed Resorts of the Canadian Rockies through the acquisition of seven additional ski resorts in B.C., Alberta and Quebec, also initiated a variety of real estate projects on 110 acres of land at the base of the mountain, including three attractive new haute-timber lodges and a residential subdivision. But while skier visits more than doubled within two years of the expansion, the bills came due before the real estate ventures could pay off. "Charlie Locke was all heart and no accounting," says current operations manager and 27-year ski-patrol veteran Robin Siggers. "He went all out, but he didn't think about where the money was coming from."

Unfortunately, his lenders did. In 2001, RCR was forced to seek protection from its creditors, and Calgary financier Murray Edwards, who owns interest in a host of oil companies as well as the National Hockey League Calgary Flames, stepped in to provide short-term funding to keep the company together. Edwards kept Locke on to run the ski resorts for a time, but Locke had ruffled more than a few feathers during his visionary but disastrous tenure at RCR, and in 2003 he left the company for good.

After Locke's Icarus-like rise and fall, the resort's once torrid pace of expansion cooled to what RCR spokesman Matt Mosteller calls a "slow simmer." With Edwards' imprimatur, the company delayed implementation of its grandiose master plan and focused instead on gradual improvements to enhance the skiing experience, increasing snowmaking, clearing trees for new runs and adding winch cats to provide steep grooming on the once-cruiser-deprived mountain. The idea, says Mosteller, is to finance operations through skier visits rather than selling off more and more property in "fast and furious real-estate-driven projects" to bankroll increasingly lavish improvements.

While RCR ultimately plans to develop more real estate at the base, the company wants to do so without incurring enormous debt and without building a "huge, concrete, cookie-cutter village" that might overwhelm Fernie's distinctively down-to-earth sense of place. "There's only one canvas like Fernie," says Mosteller. "Murray believes the mountains are too important to be sold off to people who don't care about the interests of the local communities."

If Locke's dreams of alpine domination hurt the resort's bottom line, however, they didn't hurt the turns, not one bit. The expansion he oversaw transformed what was a very good skiing experience into a fantastic one. The resort spans a series of parallel ridges and hulking, striated bowls and headwalls that hang suspended in the high peaks 3000 feet above the base area. The Timber Express and White Pass chairlifts, built soon after Locke acquired the resort, opened up Curry, Timber and Siberia Bowls to lift-accessed skiing for the first time, and made the expert terrain on the west side of Lizard Bowl far more accessible. The bowls themselves offer excellent intermediate-to-advanced skiing, while the chutes and tree shots on the ridges above provide experts with ample thrills and hidden pockets of soft snow.

Not that soft snow is hard to find. Locals call the Elk Valley, in which Fernie sits, the "toilet bowl," for the tendency of storm systems to track straight from the Pacific, hit the Lizard Range and swirl back over the resort. These juicy, wet dumps drop an average of 29 feet a year, producing twice the snowpack of some nearby resorts and nourishing cedar and tamarack trees more often found on the coasts than on the western slope of the Continental Divide. In Fernie, a "clear" day is not necessarily when the sun shines, but when the cloud ceiling is high enough that you can spot the top of the mountain-early last season, the patrol couldn't see the notoriously avalanche-prone headwall above Lizard Bowl for a month and a half. The resort's low elevation (3,500 feet at the base, 6,361 at the top) also presents a high likelihood of what the management euphemistically calls "rain events"-there are at least a few skiing-in-garbage-bag days each year.

Of course, that's all part of the resort's down-to-earth, just-the-powder-ma'am allure -- and it's something that both Edwards and the local community hope to preserve. The resort and the nearby town have grown tremendously since joining the continent's ski-resort development frenzy under Locke's watch. To some, "Fernie" has become a catchall phrase for development run amuck, and you'll often hear people describe their town or ski area described as being "the way Fernie used to be." There's no doubt the place has changed. The main drag in town, once full of the utilitarian businesses, is now lined with coffeehouses, bistros, and, in what may be the ultimate sign that a ski town has hit the destination-resort tipping point, a jarringly contemporary sushi restaurant.

But the town of Fernie is also still very much an interior B.C. community, with smokestacks and timber trucks rattling through, where half the population shows up for rowdy youth-league hockey tournaments to taunt the opposing team, throw whitefish and roosters on the ice, and watch the kids "whale on each other," says Siggers. And nobody wants such displays of regional personality to disappear.

It doesn't look likely to happen soon. Fernie may have more terrain and more luxury condos these days-and yes, a lovingly refinished naked-table-sliding surface-but its unassuming, nothing-but-the-powder roots remain.

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