Cat Skiing Blog

CALGARY — Joey O’Brien credits a major Hollywood star for some of the progress he’s been able to make toward bringing skiing back to the Fortress Mountain ski resort.

“Thank you, Mr. DiCaprio,” said O’Brien of Leonardo DiCaprio, who starred in Inception, a major movie filmed in part at Fortress, about 120 kilometres west of Calgary.

In shooting a climactic scene of the $160-million thriller there in 2009, the Warner Bros. movie studio spent $250,000 replacing a deteriorating bridge on the only access road.

“We’re bringing a dead resort back to life,” said O’Brien. “That gave us a kick-start. They also worked on the road and did a bunch of other stuff.

“And when they did their cleanup the following July, the place was cleaner than when they arrived. That helped us as well.”

Now, for the first time since Fortress was forced to close in 2007 under a previous owner, a group of paid skiers will take to the mountain in a new snow cat operation called KPOW.

It’s a modest first step toward the eventual relaunch of the resort, with a maximum of 14 participants who can be accommodated per day.

Skiers and snowboarders can each pay $350 to be taken up the mountain in a snow cat and then carve out their own runs in fresh powder.

O’Brien said the limited cat skiing will give his operation and safety team a better chance to get to know the snowpack.

O’Brien has hired Chris Chevalier as director of mountain operations and maintenance, Chris Mueller as snow services manager and Rowan Harper as snow safety director.

All three are seasoned ski resort professionals who previously worked for Sunshine Village. Chevalier and Harper, along with two other employees, have filed a wrongful dismissal lawsuit against Sunshine owner Ralph Scurfield.

“I hired them because they’re fabulous people and they’re industry leaders,” said O’Brien. “They’re good people I’ve enjoyed spending time with and will need to enjoy spending time with them over the next decade or so.”

In 2007, Alberta Sustainable Resource Development pulled five leases from the resort when it was owned by Banff Rail Co., run by Zrinko Amerl.

The province said Banff Rail Co. failed to fix an unsafe bridge on the sole access route to the site and had missed several lease payments.

The province reinstated the leases in 2010 after O’Brien’s company, Fortress Mountain Holdings, took over.

O’Brien had been named Alpine Canada’s first chief operating officer in 2004. Prior to that, he owned the Ski Martock resort in Windsor, N.S., for 27 years.

In the two years since he took over, old buildings have been demolished, 18 truckloads of scrap metal have been removed and three old chairlifts have been dismantled and hauled off.

Three more lifts still need to be taken out.

Planning, surveying and engineering for utilities, new buildings, roads and parking lots will need to be completed and permits issued before construction on the new resort can begin. It could be more than two years before shovels go in the ground, said O’Brien.

He won’t comment yet on his plans for the resort, but said former fans of the ski runs should be pleased.

“In terms of runs, the mountain will remain essentially the same as before with what I’ll call expanded ski terrain,” he said.

Calgary Herald

smyers@calgaryherald.com
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