Mountains of support needed for community hills
Struggling with expenses, rural ski facilities in Western Canada find creative ways to survive
EDMONTON — Tawatinaw Valley ski hill isn’t what you’d call big. Three T-bars and a rope tow. No high-speed quad. Not even a chairlift.
But located north of Edmonton in a hamlet of five people, it’s where locals like Heather Toporowski started skiing. From a nearby town of 100 people, Toporowski learned on school ski trips at age 12.
“I’m 58 now and that’s been a lifetime recreation opportunity,” Toporowski said. “A generation past me have been learning to ski the same way.”
Westlock County — an amalgamation of hamlets and towns that owns the hill — has been trying to figure out what to do with the hill, which opened in 1967, since a plebiscite last year when residents voted to try to sell it.
It was just bleeding cash and needed more than $1 million in upgrades.
This episode was resolved this month with a new nonprofit taking over just weeks after the county announced it was shutting the hill down in October unless a buyer came forward. But it’s emblematic of a struggle across Western Canada.
Ski hills are expensive, they’re hostage to the weather and smaller communities are shrinking. And there are lots of them — most of the 92 ski hills between Manitoba and the west coast are community hills, according to the Canada West Ski Association.
Those hills matter, said Kelly VanderBeek, a former Olympic ski racer who was born in small town of Kapuskasing, Ont.
“My first memory is actually leaning on this rope tow and recognizing that the big kids … would get to the top of the rope tow and that was my biggest life goal at the moment,” VanderBeek said. “My mom and dad, they had visions of our family going on ski vacations, but you can’t do those if you don’t know how to ski.”
So there’s something of a conflict in small communities between the importance of outdoor activities and their cost.
“To me, it’s a part of our fabric of being Canadian ... teaching our youth to play rather than hibernate in the winter,” said VanderBeek. “Without these small clubs, you’re missing a massive demographic.”
It’s not like the Tawatinaw Valley hill was bankrupting the 7,000-person county, said Reeve Lou Hall, but over the years there were cost overruns on renovations and the hill ran deficits of $200,000 to $300,000 per year. The county’s still paying off $800,000 in debt on the new chalet and it needs $1.2 million to $1.5 million in capital upgrades.
Westlock County CAO Leo Ludwig said after Alberta’s economy stalled, there was a significant drop-off in property tax revenues and additional expenses “well into the six figures” because of the carbon tax. All of this conspired to make maintaining the ski hill a burden.
After the plebiscite, in which 53 per cent voted to offload the hill, the non-profit Friends of Tawatinaw working group came together, pitching the county on its plan to save the hill.
“That’s when a number of us that were users and user groups kinda went, ‘Oh my gosh, they’re going to sell it,’” said Toporowski, who’s involved with the group. “So we started thinking about what we could do.”
The key to success for what’s also called the Pine Valley Snow Resort will be diversifying the offerings, such as converting it into a four-season operation. The chalet, for example, will need to become a community hall and a place for events.
Several top-tier Canadian skiers began their careers at smaller hills. If not for Chicopee Ski Club in Kitchener, Ont., where she was raised after moving from Kapuskasing, VanderBeek said she never would’ve started racing.
“The only reason my parents signed us up was it was down the street. I could walk home from school, put on my ski boots and in my ski boots walk to the ski hill.”
By having a non-profit group operating the hill, Toporowski said, they’ll be able to seek out funding the county wouldn’t have been eligible for, find donors and rally volunteers. Westlock County will still provide $200,000 in operational funding and $50,000 for capital expenses.