BIG DREAMS FOR ZINCTON
David Harley believes the mountain resort business model is broken. The sport’s future does not lie in bringing planeloads of skiers into Denver International Airport and shuttling them off to cookie-cutter areas along an interstate. Rather, Harley thinks adventurous skiers will come to Zincton, his proposed new fourseason resort near New Denver, a remote mountain town on the shores of B.C.’s Kootenay Lake.
The 68-year-old entrepreneur has a long history in the outdoor adventure world. In 1983 his FarWest clothing brand was the first in Canada to use a new waterproof-breathable fabric called Gore-Tex. (The company’s success was rewarded with a cover feature about Harley in the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business magazine). He moved on from FarWest in the mid-’90s to start Valhalla Pure, a chain of a dozen locally owned backcountry stores in Alberta and B.C. that have been able to successfully compete against corporate giants like Sport Chek and MEC. He’s been a keen backcountry skier since the early ’70s, hitting first tracks at Rogers Pass “at a time when we had zero safety gear: no beacons, no probes, no airbags, no Canadian Avalanche Association app on our phones—nothing.”
Access to Zincton (its name is a nod to the early days of zinc and silver mining in the Kootenays) will be via B.C. Provincial Highway 31A from New Denver over to Nakusp. In terms of mountain passes in southern B.C., this is about as remote as it gets. The parking lot is at 825m, and a short gondola will whisk skiers up to the car-free village at 1,036m. A range of accommodation options—from simple pensions to more luxurious lodges comparable to current heli, cat or backcountry skiing offerings—would be offered.
Two fixed-grip lifts will service an inbounds acreage about the size of Silver Star, with a vertical drop of approximately 670m. “Inbounds skiing would go up to around 6,000 feet and experienced skiers could access an additional 1,000 vertical beyond the area boundary,” Harley says. “There are certainly possibilities for runs as long as 3,000 vertical feet.”
Obviously, safety is a key issue here, since most of the skiers would be self-guided and self-propelled. “We’ll have a very engaged ski patrol to perform avalanche control and effective signage,” Harley says. “There would likely be some form of skills testing to ensure that skiers have at least the basics of avalanche