The first season at the Mount Timothy ski hill under new owners Larry Henderson and Kevin McCray went fairly well with lots of positive comments from skiers, boarders and snowmobilers, according to general manager Walter Bramsleven.
“The snowmobile trail is really starting to get used quite a bit so that was a great development for us for this year. But yeah lots of positive feedback from both communities and skiers and boarders from out of town as well,” he says referring to 100 Mile House and Williams Lake.
There were a lot of out of town guests over the Christmas season and Family Day was hugely successful, according to Bramsleven, adding the latter will be an annual event.
“The rental shop and our ski school did really well so we’re looking to developing a lot of that this coming summer and getting more instructors and more equipment up here.”
There was some hesitancy with school groups and season pass-holders as well as a need to rebuild trust with the community but they had great numbers this year, says Bramsleven.
“We had tremendous response from the schools basically from the middle of January onward. Every Thursday and Friday we had school groups of various sizes.”
They’re looking at developing some cabins, a campground and completing the rental shop down below, says Bramsleven, adding that they’re still working on permits. The concept was for 10 cabins and they were hoping to have about half a dozen up and done this year as well as the campground but there’s a lot of snow up there this year, much more so than this time last year, says Bramsleven.
“So a lot of it’s going to depend on how fast the snow melts.”
The hill is still impacted by COVID-19 restrictions because they were going to have a snowmobile rally sometime in April, they were looking at extending the ski season on the weekends, lost the last six days of skiing and some other social events, he says.
“There definitely has been some impact on us for sure,” he says. “[We’ll] see what this next year holds for us. A lot of this is dependent on when this COVID thing starts to sort itself out. Hopefully, that won’t impact us coming up this summer but at this point, nobody really knows what’s going to happen.”
