I happened to be in our main office in mid to late February and was chatting with our VP, who is a huge ski fanatic. I mentioned the goose chase I had agreed to and he told me that Sunshine Village (where he has had a ski pass for the last 20 years) was getting a new lift and the old Angel chair was purchased by Castle Ski resort to replace an even older lift.
The timing wasn’t great as this swap was going to happen in the summer (after the VRGE was slated to be opened) but I had no other leads so I called Castle Mountain Resort. I chatted with a friendly customer service representative that quickly squashed all my hopes and said they do not intend on selling any of the old equipment they were replacing. Back to zero.
Several weeks went by quickly as we were racing to ensure all the construction activities were ongoing and progressing as scheduled. I had a chance encounter at the coffee machine with a coworker who I hadn’t chatted with in some time. He was bragging about the greatest ski day he and friends just had at KPOW where they were cat skiing on the former Fortress Resort. Fortress Ski Resort closed abruptly in 2004 for reasons I do not know but they basically just picked up and left until, until almost ten years later a couple gentlemen started running a cat skiing operation on the old ski hill. The coworker described the ski conditions as beyond excellent and had the best day skiing ever, then went on to tell me about all the old / vintage lifts and ski lodges that were still on the property . Did they possibly have old lifts?
The next day (mid march by now) I called KPOW and left a short but pretty specific voice mail about my intentions of buying an old chair lift. Hung up the phone and thought; who knows maybe I will get a call back.
Thoughts of the chair lift faded as I was busy with the day to day coordination, scheduling, and problem solving associated with VRGE.
Saturday morning early February I was taking my daughter to play hockey and received a phone call. I quickly picked up to… “Hi Eric, this is Chevy out at KPOW, I hear you want to buy a chairlift?”. That morning I had quite a conversation with Chevy. He was interested in EllisDon and our project in Revy and I enjoyed chatting with him for 10 or so minutes. Finally he said they have lots of chairlift available including doubles, triples, older doubles; basically exactly what I had been looking for. The problem was that it was early Feb and everything was still berried in 10ft of snow. We ended the phone call exchanging cell numbers and he was going to text me pictures of the chairs once he had a chance.
Sure enough a few weeks later three or four pictures came across my cell with some snow covered lifts. “Any of these work?”. We had options. At this point I thought if we found anything we would be lucky but now we have multiple sizes and styles to pick form. I circulated the good news and some pictures over to Matt for direction on a favourite style and size.
I then messaged Chevy back and said we would buy a few and gave him the chairlift style we were after. He replied: “Call me back in April and we will see if enough snow has melted to be able to access the lifts.”
So we waited.
