CELEBRATING 65 YEARS
TheStar.com – Travel – A mountain of history at popular resort
A mountain of history at popular resort
PHOTO COURTESY OF BLUE MOUNTAIN RESORT
Blue Mountain has come a long way from its modest beginnings, with a few huts around a parking lot.
Jozo Weider’s world-class dream comes true at Blue Mountain
January 18, 2007
Roberta Avery
Special to the Star
TOWN OF THE BLUE MOUNTAINS–George Weider was just three years old in 1941 when his father Jozo Weider brought him to live on a farm at the foot of Blue Mountain.
His father, who was originally from Czechoslovakia, had a dream, says Weider. He wanted to turn the slopes of the Niagara Escarpment rising 220 metres above his farm into a world-class ski resort.
“He dreamed and designed on a most ambitious scale,” says Weider.
The dream was ahead of its time and would take more than half a century to come to pass. Now, however, Blue Mountain is celebrating the 2006-07 season as the 65th anniversary of its first winter as a ski resort and –with a little help from Vancouver-based Intrawest Corp. – can now boast 700,000 skier visits a year.
That makes it the third-busiest ski resort in Canada after Whistler, B.C., and Tremblant, Quebec, Weider says.
Walking through the village that Intrawest has built on what was once the hayfield that he helped his father farm in the 1950s, Weider shakes his head almost in disbelief at the upscale condos, restaurants and boutiques.
“It’s still hard to take in,” he says. But his father, who died in 1971, probably wouldn’t be surprised at all.
“A village was something he wanted to do right from the beginning,” says Weider, who is still part of Blue Mountain Resorts as chairman of the board, while Jozo’s son-in-law, Gord Canning, is president.
Jozo’s daughter, Katherine Canning, died on Jan. 8 of this year. A former skiing champion, she was a big part of Blue Mountain, waiting tables for her father as a young girl and managing the retail stores and selling condos as an adult.
In the beginning, things were very different.
In those days, skiing was an elitist sport because it required great physical fitness and endurance, and the narrow steep trails made it positively dangerous. But Jozo set about changing that.
Armed with a saw, he began to clear wider and safer trails. Then, to encourage the skiers to stay a while, he began to build a lodge at the bottom of the north end area. He was still hammering the nails into the bunk beds when the first trainload of skiers arrived at the depot in Craig- leith.
“The lodge was charming and by the standards of the day, quite luxurious,” says Weider.
The ski lift consisted of two sleds drawn by a cable and powered by an old truck engine and was considered state of the art and a lot easier to use than some of the older-type rope tows.
Jozo quickly established a reputation for enthusiasm and hard work and in the early days kept Blue Mountain financially afloat by working on his farm in the summer.
George Weider remembers his father cultivating fruit trees on what is now known as the Apple Bowl. The beautiful Georgian Bay apples that he grew there were stored so that they could be sold to skiers during the winter.
His father also had the vision to add on services. An old sheep barn was converted into a ski shop and a second lodge, called the Ski Barn, offered a restaurant, cafeteria and entertainment.
Money remained tight, so the ever-optimistic Jozo turned the basement of the Ski Barn into a pottery to use up the clay scraped from the hills to smooth out the slopes. Blue Mountain Pottery was eventually sold around the world and is now considered a collector’s item.
Jozo Weider was inducted into the Canadian Ski Hall of Fame in 1983 for his vision and perseverance in developing one of Canada’s most dynamic ski areas.
The Weider family continued the tradition of supplying visitors with the best accommodation of the day by adding the five-star Blue Mountain Inn in 1981 with 100 guest rooms and a conference centre. Meanwhile state-of-the-art ski lifts and snowmaking equipment were added and then in 1989, Monterra Golf was added – the first major step toward making Blue Mountain a year-round resort.
Blue Mountain now boasts 13 lifts, including four high-speed six-person chairs with 34 trails ranging from beginner slopes to double black diamond steeps. To mark the 65th anniversary, the Pontiac Grand Prix chair at the north end of the resort has been renamed the Jozo Weider chair.
In 1999, the Weider family sold a 50 per cent interest in the resort to Intrawest along with a 20-hectare parcel of land – formerly a hay field – where Intrawest would build its village. The village is only about 60 per cent complete, but the 700 condo hotel rooms and suites already built can take 3,500 overnight guests, five times the number that could be accommodated in the Blue Mountain Inn and adjoining condos in 1999.
Weider is confident that the recent acquisition of Intrawest by New York-based Fortress Investment Group L.L.C. won’t have any impact on the plans to complete the village by 2011 or on the development of the Orchard Pod on the south side of the mountain that could be open by 2008-09. Plans there include a new six-person ski lift and a base lodge.
The goal is to increase skier visits to one million per year. Now that would make Jozo proud.
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Roberta Avery is a freelance writer based in Meaford, Ontario.
http://www.thestar.com/Travel/article/171619
