The Maligne Lake Ski Club is taking a long, hard look at its future, after Parks Canada’s caribou conservation measures have left its financial future in question.
The club is the non-profit organization that operates the Shangrila ski cabin in the Maligne Valley. The cabin will remain shuttered until March as a result of delayed winter access in large swaths of the Maligne Valley, which Parks instituted to help protect the valley’s struggling caribou herd.
The result is months of cancelled reservations to the cabin and the loss of significant revenue for the ski club.
Last week the club’s executive met to discuss the organization’s future. According to Vice President Sandy Cox the club doesn’t know exactly what that future will look like, but members are optimistic that they won’t be forced to fold.
“We sort of sat and discussed our vision for the club, and how we look 15 years down the road,” she explained.
While that discussion touched on what Shangrila offers, what it means to people, and why it is important to the community, it also focused on the books.
“I guess one of our big things is will we be financially viable—and I guess we’ve decided that, yes we can be, we just have to decide how that works,” Cox said.
She pointed out that while the club will be losing a significant amount of money from the people who would have stayed in the cabin in January and February, the fact that the cabin will remain closed during those months means some of their big expenses—like propane and flying human waste out of the valley—will also be significantly diminished.
But even if the club can’t know exactly how much the financial hit will hurt, its members realize that they will likely have to take steps to make operating the cabin financially viable in the coming decade.
Extending the season until the end of April—if snow conditions cooperate—is one small solution, as is raising fees to rent the cabin. Cox pointed out that fees haven’t gone up in a very long time, but if the club did make that move, she wants to make sure it is still affordable.
“You don’t want to also become so expensive that it’s just for the privileged few,” she said.
Cox said that right now the executive is in the process of writing up a proposal for future operation of the cabin. After the proposal is complete, the executive will circulate it to its members, and then submit it to Parks Canada.
They hope to have that done by Feb. 20, and then, Cox said, they will wait to hear back from Parks.
So far, she said the club hasn’t yet heard too much from Parks, but that the organization has expressed a desire to work with the ski club as it figures out its future. She said that she expects the conversation to begin in earnest once the club has submitted its proposal.
“We just sort of have to wait and see, and follow the process, and just be positive that we can make things work. Because it’s a pretty beautiful area, and there’s lot’s of history there,” Cox said.
Trevor Nichols
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