despite 22 years of controversy, it appears Jumbo glacier resort

despite 22 years of controversy,
it appears Jumbo glacier resort,
north america’s biggest ski area
development in decades, is at the
finish line.
OVERCOM
theODDS
by george koCh
o
n a picture-perfect late March
morning, the helicopter carrying
Oberto Oberti and a small group
of colleagues and associates
alighted atop Farnham Glacier, most recently
home only to heli-skiers and the Canadian
Alpine Ski Team. Even allowing for the
postcard conditions, it was no ordinary heliskiing run for Oberti, who in his nearly 70
years has logged thousands of great descents
in many countries. This run was singular
because the surrounding domain had, just
days before, been officially sanctioned by the
B.C. government to become a year-round
alpine ski area: Jumbo Glacier Resort. Oberti’s
dream was to marry the European-style, peakto-valley, big-mountain descents of the kind
he grew up with in Italy, with the 1,000 cm+
annual snowfall of B.C.’s Purcell Mountains.
And now, after a tortuous 22-year regulatory
and political odyssey, Oberti was skiing the
terrain he had come to hold dear, knowing
that his dream was being realized.
The calf-deep overnight snow was magical
as we descended Farnham’s rolling pitches. To
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mark the occasion, Oberti was sporting the
red Descente jacket he had worn on his first
scouting run back in April 1990. “It’s a great
feeling that something that took so long, and
was so much work, is now moving towards
reality,” the architect later reflected. “In
these things you have ups and downs, and
at times I needed to work on other things to
restore my sense of balance, like the Kicking
Horse plan. But I always believed Jumbo has
such a great design, one that’s unique in
North America, that the quality of the idea
would prevail. The truth is like a cork: you
can press it down into the water but it comes
back up. Jumbo is like that, a very good
project with manageable environmental risks.”
After Farnham, which is to remain a
summer race-training site, the helicopter
headed for the heart of the future resort:
along the imposing and tortuously crevassed
Commander Glacier—a scene right out of the
French Alps—over the small Jumbo Glacier
itself, and onto the rounded top of Glacier
Dome at 3,000 metres, where most of the
skiing will take place. Under Phase I, Glacier
buYer’s guide 2012
Dome will be serviced by a long gondola
rising about 1,200 vertical metres, three
alpine T-bars providing year-round skiing and
three chairlifts on the treed slopes of the
upper valley at the glacier’s foot, providing
sheltered mid-winter skiing and connecting
the gondola base to the future village. The
village will initially grow to about 1,500
beds and sit on the site of an old sawmill
at 1,700 metres, about 35 km west (20 of
OMING
DS
toP: elis condam am atis, nos esimors clus
rebatus, nos viriu stem urnum ta auctuus et vivere co
cutum aderi is. tatum optioctum pover.
RigHt: elis condam am atis, nos esimors clus const
rebatus, nos viriu stem urnum ta auctuus et vivere mena co
cutum aderi is. tatum optioctum.
buYer’s guide 2012
» ski canada
47
oberti stresses
that Jumbo wiLL
not be reaL
estate-foCused.
for him, it’s
about the
skiing.
toP: elis condam am atis, nos esimors clus
rebatus, nos viriu stem urnum ta auctuus et vivere co
cutum aderi is. tatum optioctum pover.
ABoVe: elis condam am atis, nos esimors clus const
rebatus, nos viriu stem urnum ta auctuus et vivere mena co
cutum aderi is. tatum optioctum.
which are paved and plowed, the remainder
being logging roads needing upgrading) of
Panorama Resort near Invermere.
From our perch atop Glacier Dome we
could see nearly all of the Phase I resort,
although the weather was turning blustery. The
announcement a week earlier by the Liberal
government of B.C. Premier Christy Clark that
it had approved the Master Development
Agreement for Jumbo was, by Oberti’s count,
the seventh crucial step in the Jumbo saga. The
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previous six were his original signature of an
Interim Agreement with the B.C. government
in 1993, approval by the East Kootenay CORE
Table in 1994, the provincial Environmental
Assessment Certificate in 2004, approval
of the resort’s Master Plan in 2007, the
Impact Management and Benefit Agreement
with the Shuswap First Nation (which has
its reserve at Invermere) in 2008 and the
2009 reconfirmation of the 1996 vote by the
Regional District of East Kootenay (RDEK)
requesting that the province form a Mountain
Resort Municipality to govern the resort,
instead of controlling it via local zoning.
Those were just the turning points. The
process included almost innumerable studies,
reports, disputes, reversals, negotiations,
declarations and agreements. Although Oberti
fulfilled every demand, he says, “A lot of
buYer’s guide 2012
focus was placed on how a possible approval
would resonate politically, while our view
was that the process should focus on the
design and whether it was acceptable from
an environmental, aesthetic and engineering
standpoint.” But politics did dominate—
which made the March 2012 announcement
all the more surprising, coming from a
government in rocky political shape. I
was told through separate channels that
Bill Bennett, the East Kootenay MLA who
has been a vocal Jumbo supporter despite
frequent attacks, brought the matter before
cabinet over the winter and pushed his
colleagues to make a decision.
To say Oberti has the patience of Job fails
to illuminate the nature of his journey. Over
the 22 years, premiers, prime ministers and
presidents have come and gone, ruling parties
have been voted out of office, wars have
been fought, huge skiing corporations have
risen and gone bankrupt, the world economy
has boomed and lurched through repeated
crises—but Oberti has endured. For many
people, quietly giving up would have seemed
more rational. Then again, Oberti never
dreamt it would take 22 years.
“For a long time, Jumbo was ‘next
year country’,” he recalls with a chuckle.
“Following the Interim Agreement, we
continually anticipated approval ‘next year’. Our
understanding was always that once we fulfilled
the officially required steps, approval would
occur in accordance with the law and policy. The
environmental assessment process, for example,
includes legislated timelines. We are, of course,
very pleased that it happened at last.”
Along the way, Oberti met Grant Costello,
a long-time ski racing coach and fellow
passionate skier, as well as a real estate
expert living in Invermere. Costello became
senior vice-president of the company, Glacier
Resorts Ltd., and was part of the skiing group
in March. Oberti stresses that Jumbo will not
be real estate-focused. For him, it’s about the
skiing. “Many other mountain resort projects
in North America are driven by and dependent
on real estate,” he says. “This project will
have some real estate, but real estate is not
what motivated or will carry it. Jumbo was
conceived and will be built for real users—in
summer as well as winter.”
The descent from Glacier Dome was
pleasantly powdery. Although flanked by
gnarly terrain, visually stunning and copiously
snowed-upon, the main lift-serviced area is
pure intermediate heaven. The slopes are more
than merely broad and the pitches are vast,
with virtually no limit to the width of runs that
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Leaving aside that Canada has a
market economy in which businesses
are supposed to compete, in actual
fact Jumbo isn’t “yet another”
anything: it will be the first and
only true high-alpine ski resort in
North America.
could be groomed. Just what mainstream skiers
crave. Oberti had found the area back in the
mid-’80s, “purely from mapping”, after being
commissioned to hunt for “the ideal location
for an ideal ski area for North America”, one
that would optimize all the ingredients of
terrain, snowfall, snow quality, climate, location
and year-round use. Within a few years Oberti
had found the Jumbo Creek area. He skied
Glacier Dome for the first time in April 1990
with his son, Tom, heli-skiing operator Roger
Madson, long-time Ski Canada contributor Don
Bilodeau and two potential investors. Oberti
immediately began work on a resort proposal,
and presented the formal application to the
B.C. government the next year.
Opposition materialized. The more studies
were completed and regulatory steps satisfied,
the more stridently opponents claimed that
Jumbo was “pristine” or “wild”. Although the
area has been logged, has been mined, has
an existing road, held a village for decades,
and is the long-time scene of heli-skiing
and snowmobiling, opponents insisted that
building even half-a-dozen lifts would bring
environmental disaster. While the local Shuswap
came to see it as opportunity, the Ktunaxa First
Nation to the south remains opposed.
“The opponents come from a lot of angles,”
says Oberti. “A lot of people are genuinely
concerned but don’t have the right facts,
others have friends or relatives who are
opposed, some are business owners cowed by
the intensity of some opponents and some are
very negative people who feel Jumbo must be
stopped at all costs.”
One of the opposition arguments runs along
the lines that we don’t need “yet another” ski
resort. Leaving aside that Canada has a market
economy in which businesses are supposed
to compete, in actual fact Jumbo isn’t “yet
another” anything: it will be the first and only
true high-alpine ski resort in North America.
Plus the only ski area in Canada besides
Sunshine Village that sits atop the main spine
of a major mountain range, not merely out at
the edge of things or on an obscure hilltop
in the woods. It will have among the highest
annual snowfall on the continent and, at
buildout, the number-one vertical.
Several dozen protesters showed up at the
heli-pad at Panorama on the morning of our
skiing—including some young women who
have race-trained on Farnham in summer.
That evening, down in the Best Western hotel
in Invermere where I was staying, the young
woman at the front desk commented, “I find
it ironic that these girls think it’s fine for
them to ride diesel-powered snowcats so they
can ski on Farnham in summer, but the rest
of us should not be allowed to ride a lift and
have the same experience.”
The run’s final pitch was the most
satisfying: a nicely inclined apron beneath
towering cliffs, dappled with larches, ending
at the forest. Jumbo Glacier Resort, too,
still has a substantial pitch to navigate.
The B.C. government must make good on
its intention to create a mountain resort
municipality, similar to Whistler’s or Sun
Peaks’s governance structure, which is needed
to secure local permitting. And Oberti must
line up the Phase I construction financing of
$25-$50 million. He has been working with
a major French lift company plus the pension
fund that finances it, and several French
officials were in the March skiing party. Lastly,
Oberti will almost certainly have to run a
gauntlet of protesters (or worse) when the
earth-moving equipment and flatbed trucks
laden with lift towers finally arrive. Oberti
hopes to launch limited public summer skiing
on Farnham next year, and begin construction
of the gondola in 2014. d
Coming
next issue
National-team vet and Jumbo naysayer
Thomas Grandi dukes it out with longtime Ski Canada contributor George
Koch, who can’t wait to ride its first
lift, on whether or not the whole project
should go ahead.
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buYer’s guide 2012
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