can anyone confirm that Charlie has bought Lake Louise?

word on the street is it's true - 50/50 with Murray Edwards for now, and LL is no longer a part of RCR, but its own company.

Well, swamp thing seems to know a thing or two about real estate (location, location, location -- good one!) but I'm going to wait until Egon Spangler, the smartest guy on the forum, weighs in on the matter.

It's true, Egon or not. The street I'm talking about (the one the word's on) runs right through the Lake, and while the final sig isn't yet on the dotted line, it's only a matter of days. You'll see.....

Think back to a note posted last week - "Something interesting happened today". I'm surprised you bigliners have been so slow in picking this one up

funny i hear the same thing about quiksilver selling the hardgoods division but nothings final until money changes hands...

...hmm... :| ...carry on then...

Unless you already knew, there's no way anyone was going to figure it out from that vague-ass post. I thought at first he meant that I was able for the first time to fit four fingers up my ass instead of the usual three. :shock:

That didn't take long...

http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=8f1e4bd9-5944-494b-849a-15163ff02c40

Does Charlie like jumps? ;)

so its not RCR... does that mean, a real park again???

So besides possibly getting a park again, what other possible benefits could we expect? I know a lot of locals in Fernie have gripes how RCR runs things there, however is there anything that new management can do to "fix" or improve things at Louise?

Invite Ullr back and entice him to hang around for a good long while.

Authentic cheese curds in the poutine.

wow...did somebody actually just use charlie locke, lake louise and the term "new management" in the same sentence???

now thats some funny f-in stuff..

do i need to give you a history lesson about how charlie pretty much ran his entire empire into the ground and murray came to buy up the scraps and boot charlie out...

so mister locke with all due respect would be the last fricken thing you could call "new management"..

more of a case of "oh look we fawked it up just as bad as the last guy..may as well bring him back"..lol

heres my suspiscion...lets see 3 yrs from now if i was as acurate as the fortress debocle.

im guessing murray has finally realised theres no real money to be made in ski area operations..and has slowly been sucking dry his oil backup money..so first he calls charlie..who trully does love louise.. to come in and pay for half now....possibly half later.. thats the first step in breaking apart "rcr"

then all the others will end up for sale..or closed..shit maybe hiko has been phoned to buy back into fernie..lets hope so..

at any rate i predict the downfall of the rcr empire...and if not dowfall..then severely reduced in size.

just me...stirring the pot..yet again.

debate amongst yourselves as to the validity of these predictions ;)

oh on the park thing..did you guys know that nakiska wont even have a rail park this year...nadda..nothing..zip..not one single man made feature is to be placed or built on the hill....and thats fact...mind you possibly not public fact yet...oooops ;)

not sure if this is rcr wide or just this hill...but there...more fuel for the fire

Well, you can always come to Drumheller to ride some rails and huck some jumps... (can of warms number 1)

It would be realy nice if CODA would take over Nakiska; it is a racing hill and CODA does great job at the Olympic legacy thingie... (can of warms number 2)

Charlie built Lake Louise from a mish-mash of old chairs and infrastructure into a world class hill. He also forced Scurfields into building up Sunshine. Charlie was good to the place as he run it with his heart. His heart was not in the other places and they always suffered. When Charlie was hurting LL, we all knew Charlie was hurting! My prediction is that if Charlie just sticks to LL things will be good! Just dump most of your upper management or at least teach them how to work as a team, and will be all good.... (can of warms number 3)

The last can I closed long time ago...and no, you can not get me to open it!

My opinions...

Z-man

And for the ones that still do not understand the ski industry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnU2DY9TRDs

could this new info we have received about the ownership of LL be a clever wolf hidden in sheeps clothing. Could it actually be that RCR and LL realize the local's are starting to become fed up so why not make some changes but don't change to much because the public might expect to much kind of attitude. Could it be this might be the only solution to maintain ownership, keep #'s secure and lead the public to misbelieve for another decade of $ bills from unkept promises and false advertising.

Why not just sell the hill to Scurfield at a nice profit and walk away if real estate is the big problem...

That advertising department at LL have quite the marketing campaign. Perhaps similar to a certain alberta resort who's strong corporate moto was over promise and under deliver and at certain times why bother delivering at all. Maybe that figure head was at one time employed under the same regime.
lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol

"Could it actually be that RCR and LL realize the local's are starting to become fed up"

what locals? there are no LL locals except the hill and hotel workers...

The devil you know verses the devil you dont.

Still its fukin funny "Chucky back" god i am glad i dont work there anymore.

Given second life, one is a different person... given third - well, who knows. But I do not cast stones...there is pleanty of forum users that will! (uh, was that a dig???) :lol:

Go Charlie Go!

Murray Edwards is a smart guy!

He is getting some cash out at the top of the market.

I predict that tourism for Banff this winter will take an large fall. Much of the growth in Banff winter visitor numbers over the last few years has come from the UK. We have just seen a huge drop in the housing market and the problems in the financial sector do not need to be highlighted other than to mention that it is the #1 sector in the UK. The finance industry is highly concentrated in London, which is where many of Banff's UK skiers are based. Added to this is that, over the past few years, a British pound would have bought at least 2 Canadian dollars, whilst you will be lucky to get 1.90 this season.

The average UK family skier view their winter holiday as a extra to their summer break. When people cut back, they may give the winter trip a miss this year, or at the very least, spend a week nearer to home. There are a lot of newer cheaper alternatives on the market in Europe now, such as Bulgaria.

It is not all about UK visitors, but they're an important market for Banff. Effects on US visitors will probably be similar but perhaps less harsh due to proximity.

The bulk of the downturn will be felt in the Banff area and so as Charlie Locke takes over the reigns, there will be a large fall in revenue, through no fault of his own. Charlie is probably doing this more out of love than anything else, and fair play to him for that. I would love to be skiing my own hill when I'm his age. However, don't expect there to be many new lifts for the next few years and don’t expect the customer service to get any better.

I hope this prediction proves to be wrong, but on the up side, the slopes might be a bit quieter.... there's always an up side.

Tourism to Banff will fall but it's not like there isn't a city with over a million people an hour and a half away with more rich people than pretty much every other city in the country (per capita), so it's not like he has nothing to work with.

Like I said, UK and US visitors are not everything. Calgary has been booming for the last six years on the back of the oil price boom which is stalling over the short to medium term.

You are right, success depends on his ability to persuade more Calgarians to drive through the TCH widening construction to Louise, rather than saving the gas money and stopping at Sunshine. Also, with the new bridge through the kickinghorse pass, those that do make the drive might just carry on to Kickinghorse instead.

He has a tough job to do. I hope he succeeds.

Chuckys back,it kills me :D :D

I know we all bitch about our favorite ski hill operators (and we should have the right as paying cusotmers, no differednt then going out for dinner) but who here would have the balls to put thier money up and invest in a hill like Louise. You would either have to be crazy, have an unlimmeted trust fund account (I hate you and envey you at the same time!) sell a shit load of overpriced pouitne or just have a pure love for what you are investing in (and a big wad of cash you don't mind losing)

For better or worst at least somebody has an interest in giving us a choice.

I still thing it's fucking crazy.

Sanity is such an abstract concept, especially when it relates to ones love! :lol:

POWDERS THICKER THAN OIL.......... :twisted:

word on the street is that Charlie is bringing back a park & pipe

would be nice...

Locke is back at the helm, but this is definitely not the old days.

I had a few issues with Locke back in the day,... but the best thing he ever provided was AFFORDABLE SKIING. Season's passes were only a few hundred bucks, it was incredible.

How times have changed. Day tickets $75-$80. Passes at $1400. Louise Card is $80 and is no longer good at Fernie... Fernie doesn't even have a card by the looks of it... I could understand why the Fernie locals are disappointed with how things developed there... you have to drop $1400 for the season or else figure $80 is worth a day on the hill? At least my LL pass this year is free --- but my wife is SOL! ;)
It's really unfortunate. In the 90s, the ski hills here were really 'family' places -- even high school kids could afford to go... now, its not the same. You don't see people eating bagged lunches. No old-schoolers on 8-yr-old equipment. It's officially a rich-man sport now. Too bad.

Guess it'll be a bigger backcountry season than I'd thought then! Put the free back in my freeskiing...

"t's officially a rich-man sport now. Too bad." ...

Or a dirtbag's 'cause I'm sure as shit not rich but I do love my new pow boards and my chewed up shoes and shitty old couch!

cold smoke the only consistent thing about your post with "the old days" is complaining about the new days

since the dawn of skiing someone has always complained about skiing being expensive and how great things were "in the old days"
when were seasons passes "a few hundred bucks" unless you were a student or staff at a shop, i'm guessing the 80s?
you know, when you could buy a house for 40K$ in Calgary or 10K$ in Canmore and SSV and Louise had less than 10 lifts between them?
Day tickets at 80$? about the price of a tank of gas in a normal car? seems like that's consistent with history...
Do you love your wife? Buy her a pass. You still get them both at 2for1 which is better than pretty much everybody elses deal.
bagged lunches are a sign of a good thing? maybe people would rather have cooked food?
Families? maybe they are all at Norquay/Castle/Nakiska/Pano/Kimberley? i really don't know as my family will be at LL and Fernie with all of my friends that have families as well....
there are lots of dudes on 8 year old equipment, they are from Sakatchewan or Ontario, everyone else figured out that skis get better evry 3 or 4 years....

alright waxman... so I could be off-base on this one... maybe I'm just a washed up old-timer lamenting the good old days. Yeah, there's lots of families at the resorts, and there's always the dirtbags living the dream -- I used to be one of them.

For the record;
The "few hundred bucks" i referred to was indeed a student rate - so that's true. But consider: In the late 1990s (that's the 90s, not the 80s), you could buy a student super-pass for $400, which was good at nine different mountains. I don't know the exact adult rate then, but I believe it was around $700; so close to half-price from today. In the same period, I moved to Whistler, where a season's pass ran for $1400 (in 1998) - the student rate was way above Alberta. The whole resort was a totally different feel than Lake Louise then, everything was higher end. Yeah, maybe the Vancouverites figured out that they "like cooked food" instead of bagged lunches. But they also figured they'd pay $15 for lunch, and a pile more money on pretty much everything... which represents a different clientele from those who save money by packing their own food to the hill --- something way more common at Lake Louise then. In the 10 years since, a ton of money has been invested into Lake Louise and Fernie, and it has pushed the product into a much more upscale market, even as Calgary's best cheap option around - Fortress - went under.
That's all I was getting at. Some will like it. Others, like me, are sad to see the change.

[[ And yes, $80 IS a lot of money for one day of skiing - at least compared to prices not so long ago. How many years did it take to go from $50 to $80?... At least in Whistler you get Whistler - in my view, a product far superior to Louise (especially when they decide to junk the entire park at LL). Again, my whole point is that the 'deals' don't seem to be there so much anymore. Its a higher end market - that's all. Splitting Fernie from LL only amplifies the situation; less deals, more expensive. ]]

Okay, but you are right -- I am one of those guys bitching about the cost of things compared to before...and I'm well aware that the era of cheap skiing in the rockies (the 90s) may be exactly what bankrupted Locke... and of course Locke was notoriously stingy with his staff...
So whatever... I mean I'm still happy. I got my AT set-up, a free pass -- ski resorts are at least surviving, and if you got the $$, they're offering a good product. I'm stoked for another good season!

..........and SINCE you mention it........ ;) .........$80 for a "normal car's" tank of gas? I dunno dude, mine's like $37 bucks, for a 16-yr-old 4-door sedan... you might need some better mileage? ;) :D

okay 37$ this week...at 82 cents a liter...

http://www.biglines.com/blarticles/4216/Charlie_Locke_Talks_About_Buying_Back_Lake_Louise.

This thread inspired this story!

It looks like I might be wrong (occasionaly this happens):

http://industryreport.mountainnews.com/2008/12/theres_plenty_of_snow_in_the_a.shtml