ROB MURRAY: I’m speaking with Dan Markham from the Lake Louise Ski Resort. I’m super excited to be back on the slopes of Lake Louise this season with an early opening date this Thursday. This will be my 19th ski season here in the Bow Valley and usually Lake Louise sets a tentative opening date around the first or second weekend in November. More often than not, you hit that. It’s very rare for you to open early. What precipitated this decision?

DAN MARKHAM: ‘Precipitated’ is probably a good word. We’ve had some great snow over the last week, week and a half, as well as snowmaking teams and grooming teams that have gotten together on the mountain to make sure that we can open up not just the one run that we usually do, but we’re actually opening up both the Glacier Chair and the Grizzly Gondola. We’ll have runs from about 2,500 feet of vertical on seven different runs. We’ll have the Lodge of Ten Peaks and Whiskey Jack open for opening day, but Powder Keg will be open on Friday and Kuma Yama, the sushi ramen restaurant, will be open on Saturday. We’re looking forward to a great opening day on Thursday, which is actually the earliest opening we’ve ever had.

RM: I think a lot of people, myself included, are very excited to ride up the new Summit Chair and check out the new West Bowl terrain. Any idea when we can expect to be able to do that?

DM: The original opening date was scheduled for November 6th and obviously we’re a little ahead of schedule there, but we’re still scheduled to have the Summit Chairlift up and operational, conditions permitting, for the November 6th date. Whether we have the snow conditions on the top of Whitehorn to be able to open it up to the public…we’ll see how that goes. Things are looking pretty good right now.

RM: What are some of the COVID protocols that people should be aware of when they head to the resort?

DM: If you have a season’s pass, get it before you get to the resort. If you have the Lake Lake Louise Plus card, get it before you get to the resort. If you’re just buying a day ticket, you can buy them online. We’re really trying to do whatever we can to minimize the amount of people into the lodges. People will be required to wear face masks in lift lines and on the chairs, especially if they’re not in a group with their own bubble. A face mask will be required in the lodges, just like most places, until you’re eating or drinking. What you’ll find them the lodges and in our restaurants is certainly like most other places, a lot of reduced capacity. You won’t see as many tables, many chairs, but we will be opening up larger tents outside. We’ll have one in the base area, eventually one up at Whitehorn, and one back at Temple. There’s some outdoor, heated bathroom facilities just to make up for the capacity that we’ve pulled out of the lodges. One of the big things people will notice this year is that, unless you have a locker, we won’t be allowing people to leave their bags in the lodges. Normally there’s so many bags all over the place in the lodges that we ended up having a lot of our staff moving them around to make sure that walk lanes and fire lanes are clear. That’s just not something that we can do during a pandemic so we’re asking people, if you don’t have a locker, just leave your bags in the car.

Filed under: Lake Louise Ski Resort, Skiing, Snowboarding