Posted Jun 21, 2016, 2:49 PM
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Originally Posted by McMurph
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Fortress Resort in Alberta Slowly Catching Its Breath
By IAN AUSTEN DEC. 9, 2015
Unlike its competitors in Banff National Park, Fortress Mountain Resort is little known as a skiing destination outside of Alberta. But despite that, it is still familiar to much of the world, for a quite a different reason.
It has hosted a dramatic ski chase in “Inception,” stood in for Alaska in “The Bourne Legacy” and was a snowy campsite in “Brokeback Mountain.” Television producers and ad agencies seeking a mountain backdrop are also regular visitors.
But the success Fortress Mountain has enjoyed as a film production location hasn’t been matched in recent years by its main business. In 2007, it became a ghost resort after the province withdrew the lease from the owner at that time after it failed to fix an unsafe bridge, maintain the buildings properly and pay rent and taxes.
Now a new group, funded by an oil industry investor from nearby Calgary, is slowly reviving Fortress Mountain. This month marks the start of the fifth season of what may be Canada’s most bare-bones, yet exclusive, ski resort.
With the resort’s lifts out of operation and, in many cases, beyond redemption, Fortress Mountain Holdings, the current owner, now relies on a single tracked snowcat to give no more than 14 skiers the full run of the resort’s 3,300 acres four days a week.
The cat skiing is the first step in a plan to restart lift skiing, build a new lodge and eventually add accommodations to the resort for the first time. But before any of that, the owners need approval from the Province of Alberta, which leases the land to the resort, and deal with the economic downturn that the collapse of oil prices has brought to Alberta.
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