Great Northern Ski Society given $25,000 cheque from city

A cheque from the City of Whitehorse has allowed the Great Northern Ski Society board to take a huge step in getting Mount Sima ready for the upcoming season.

A cheque from the City of Whitehorse has allowed the Great Northern Ski Society board to take a huge step in getting Mount Sima ready for the upcoming season.

On Friday, Mayor Bev Buckway presented the cheque, valued at $25,000, to the board at the Mt. Sima ski lodge.

The $25,000 cheque is for the Recreational grant awarded to Great Northern Ski Society at the Aug. 11 council meeting.

The money will be used to repair the snowmaking system as well as purchase the parts needed to repair Mount Sima’s three lift systems.

The board has already used around $2,000 of the funds last week to bring up Randy Gliege, who works for Summit Lifts Co. Gliege, along with some employees of the City of Whitehorse, performed a thorough inspection on the T-bar, chair lift and handle toe.

“We just saved about three weeks of time because having that $25,000 allowed us to do the inspection, allowing us to fix the snowmaking and get all of those parts here,“ said Keith

Thaxter, interim president for the Great Northern Ski Society. “If we had to wait another month, we then would be waiting for the parts. That’s what the key is. As soon as we can secure the additional funding that Randy and his people can just jump on a plane, as long as they are available, and get here in a few days.“

Mount Sima shutdown all skiing operations for the majority of the season because of mechanical problems with its lifts as well as a lack of snow.

Due to the loss of the season, the Great Northern Ski Society board has offered to honour all pass holders for the upcoming season.

Currently, the Great Northern Ski Society is working on repairing the hill’s snowmaking system for the fall.

Some of the problems with the snowmaking system are breaks as well as foreign debris in the lines, which need to be flushed out.

The ski society is working with a couple of local contractors, such as Klondike Welding, which has offered the hill some in kind support to repair any cracks that are found.

In addition to the inspection, Gliege provided the board with a work plan, which identifies all the work that needs to be done, the parts needed to repair the lifts, as well as the importance of training locals in order to reduce future costs.

The Great Northern Ski Society is planning on ordering all of the parts this week and is hoping to get them by the end of August.

As a result of the three different lifts, the parts are coming from three different suppliers, including one out of B.C., Alberta and Washington State.

This was recommended by Summit Lifts because the parts are readily in stock.

Thaxter said he is pleased with how the inspection went.

“Randy is a very good knowledgeable resource,“ he said.

“We really feel we have a good work plan that we just have come up with. Having Randy come up and do the work and give us a proper quote means he is willing to sort of stick to that quote within the best guess unless he finds something that we couldn’t find on the inspection, but we don’t anticipate we will find anymore because the inspection went pretty well.“

The Great Northern Ski Society is also presently in negotiations with the territorial and federal government in hope of securing additional funding.

The funding is needed to pay for the costs for the lift repairs as well as the start up cost, which includes making snow, the insurance payment and any staff hirings.

Among the hirings include a hill manager, a mechanic and a mechanic assistant.

Thaxter said the board wants to be able to hire the general manager as full-year positions.

“The key with hiring the general manager is that we want to be able to hire him or her as a year round operation, so that when the hill does shut down the skiing operations at the end of April that he or she can focus on the marketing and looking at how the hill can generate revenue for the summer time,“ he said.

“Those are the things that we need to make money in the summer to support the extra costs required to run the hill in the winter. That’s why we need the year-round manager because otherwise you just don’t have any paid staff that can continue to move the hill to be self sustainable.“

He said it’s crucial for the hill to start earning an income in the off-season.

“We really want to move this hill to be as much as possible self sustainable,“ Thaxter said.

“We really want to see in the future that we minimize the amount of funding that we would need from the government in the future. It’s going to take a few years until we can move these things into place and start to build a model that allows us to have summer activities going on. Getting through the first year is important right now, but yet starting to work on that five year plan is very important, so that we have that vision of where we can go to.“