The Williams Lake Cross Country Ski Club received a large grant to put towards a new lodge at Bull Mountain.
The club was given 430-thousand dollars in funding through the Targeted Regional Tourism Initiative to support the growth of recreation and outdoor tourism opportunities in the Cariboo Chilcotin Coast region.
The Cariboo Chilcotin Coast Tourism Association and the Ministry of Tourism Arts, Culture, and Sport awarded the Williams Lake Cross Country Ski Club with generous funding to construct a timber frame visitor lodge and ski rental facility.
Club Director Richard Nelson said the lodge has been a long-time dream of theirs and the benefits from it will be tremendous.
“When you have a lodge there and facilities like that, it can become a destination. People won’t have to come up in their car going skiing then go back in their car and go away. Once you have a lodge there then it makes it a destination and hopefully we’ll get more and more people will come here because of it.”
Nelson added that they are still in the process of working on a design and hope to get started on the construction before the end of summer.
“We have a target date of completion by December 2022. We do have some deadlines so everyone’s working hard to contact various contractors, and working on designs and trying to get this work done and get it started this summer so we can get well into before the Fall starts.”
With the addition of a lodge at Bull Mountain, the club said the Cariboo has the potential to become an iconic BC Nordic ski destination and increase regional tourism in the winter.
They also noted that the new infrastructure has the potential to be used for corporate, community and provincial events during all four seasons in the future.