Alberta’s Fortress Mountain was in operation from 1967 to 2004. Almost 20 years later the lodge, its chairlifts, and other signs of the abandoned resort are still mostly intact.
Exploring it all are Mark Abma and Callum Pettit, who take a tour of the rundown lodge and learn the history of Fortress Mountain from the late 1960s, through the eighties — times when it was buzzing with energy and activity.
“This place was allowed to run into the ground,” says Rob Stevens, a former Fortress Mountain dishwasher, who has plenty of fond memories of the resort’s heydays. Stevens explains the fall of it as just “sputtering” to a stop a few years into the 21st century.
It didn’t take too long for a unique revival to begin though. An entrepreneur obtained a license and started a cat skiing operation in 2011. The mountain is still a thing of beauty and cat skiing gives skiers the opportunity to make runs around the abandoned lifts. Abma and Pettit even take a few moments to dive into the old lodge and rummage through what remains from Fortress Mountain’s glory days of the eighties.
