En route to Jasper on July 23, 2024, as part of the Banff wildland firefighting team, Sara-Jay (SJ) Nogel was pretty sure she saw her dream going up in smoke. 

Flying above Highway 93N, from her seat in the helicopter, SJ saw a dense plume of smoke up the Athabasca River valley, rising over Wabasso Lake and heading towards the Skyline Trail and Shovel Pass Lodge.  

A few weeks earlier, SJ and her husband Ross Evens had begun discussions to purchase the lodge.

But now, things didn’t look good.

SJ and Ross met while working as wildland firefighters throughout Northern Alberta and across Canada. SJ worked on wildfire crews for seven years, with her last two seasons in Banff. Following six seasons as a wildland firefighter, last summer Ross was working for the Calgary Fire Department.  

The idea to purchase a lodge was sparked while attending a friend’s wedding at Rock Lake Lodge, near Hinton, which was recently acquired by an energetic couple in their early 30s.  Looking for a change of pace themselves, SJ typed “backcountry lodges for sale” into Google and discovered the opportunity at Shovel Pass Lodge. 

Backcountry lodges run in SJ’s family. Her grandmother was working in the kitchen at Skoki Lodge in the 1950s.

“In walks a horse packer, soaking wet after being caught in a storm,” SJ said. “My grandmother told him, very elegantly, to take his pants off (so that she could dry them by the fire, of course). The rest, as they say, is history.” In later years, her uncle also packed into Skoki.

SJ and Ross received confirmation that Shovel Pass Lodge survived the fire in early August, but questions about the viability of the business remained. The park remained closed and for several months many questions about trails, backcountry access and the future of tourism in Jasper could not be answered. The horse staging area at the Wabasso trailhead was gone and the Wabasso trail itself was seriously damaged, creating additional complexities for supplying the lodge. 

In October, with many questions still unanswered, SJ and Ross decided to go for it.  They were unfazed by hard work and risk.

“It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity.  Even if we’re shut down for the first year, we’re just going to make it work,” SJ remembers thinking.

The purchase went through in January.

At the end of a long day of hiking on Jasper National Park’s famous Skyline Trail, Shovel Pass Lodge guests relax on the serene front porch, enjoying the cold beverage(s) they have carried in. Not far down the mountainside, an abrupt transition from brown to green indicates where the wildfire stopped. One of SJ and Ross’s theories about what caused the flames to subside is that at that location, the forest changes from a pine forest to a wet and marshy subalpine fir ecosystem. That moisture helped cause the fire to lose intensity, they figure.  

This past June 19, SJ and Ross trudged through a challenging late-season snowpack to their newly-acquired business.

They made the trip from Maligne Lake—at times slogging through waist-deep snow—only to find that a pine marten had over-wintered, and then died, in the main lodge.

“We opened the door and it looked and smelled terrible. Mass chaos,” they recalled.

Their dream of having a family business quickly became a reality, as they recruited friends and family for a few weeks of hard work, cleaning the main lodge and levelling cabins. 

They also reached out to SJ’s Mayerthorpe High School friend, Ryley Rizzoli, as their cook. No stranger to hard work and isolated living, in the winter, Ryley builds ice roads. SJ and Ross knew that the ability for the three of them to work well together would be key to their success.

“You can learn how to cook but you can’t learn how to be a good person,” SJ said.

As this summer’s guests have discovered, Ryley is a quick study: Homemade pasta, freshly baked bread, delicious quiche, and Danish pastries are some of the delacacies on offer.

A congestion-free commute

With the horse corral gone and the Wabasso Trail inaccessible due to fire damage, SJ or Ross take turns “commuting” to Hinton once a week. 

Their trip includes a brisk 20.3 km hike to the Maligne Lake trailhead, followed by a 117 km drive to Hinton and a week’s worth of grocery shopping. After loading the supplies into a helicopter, they boot it back up the Skyline Trail to greet the next set of guests.

They’ve extended the operating season to run from July 7 to September 15 this year, taking advantage of earlier snow melt and (typically) good fall weather. The good news for serenity seekers is that the lodge has available rooms in August and September.  Due to the logistics of obtaining supplies, Shovel Pass Lodge requires a 10-day advance booking.

In the future, SJ and Ross are looking forward to resuming horse packing of supplies up the Wabasso Trail. 

“It’s very important to us.  It’s been part of the history of the lodge for 100 years.  A lot of lodges are shifting to helicopters because it’s easier logistically, but we want to stick with the history of the lodge,” SJ says.

Rebuilding the paddock and tack shed at the Wabasso trailhead will be a first step to bringing back horse packing. Ultimately, they’d also love to expand the kitchen and food storage capacity.

SJ returned to Jasper in September 2024, working on danger tree felling and campground clearing as part of the Banff fire crew. By then, the evacuation order had been lifted and locals were back in town. SJ felt “a real sense of community” in Jasper.

Initially concerned that they might be treated as outsiders, SJ and Ross say the community has been incredibly kind and supportive. They look forward to putting down roots in Jasper and continuing the tradition of a family-run lodge on the Skyline Trail.

Andrea Ziegler // info@thejasperlocal.com