The Mount Robson Inn was destroyed in the 2024 Jasper wildfire. Its owner had spent years imagining a replacement before the disaster forced its vision into reality.
More than a decade before the Jasper wildfire destroyed the Mount Robson Inn, Chad Gulevich was already thinking about replacing it.
Plans were drawn. Time and money were spent exploring what a new hotel on the site could look like.
But eventually, the longtime Jasper hotelier and his family came to a difficult conclusion.
“We had spent a lot of money and time to actually realize we couldn’t do it,” Gulevich said. “We just couldn’t afford it.”
The plans were shelved. The Mount Robson Inn carried on, welcoming generations of visitors to Jasper and building a loyal following among returning guests.
Then came the wildfire.
The July 2024 disaster destroyed the hotel, leaving the Gulevich family facing a question that, in one form or another, had been sitting unresolved for years.
“Fast forward to today — well, now we have to rebuild,” Gulevich said during a recent tour of the construction site. “It’s just a different set of circumstances.”
For Gulevich, deciding what to build was not necessarily the difficult part.
“It wasn’t so much the what to do. That seemed more clear to me,” he said. “It wasn’t the what, it was more along the lines of the how.”
Now, on the site where the Mount Robson Inn once stood, that long-delayed vision is taking shape.
The new property, called The Robson, will be larger and fundamentally different from the two-storey motel it replaces. It will have three storeys and 100 guest rooms, compared with the former inn’s 81, and is being assembled using prefabricated modular units manufactured off-site and trucked to Jasper.
But the new building is about more than replacing what was lost.
In many ways, it represents decades of lessons learned.
A place that mattered
The Mount Robson Inn was part of Jasper’s accommodation landscape for generations. The Gulevich family has deep roots in the local hotel industry, and Chad was born and raised in Jasper.
When the hotel burned, one of the things that struck him was the reaction from people who had stayed there over the years.
“We had a lot of great repeat business, a lot of customers that really connected with us,” he said.
That connection is important to Gulevich as he rebuilds. The goal isn’t simply to create a bigger, newer or more efficient hotel. It is also to understand what the old Mount Robson Inn meant to the people who kept coming back.
“There was something that mattered to them that we were doing right,” he said.
The challenge now is to carry that forward.
“I want us to be able to hit the high notes to those same people.”
The Robson will be an entirely new building, but Gulevich said its design will also reflect the place where it stands.
“I was born and raised here,” he said. “It is my home, right? It’s important to me, like any local.”
The hotel will incorporate elements of Jasper’s history and character throughout the property.
“We’re going to do our best to celebrate the history of Jasper,” Gulevich said. [But] we’re not trying to be a museum,” he said. “It’s just a taste — some fun snippets.”
Building differently
The most visible difference between the old Mount Robson Inn and its replacement may be the way The Robson is being built.
During the construction tour, modular units were being delivered to the site and stacked into place, gradually forming the three-storey structure.
The approach resembles assembling a building from enormous Lego pieces, but for Gulevich, the appeal is largely practical; the rooms can be manufactured while work is happening simultaneously on the Jasper site.
“You’re doing two things at once,” he said. “You’re putting in the foundation while your rooms are being built at the same time.”
“So you’re gaining a huge amount of time efficiency.”
That efficiency is valuable in a remote community undergoing a massive reconstruction effort.
Jasper is rebuilding homes, businesses and infrastructure at the same time. Tradespeople are in high demand, accommodation for workers is limited and construction costs remain a major challenge.
“You look at the event of the fire and that there’s so much construction happening at the same time that trades, accommodation, so many things are not just at a premium, but an acute premium,” Gulevich said. “Then it really starts to make more sense.”
The modular approach also reflects Gulevich’s previous experience building and operating hotels, including a property in Valemount. The Robson, he said, is an opportunity to take lessons accumulated over decades and build them directly into the structure.
Designing out the frustrations
Parking, for example, was a persistent problem at the old Mount Robson Inn.
The motel did not have enough stalls for every room, occasionally leaving arriving guests without an obvious place to leave their vehicles.
For Gulevich, that was more than an inconvenience.
“As an operator, I always want everyone to have a wonderful experience,” he said.
The new property will have more parking spaces than guest rooms, along with dedicated space for buses.
The same thinking has gone into the building’s energy efficiency and working conditions. The old motel-style layout meant rooms opened directly outdoors, creating challenges in Jasper’s winter climate.
“With the motel, when every room has an opening to the outside, it’s not very energy efficient,” Gulevich said.
The new enclosed building will be more efficient and, he said, provide a better working environment for employees.
Housing the people who make the hotel work
The Robson will also include dedicated staff accommodation — a significant consideration in a community where housing remains one of Jasper’s most pressing challenges.
The staff accommodation will include 27 rooms and capacity for approximately 42 people, depending on how the rooms are occupied.
For Gulevich, the design incorporates lessons learned from years of housing employees.
Food storage and refrigerator space, he said, can become points of conflict when employees share accommodation.
The new facility has been designed with individual storage and more private amenities in mind.
“Having your own bedroom is a luxury in staff housing,” Gulevich said.
Private bathrooms are another feature intended to make the accommodation more comfortable. The arrangements are intended to help the hotel retain employees, but having on-site housing also means fewer workers competing in Jasper’s extremely limited rental market.
The Robson won’t solve the community’s housing shortage. But it offers an example of how the realities of rebuilding Jasper are changing the way employers think about the infrastructure they need to operate.
For a business in a community where finding workers and finding somewhere for those workers to live are increasingly connected problems, staff housing has become part of the equation.
Just getting started
The new hotel represents an enormous project, involving architects, engineers, contractors, modular builders and dozens of decisions that will determine how the property operates for years to come.
Gulevich said experience has taught him that managing a project like this doesn’t mean pretending to have every answer.
“I like to say it’s trying to be smart enough to know when you’re not smart enough,” he said.
“You’ve got a room full of experts. I might be the one in charge, but I’d be well advised to listen to them. Because that’s why they’re there.”
During the recent construction tour, however, there was another person listening and learning.
Gulevich’s teenage son, Corbin, accompanied his father through the in-progress hotel.
Corbin is still years away from running the business, but Chad is already finding ways to involve him and introduce him to the complicated world of hotel ownership and management.
It is a continuation of a family tradition that stretches back generations in Jasper — and a reminder that the rebuilding of The Robson is not simply about replacing a building destroyed by wildfire.
The Mount Robson Inn had a long history. The new hotel is intended to have one, too.
For many of the people involved in the construction project, Gulevich said, opening day will represent the finish line.
“To a lot of people involved here, the day it’s open is when the project’s done to them,” he said.
“But in so many ways, we’re just getting started.”
Bob Covey // bob@thejasperlocal.com
