Craig's Report - September 07, 2006

Lost Boys Cafe Preview

The ski hill took a group of local business folk up the Timber chair this afternoon for a bit of a preview of the new restaurant that is being built up there. To my surprise, they offered to take me along, which not only allowed me to check out the progress since last week in a perspiration free manner, but also get some additional details.

The first is of course that the name has been semi definitely set as the Lost Boys Cafe. This is fitting as the pass through the Lizard range above Siberia Bowl is named Lost Boys, originally for a couple of young local boys who went missing there long before the new side lifts went in. They have since been joined by many other wayward souls, all of whom, like the boys survived and were eventually found, but may now be destined to find themselves good naturedly listed on a �Wall of Shame� inside the cafe.

The ski hill folks made it clear that this was not going to be a hot dog and burger joint competing for the day lodge crowds, but rather the menu will run to more upscale potato and pasta dishes, perhaps with a nice glass of wine. There will be inside seating for about 60 on the main floor and while plans for the basement floor are still not firm, there could be overflow seating for as many as 40 more there. For comparison, inside seating at Rip N Richards is about 115, so while Lost Boys certainly won�t make much of a dent in major holiday crowds, it isn�t as tiny as some folks may have thought. Obviously on nice days there will be significant additional space on the spacious deck.

Speaking of the deck, it juts out from the hill and affords a view of the valley and Timber Bowl uninterrupted by trees or other impediments. This should result is some wicked views in both winter and summer and I can imagine it becoming a popular spot for things like weddings etc.

As I have mentioned before, there is no running water up there, so the toilets, which are housed in a separate building a few meters away, are essentially high tech pit arrangements. However the building will be heated and there will be a filtered air circulation system that hopefully will make this far from an outhouse experience. There will be two stalls for the women, while the men will have a single stall plus a urinal.

I suspect recent reports seem to be fixated on this restaurant, but in truth it is the major activity on the hill at this point and apart from some preliminary tinges of fall colour, there isn�t much else to report unless detail accounts of mountain foliage going to seed excites you.

Coming up to seven in the evening, it is 24 C and clouds have moved in to accompany the smoke that has been around all day.


The latest version of my standard restaurant progress picture.

The view up the valley from the deck would have been spectacular except for all the smoke from forest fires in Washington and farther West in BC.

Timber Bowl from the restaurant deck.

The restaurant interior so far. The posts for those logs have been recovered from clearing operations on the hill.

The offset vestibule intended to blunt the often fierce Lost Boys winds.

The first of four computer generated renderings of the final structure, that were stapled to the lift platform.

Two

Three

Four

The new Timber Lodge (I believe it is call Juniper) continues to rise under the hands of an early rising and dedicated workforce who have all had special training in early morning noise production.

With the summer lift season shutdown, I can once again hike the more popular and difficult mountain bike trails, such as Alternate Flight Pattern, which has acquired a number of new �features� such as this.

But already all of the bike toys have been pulled out of the Might Moose park.

This picture of the valley taken from up on Dancer just after noon, shows how smoky the valley looked even before any clouds moved in.