The Remote Mountain Lodge’s Greatest Allure Is Also Its Biggest Liability

In Canada’s Rocky Mountains, the Icefields Parkway road climbs up a narrow valley, stacked ridgelines and tangled ice piled too high to see fully from the frame of a car window. The 144-mile road traverses Banff and Jasper National Parks, and for a winter visitor seeking to rest their head between the respective towns, only one full-service hotel stays open through much of the lonely, cold half of the year.

The Lodge at Bow Lake first opened as an outfitting lodge in 1922. Other than a three-year pandemic closure, during which time new owners purchased and renovated the Lodge, it’s been operating more or less continuously ever since. For more than a century, its iconic red roof has interrupted the endless frozen landscape around it like a siren song, the landmark persisting as the landscape changed around it—as buffalo were eradicated, then wolves, and then, over the last 20 years, as both species were reintroduced. Today, the Lodge can accommodate 34 people in rooms that run $740 to $1,750 CAD a night. (This fall, when they open a second building, designed by Calgary-based Shugarman Architecture + Design, the total number of guests will roughly double.) The nightly costs include an all-inclusive stay, enjoyed to the soundtrack of propane generators humming under the sound of the wind in the trees. But the biggest change the Lodge faces in its second century may be the ever-quickening pace of landscape-level changes—in the last two years alone, the immediate surroundings have faced an almost unrelenting barrage of rockfall, wildfire and extreme weather events.

In late March, I boarded a mountain-bound bus in Calgary, on an assignment to cover how remote mountain lodges like the Lodge at Bow Lake are designing for the future amid escalating climate events in the landscapes where they operate. I’d visited the Canadian Rockies annually for the last seven years—on a Pan-American bicycle ride, while conducting field research for my environmental science master’s thesis, as well as during several stints at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. I was glad that a press stay at the Lodge gave me a reason to be back, and relieved that I’d even made it after a wily morning of close connections and flight delays. My skis were now safely tucked in the airport bus’s luggage rack, and I watched as the familiar mountains whirred outside my window. It was time to put my feet up, I thought. I texted the Lodge’s owner, Bruce Millar, that I’d arrive at our planned meeting place in Canmore soon. My phone buzzed in my hand immediately: "Just checking to see if the road is closed," Millar wrote.

The Lodge at Bow Lake’s allure—that it’s far from other places, on the front door of Canada’s wildest mountain range—is also its greatest liability. The sole road in and out is flanked with steep cliffs that were, the Wednesday I arrived, draped in layer after layer of rotten winter snow. And now a storm of generational proportions was blowing in from the Pacific, warm and weird—the perfect combination to make these idyllic mountain slopes into a massive avalanche problem. The roadway was at risk. Parks Canada would close it until their team could clear the route by dropping bombs from helicopters onto particularly slide-prone slopes.

After 20 minutes, my phone pinged again: the road would stay open until seven that evening. We’d make it through in the nick of time.

The Lodge’s general manager, John, met me at the welcome desk, apologizing for his informal flannel—he’d just been out shoveling snow. The foyer seemed cavernous in the unlit lodge, its gray stone tiles turned blue from the dim glow of the snow beyond the two windows at the end of the long, rectangular room. I’d shown up on a Wednesday, at Bruce’s invitation, a day before guests would typically arrive. (When it operates during winter from the end of January to early April, the Lodge is only open Thursdays through Mondays.) Now that the roads were closed, it would just be me for the weekend. John led me past a room full of chairs made out of antlers, up a massive stairwell made from old-growth lumber, and through several shadowy halls to my third-floor room.

Even in the dark, the light wood on the walls was stunning—a warm nod to Scandinavia amidst what was otherwise a cowboy-colonial aesthetic. Natural world-inspired design was a priority for Millar who, with a team of investors, bought the property after it closed during the pandemic and set about restoring it. Millar, who’d spent the last several decades operating the nearby Lake O’Hara Lodge, and his group became the third owners of the Lodge in its long history. The original structure, made from local fir trees that were too short to make into any shape other than a hexagon, remains intact, along with the dining room’s massive, hand-cobbled fireplace with fist-sized quartz crystals jutting from its firebox. If there had been any other guests there with me, they would have sat at tables hewn from old growth lumber under the taxidermied heads of animals the Lodge’s original proprietor, Jimmy Simpson, hunted a hundred years ago. Even after the renovations, Simpson still looms large at the Lodge. There are wide-format Simpson family photos in every hall. Giant placards, like a museum’s wall text, line the walls of the foyer, which paint Simpson as a regular Buffalo Bill.

The Scottish runaway first became familiar with the region on a government-funded Dominion Land Survey to scout the valley for a suitable railway as part of a late-19th century effort to increase local tourism and, by extension, a colonial hold on the landscape. Canada’s national identity was still being articulated by train tracks and traplines and maps (plus the genocide of Indigenous peoples that these technologies enabled), and Simpson wanted in on the fun. He worked as a guide and outfitter for decades, working out of a tiny, four-acre parcel on Bow Lake. When he won a contract in 1931 to flag the new route for the Banff-Jasper highway, he took the road right on through. Six years later, without ever applying for a permit from the Park, Simpson built a 37-by-50-foot log structure atop stones pulled from the rubble where the highway’s path had been dynamited. With the guesthouse erected, a new era of mountain tourism was set to begin.

Simpson’s success was powered in part by the postwar roadtrip boom, and in part by his extensive local knowledge of the best spots for his guests—who are said to have included everyone from European royalty to adventure-botanists to Samuel Peabody—to hunt, fish, hike, and boat. He also had the horse team and kitchen staff to make any adventurer’s dreams come true.

When Millar and his team reopened the Lodge in 2023, encouraging this essential experience—unexpected encounters, transcendent possibilities, mountain majesty, et cetera—was their priority. In the end, their approach had as much to do with cultivating a community among its visitors as it did with curating the physical place. The Lodge is (at least for now) out of network for major cell carriers. There’s also no Wi-Fi, unless you want to trek through the grounds to the ski-and-bike shack, which I found had a distinct ski-boot aroma in addition to a slow connection.

One evening, as we sat with our feet kicked up on the slab of old growth that served as a coffee table, Millar told me what he wants most is for his guests to connect. Early in the planning, he brought Seattle architect Tom Kundig of Olson Kundig to assess the original guesthouse building, which was more or less dilapidated and hadn’t been significantly remodeled since the 1930s. (Kundig worked with Shugarman Architecture + Design on the master plan for the Lodge’s restoration.) Millar remembers that they stood in the one room that was in immaculate condition, and he described his vision for a place where people could come together in a surprising, pre-internet kind of way. Kundig got it: "The Lodge needs a living room," Kundig had said. The management team curates a seating chart for dinner each night at family-style tables. Because of the property’s limited winter operating hours, many guests overlap for weekend-long stays. They make small talk and share their day’s trip reports—trail conditions, recommended backcountry snowshoe routes. "It’s hard for people to imagine if they’re not used to mountain hut culture," Millar says. "Mountain culture is a culture of long tables."

There are nooks spread throughout the space to encourage conversations to continue beyond the dining room table. Each afternoon, I posted up in a different corner, trying to recreate the encounters I might have had there. In one corner, where a few armchairs were clustered around a tiny library, I pulled a board game from a shelf (then replaced it when I realized it would be too hard to adapt for one). Across the room, a pair of massive sofas are set to accommodate larger groups. But during my four days at the Lodge, the living room was empty: the road remained closed, and I was the only guest. One afternoon, curled up in an antler-backed chair in the corner, I heard a distinctly animal sound echoing out from some place inside the walls. There was a sudden crash, then a waft of cold ash from the fireplace. I pulled back the grate to find a sooty European starling that seemed to have blown in with the storm. I knew the bird didn’t belong here; starlings are low-elevation birds, and they only ever travel in gigantic flocks; both of us, I figured, were a little turned around.

I wondered if this was what Millar meant when he told me that his hope was that an offline experience would force guests to engage with the place, instead of with Instagram-driven expectations of what it should feel like to be there. I’d hoped for good skiing, but the avalanche danger rating was forecasted to be "EXTREME" all week. So instead of the après-ski in the sauna I’d imagined (which, to my knowledge, was never on), I tried and failed to shoo the little bird out an open window. The space between what I’d thought I wanted and what I got had collapsed. I thought the promise of luxury might act as a comforting buffer against climate chaos, but as extreme weather events only intensify, it’s clear that’s not always a promise that can be kept.

The summer after the Lodge at Bow Lake reopened, a massive wildfire to the north ripped through the resort town of Jasper, destroying one-third of all structures to the tune of $880 million dollars in disaster-recovery claims. Then, last summer, there was a rockslide four miles north of the Lodge, above the popular Bow Glacier Falls trail. Glacier meltwater had seeped into the cracks in the cliff until enough pressure built up that a 164-foot slab of rock detached from its face. The slab crashed onto the trail, where 30 hikers vanished into an explosion of dust. Two people died.

Contending with their increasingly precarious geographic contexts is not a problem only Canadian tourism institutions have to face. Over the course of the 2025 to 2026 winter, the deadliest avalanche in California’s modern history killed nine skiers during a guided hut trip near Lake Tahoe. France recorded its most fatal ski season ever—avalanche after avalanche, triggered by ahistorical dry stretches followed by historic snowfall events. In Switzerland, a massive slide buried the entire village of Leukerbad one week; a second avalanche in Valais derailed a train the next. This followed a spate of recent mountain town catastrophes, like the entire Swiss village, Blatten, that vanished in summer 2025 after a glacier collapsed above it. Tourism’s purveyors and participants are faced with the need to become climate realists, when no amount of capital can insulate a party from the consequences of climate collapse.

As I sat stranded in the Lodge at Bow Lake, Millar told me he’d never talk politics with guests. He might address the changing mountain context but, Millar explained, he wouldn’t explicitly name these changes’ cause. I’ve seen different responses coming from the mountain lodges I’ve been to in Europe. When roughly 98 percent of the population is estimated to believe in climate change, it’s an easier context to contend with—even for ultraluxury lodges, like the five-star Hameau Albert, near Mont Blanc. There, lodge owners have brought in glaciologists and other climate scientists to speak with their guests; this winter, they hosted a bespoke photography exhibition to acknowledge the fragility of life in the face of climate upheaval.

In Alberta, Canada’s most climate-naive province, such an obvious display might appear absurd. For now, the Lodge seems stuck in the tug-of-war between its pioneering roots and its changing-climate present. "We don’t want to be the lodge on the doorstep of disaster," Millar told me as we sat side-by-side on overstuffed couches in the empty living room where half the lights were still turned off. Outside the windows, the mountains had been reduced to a smudge of gray, the usually breathtaking horizon erased like a pencil sketch.

What Millar and his team do want, he explained, is to have the opportunity to steward their guests’ relationship with change; to honor local insights about their dynamic home landscape over whatever has been uploaded onto AllTrails; to carve out a space for all of us to inhabit what is over what we thought would be.

It’s a Simpsonesque ethic at heart—one I got to see play out on my final day there.

The road out was due to open on Saturday. Instead, a 36-foot-tall mash of avalanche debris had buried a nearly 1,000-foot stretch of pavement. Millar had a radio tuned to the Parks Canada frequency. He heard through the static that a helicopter was coming to rescue a plow driver who’d been caught on the wrong side of the slide path. Did they have room for one more passenger? Yes, they did—but only if I could pack up in the 20 minutes it would take for the chopper to arrive.

I rushed up to my room to repack my bags, thinking about how the experience I’d expected to have at the Lodge—finding shelter from the intensities of the modern world—had been eclipsed by an extraordinary storm that called for escape in a different form. Admittedly, I felt a little mad to leave a day earlier than I had planned to—at least until I later learned that it took a full week for the buried road to reopen. The collective wisdom spared me from missing my nonrefundable flight home from Calgary.

"You’re a lucky gal," Millar joked as I stuffed a cookie into my mouth and bumbled toward the door, badly packed bags hanging from each of my elbows. "We don’t provide mountain helicopter rides to most of our guests!"

Correction 6/19/26: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated what type of generator the Lodge at Bow Lake uses. It also inaccurately identified the hotel Bruce Millar formerly operated.

Top photo courtesy The Lodge at Bow Lake

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