For all the Tawatinaw Ski Hill naysayers, the numbers don’t lie.
Since the hill re-opened Dec. 15 under the leadership of community-lead Tawatinaw Valley Ski Club roughly 3,500 people have used the facility.
Thirty-five hundred!
The two-week period Dec. 15-31 included 166 from the town, 149 from Westlock County, 149 from Athabasca County, 126 from the Town of Athabasca, a further 120 from Sturgeon County and hundreds of others from Edmonton, St. Albert, Barrhead and Thorhild.
We get that there’ll be some folks who’ll never get why the county just didn’t walk away from the facility and honour the results of the 2017 plebiscite that called on the municipality to either sell it, or shutter it — a decision we wholeheartedly disagreed with.
And although this early success is undeniable, there’ll be others who’ll take more of a wait-and-see approach. They may ask what happens at the hill when the snow melts, or when it’s -35 C, like this past weekend, and the hill is empty?
How will the bills get paid?
And yet there are others who’ll look at the three-year operating agreement between the county and Friends and wonder what happens when it expires.
The community and business support has been overwhelming so far, but will that always be the case? Can a public recreation facility truly survive long term being run by volunteers?
We don’t have a crystal ball that allows us to peer into the future. And we suspect the ski club and even the current county councillors don’t really know what the future holds for Tawatinaw.
But that’s OK because right here, right now we have a full-functioning ski hill that served 3,500 people over a six-week span.
Did any of those out-of-towners, or even Westlock-area residents buy a tank of gas at Clyde Corner, or go out for a meal in town following a day at the hill? Maybe someone from the Barrhead area drove through town to and from the hill and then decided to spend some money on Main Street.
We’ll never know.
But what we do is know is that Tawatinaw is being used, extensively, by people from far and wide.
And if that’s not a good news story for the entire region, then we don’t know what is.
