Charlie Locke

Calgary entrepreneur and legendary mountaineer, sole owner of the Lake Louise Ski Resort for most of the past four decades and the public face of its expansion through Parks Canada. The Locke family has been in southern Alberta for more than a century; his maternal grandparents homesteaded near Stettler at the turn of the twentieth century. He grew up in Calgary’s Elbow Park, and his interest in climbing began through a neighbourhood friend, Don Gardner. A favourite family story: at twelve he used a birthday hatchet and a length of climbing rope to rig a raft, ran the Elbow River in flood, and survived more by luck than design.

Mountaineering

Locke came up through the small Calgary climbing community of the early 1960s and made his name across a remarkable five-year run. An early winter traverse of Mount Rundle came in 1964. In 1965, aged nineteen, he and Donnie Gardner traversed 23 summits in six and a half days, taking in the Ten Peaks above Moraine Lake and the ring of mountains around Lake Louise; the link-up has reportedly never been matched. The following summer he climbed the north face of Mount Temple with Brian Greenwood, putting up the line still labelled Greenwood-Locke on the topos. In the winter of 1966 to 1967 he was among the small party that pushed the Great Divide ski traverse from Jasper to Lake Louise on wooden skis, relying on food caches set the previous summer. He sat for the inaugural Canadian guides’ exam in 1967, joining the first cohort of mountain guides certified in Canada; until then the profession had been almost entirely Swiss.

Business

A 1968 Bachelor of Commerce led first into stock brokerage rather than the mountains. He worked at Merrill Lynch and later at Peters & Co before moving into resort operations full time. He took a minority position in the Lake Louise ski area in 1974 and bought the remaining shares in 1981 for roughly $19 million. Through the late 1980s and 1990s he rolled up a string of resorts under what became Resorts of the Canadian Rockies, peaking at eight properties including Fernie and Kimberley. He frames his style as a “gambler” who likes a deal but never one big enough to lose on; the standing joke is that he is “ostentatiously frugal.”

Locke retired from the resort business and took a break in the early 2000s; Murray Edwards stepped in to lead the broader group, assuming operational control by 2003. He returned to Lake Louise in 2008, exercising a buy-back option and resuming personal day-to-day control of the hill. He, his wife Louise and daughters Robin and Kim operate the resort today, with letters signed “Charlie Locke & Family, Proprietors.”

Twenty-nine years with Parks Canada

The ski area sits entirely within Banff National Park, and every meaningful change runs through federal review. Locke began work on the resort’s long-range development plan in 1988 and did not see it approved until 2017; he tends to point at the stretch as proof of a single principle, never give up. The resulting framework (Site Guidelines in 2015, Long-Range Plan in 2019) opened the way for new lifts, the West Bowl, Richardson’s Ridge and a wildlife underpass while returning some leasehold to sensitive habitat.

Off the slopes

Locke keeps a cow-calf operation and a small feedlot on a ranch northwest of Calgary. The house he lives in, known locally as Fairholme Cottage, is a log home he picked up for $2,400 in the early 1970s; it had been the Banff residence of a British intelligence officer, Captain French, and he had it dismantled and rebuilt at the ranch. Locke Stock & Barrel Company Ltd. holds his ranching, oil and gas interests.

Recognition

Lake Louise has repeatedly been voted Canada’s Best Ski Resort at the World Ski Awards, and Locke himself received the 2014 Outstanding Contribution to Ski Tourism award for the Americas. He was inducted into the Bow Valley Sports Hall of Fame in 2019. The run Charlie’s Choice on the Front Side carries his name. He is widely described as a hands-on owner who continues to ski the mountain regularly.