Mike Wiegele's passion for life on skis, combined with being a fearless entrepreneur, led him to the mountains of British Columbia.“Let’s go skiing!” Mike Wiegele would say. And for 50 years, thousands of skiers seeking the ultimate adventure – carving first tracks down massive Canadian glaciers and snaking through stands of old-growth timber – heeded his call.
Mr. Wiegele was certain that Canada must have bigger mountains and better opportunities and moved here in 1959. Initially, his mountain sense was a bit off-mark; his travels took him first to Quebec, then to Ontario, and then to a modest resort in California’s Sierra Nevada. In the meantime, his brother, Val, had moved to Calgary, where views of the endless Rocky Mountains finally fired up his imagination.
“Mike built a beautiful village of peeled log cabins of varying sizes and configurations,” Mr. Sayer says. “It’s in a wilderness setting, yet guests could drive there from Edmonton, Kamloops or Vancouver.” Mr. Sayer was captivated by those Warren Miller movies filmed at Wiegele World. “I want to work for that guy, I remember thinking,” Mr. Sayer says.He couldn’t afford the thousands of dollars that Mr. Wiegele charged for a week of skiing, but he could handle deep powder snow and, as a ski patrol director at Hemlock Valley in B.C., knew the importance of safety and risk management. He and his partner won a Canadian event at Lake Louise and a coveted spot at the Powder 8s Worlds.
Invariably, heli-skiing attracted an athletic, hard-charging, highly competitive crowd of superbly conditioned skiers who loved nothing better than “seeing their totals” at the end of the day. As Mr. Sayer says, “some skiers made a big fuss about how much vertical they skied during the day. They’d all be enjoying drinks at the bar before dinner, and then the sheets would get posted. Skiers in the fast group would be elated, but for some, it would ruin their evening.