Buying a ski hill in New York’s Catskill Mountains might have been a less bumpy path for Joseph Balaz than Cape Breton Island’s Ski Cape Smokey, about 1,500 kilometres from his Connecticut home.
But the Czech expatriate was sold on the more isolated locale years before he and a group of European investors spent $370,000 in 2019 to buy the struggling ski hill from the Nova Scotian government, with a plan to plow tens of millions of dollars into it, and create a year-round destination with Atlantic Canada’s first gondola, a skyline tree walk, and an observation tower with panoramas of the Cape Breton Highlands down to the Atlantic.
“It’s a labour of love more than anything,” says Balaz, a construction manager who made his fortune building top-of-the line townhomes for Manhattan’s rich and famous.
He happened upon Cape Breton nearly two decades ago after starting in Florida and working his way up the East Coast in search of “a dreamland” piece of seaside land to buy.
“It took me over two years, and I ended up in Nova Scotia and discovered this beautiful area of Ingonish,” he remembers. “I just felt, ‘Wow, this is really spectacular.’ And the people were friendly.”
He’s done summer stints in the community since 2006. In 2010, Balaz and one of his business partners, Prague-based Jiří Kejval, bought land on Ingonish’s Red Head peninsula and eventually built a 7,000-square-foot glass and concrete home on a cliff overlooking the ocean. It’s now available as a luxury rental.
When Ski Cape Smokey went on the market, local friends urged them to buy the 162-hectare property.
Balaz ran the numbers and figured it could be viable if the business expanded.
“A friend of mine in the Czech Republic found out through connections that there were places there and in Germany where similar operations were turned year-round by installing tree walks with a platform on top of the hill,” he says.
Plans changed after COVID pandemic-related supply chain glitches and construction costs that ballooned beyond his $12 million estimate. Balaz and his team switched focus to the peninsula below the ski hill, building condos as short-term accommodations for visitors.
Eyes on the future
While the footings are in place and most of the construction materials needed for the tree walk are in Ingonish, the project likely won’t proceed until 2027, Balaz says, ahead of a trip to Cape Breton to check in on the development.
Cape Smokey CEO Martin Kejval, whose father is Balaz’s business partner Jiří Kejval, says that could stretch out longer.
“We don’t have the resources to do everything at the bottom and the top,” he says. “Rome was not built in a day … We don’t want the whole hill to be a construction site.”
They plan up 74 condos, plus three hotels. The first 27 condos are under construction now and management expects them to be ready for the 2025-26 winter.
The capacity is all the more important with neighbouring resort Keltic Lodge announcing in April it would shutter its 1950s-era main lodge and several cottages, with millions needed to bring the buildings up to current standards.
Plans for a new lodge and Czech-style microbrewery at Cape Smokey (the developers have dropped “ski from the name) are on tap.
“If everything goes well, we should be hopefully breaking ground in the spring,” says Kejval, president of the Czech Olympic Committee, who now lives in Ingonish.
The existing lodge, which they spruced up to serve the ski hill in the interim, will handle overflow traffic and storage, he says.
They’ve added state-of-the-art snowmaking capabilities and workers are doubling the hill’s 60 hectares of skiable terrain. The original chairlift was too far gone to repair so they’ve replaced it with a gondola, which opened in August 2021, carrying passengers from the bottom to a summit shack.
Echoes of the past
Hélène D’Avignon says her gondola ride brought back memories of the early days of the chairlift, which her husband Jacques D’Avignon and other members of a crew brought in from Quebec helped build in 1970 when Quebec City lawyer and Keltic Lodge regular Owen Carter and a couple of silent partners from North Sydney decided to build the new ski hill.
“When they opened the gondola that first summer, people flocked to it,” says D’Avignon, who ended up staying in Ingonish with her husband. “It was the same thing in 1970. People just came to go up in the chairlift. It was such a thing.”
Back then, Ingonish had bustle with American draft dodgers and conscientious objectors of the Vietnam War arriving, she says. There was a wait to get a table in the dining room at the lodge and people flocked to the discotheque.
“The problem Mr. Carter ran into was lack of snow because of the weather here. We always get January thaw, and he didn’t have any snowmaking equipment”
In the mid-1970s, after a particularly bad winter, the ski hill slid into receivership. The province took over and the D’Avignons ran a ski repair and rental shop from the lodge. Things went downhill again in 1982, however, when an arsonist torched the main building. The government replaced it with yellow construction trailers and a small lodge for the 1987 Canada Games.
“Before it burned, we had buses coming from Halifax on Fridays and they would stay the weekend,” D’Avignon says. “We were the place. We had dances. They used to promote us on the radio. We had some snowmaking by then, though not as good as the one they have today. The trailers were awful. The building they built for the Canada Games that’s standing there now is nothing compared to the original building.”
A revolving door of managers at Keltic Lodge ran the hill until it was shut for a period in the 2000s. Volunteers took it over in 2006, running a surface ski lift for local kids in hopes an investor would take over.
Among those volunteers was Ingonish municipal Councillor Larry Dauphinee, who skied Cape Smokey as a child.
“One of the main reasons I became a councillor was try to do something with the ski lodge to help boost the economy and for the social impact,” he says. “I’m very excited about the way things have gone. I think we have the right people investing here. Every time Joseph comes to visit, he says, ‘What can I do for the community?’”
His son Kevin Dauphinee helped look after maintenance and grooming for years and says Ingonish is becoming a must-visit destination in all seasons.
“The number of people who are visiting the area, which used to be a ghost town in the winter months, has picked up over the past few years with Smokey being able to install snowmaking and the installation of the gondola allowing people to ski from the top of the mountain,” he says. “I’ve picked up snowmobiling and the number of snowmobiles that are visiting the top of the mountain to catch a ride on the gondola, check the views, and have a bite to eat has been a big boon to the area.”
Balaz, who escaped communist Czechoslovakia on a university ski trip to Austria in 1982 and later got asylum and citizenship in Canada before making his way to New York, estimates Cape Smokey will be a half-a-billion-dollar development.
“My ambition is not to sit here and run and create and own all these businesses,” the Prague native says. “It just doesn’t make sense. Our contribution to the local economy is: we are building something that will become a platform for other businesses to grow and stay open year-round.”
‘A long way from the finish line’
Mike Doucette, who runs Caper Gas Service Station in Ingonish Beach, about five kilometers down the road from Cape Smokey, says the investment in the hill is poised to have “a phenomenal impact” on the surrounding area and is already helping during the slow season.
“We’re very lucky to have investors come here and put money into a construction phase and bring more potential customers,” he says. “We’re seasonal and the peak is July and August.”
For years, like other small rural areas around the Cabot Trail, Ingonish was experiencing population decline, which meant fewer customers, he says. But now the community is seeing a slow influx of people who are looking for jobs that wouldn’t have been there before during the slow season, “when everyone is on unemployment,” he says.
Doucette has seen estimates that the hill could employ 500 people a day once plans are in full swing.
Much of the infrastructure, including hotels and restaurants, is there to support increased demand as the area is developed and the economy improves, he says. “They just shut down from the winter but could open up at the flick of a switch.”
The gondola, ski hill, expanded ATV trails, Ski-Doo races, and other offerings from Cape Smokey are giving a boost not only to the local economy by adding traffic and jobs but also recreation, says Doucette, who learned slalom racing there as a kid.
“The ski hill was running on volunteers for years and scrimped by just to have it open so we could have our kids ski,” he says. “This summer, they invested in power lines to the top so they can make snow ... Who would have thought someone would come and invest $100 million. It’s just unbelievable.”
Ken Doucette, owner of Doucette’s Market and Clay’s Confectionery Shop in Ingonish Beach, agrees with his cousin Mike that the hill is good for the area.
“For a small community like ours, we are so fortunate, especially with the economy being what it is, to have such a sizable investment and most of it private money,” he says.
His business, which includes a store and year-round dinette, has seen business grow.
“We’ve already seen huge benefits and they are a long way from the finish line,” he says.
He and wife Trina Doucette are ski instructors and with Kejval’s support, have resurrected the race program. “The snowmaking is so good we had a race camp in April last year,” he says. “It was very good skiing.”