Tom Key Explore Selkirk Snowcat Skiing Opportunities Today
The snowcat growls through the pre-dawn darkness, its tracks pressing stories into virgin snow. Stories that will vanish with the next storm, much like the tracks left by Allan Drury’s first cat in 1975. Drury wasn’t trying to start a revolution. He just wanted to solve a puzzle: How do you reach helicopter terrain without the helicopter?
The answer was sitting in front of a maintenance shed in British Columbia, looking like what would happen if a bulldozer and a tour bus had a baby.
Here’s the thing about revolutionaries: they rarely know they’re revolutionary at the time. They’re just trying to solve a problem that bugs them enough to do something about it. For Drury, the problem was simple: The best snow was up there. The people who wanted to ski it were down here. And helicopters were expensive.
The calculus of powder: Take one snowcat, add twelve thousand acres of untouched Selkirk Mountain terrain, multiply by an endless supply of Canadian storms, and divide by the number of people willing to pay the price and take the leap. The result? The world’s first commercial snowcat skiing operation.
Now it’s for sale.
Let’s talk about snow for a moment. Not the stuff that falls in your driveway or turns to gray slush in city streets. We’re talking about snow that falls in the Selkirk Mountains, where each flake seems to have taken a master class in how to stack perfectly with its neighbors. This is the snow that makes people quit perfectly good jobs in perfectly good cities to become ski bums. The kind of snow that makes rational people irrational.
The Selkirk operation sits at the intersection of this snow and sanity. It comprises:
- A fleet of snowcats that require equal parts mechanic and snow whisperer to maintain.
- A lodge that somehow manages to be both rustic and refined, housing 24 guests in 19 rooms.
- Twelve thousand acres of terrain that makes resort skiing feel like a crowded elevator.
- A staff that includes guides who can read snow conditions like Warren Buffett reads balance sheets.
- Click here for the official listing sheet if you want to see the details.
The industry Drury accidentally invented has grown to include over 70 operations in British Columbia alone. Each one promises the same thing: powder without the circus. But Selkirk remains the template, the original proof that you could build a business on powder dreams and diesel fuel.
The question now isn’t whether cat skiing will survive—it’s thriving, ironically, because it can’t scale. You can’t mass-produce solitude. You can’t franchise freshies. The question is: Who gets to be the next curator of this particular piece of skiing history?
A brief digression on snowcat skiing operations
Running a snowcat skiing outfit requires an interesting balancing act. You need enough business acumen to manage a fleet of six-figure machines, maintain a remote lodge, handle complex insurance and permits, and turn a reliable profit. Yet you also need the kind of passion that makes someone want to spend their days at 8,000 feet in a snowstorm. The next owner of Selkirk will need both – deep pockets, serious business acumen and deep powder credentials. It’s a rare combination, but then again, this is a rare operation.
The price tag (which isn’t public and certainly substantial) reflects not just the assets – the snowcats, the lodge, the permit rights – but something harder to quantify: decades of institutional knowledge about the terrain, the weather patterns, the sweet spots where powder lingers days after a storm. You’re not just buying equipment; you’re buying expertise.
The concern, of course, is what happens if Selkirk gets folded into a larger resort portfolio where decisions are made by spreadsheet rather than by snow condition. We’ve seen it before: the slow transformation of unique mountain experiences into standardized products. Extra fees creep in. Flexibility becomes the carefully scheduled “premium experience.” It’s not that corporate ownership can’t work – it’s that it requires a delicate touch to maintain the soul of an operation while meeting the demands of a bottom line.
The threats are real enough. Climate change lurks like a shadow on a sunny day. Insurance costs climb like a snowcat on a steep pitch. Regulations multiply like rabbits. But here’s what’s interesting: The very things that make cat skiing difficult to operate are the things that protect it from becoming just another commodity in the winter sports portfolio of some faceless corporation.
What’s for sale at Selkirk isn’t just a business. It’s not even just a piece of skiing history, though it is that. What’s for sale is a permission slip—permission to keep a corner of skiing wild, to preserve something that began as a crazy idea and somehow remained crazy enough to work for nearly fifty years.
The next owner of Selkirk will have more than a fleet of snowcats and a lodge. They’ll inherit a philosophy: that the best things in skiing can’t be reached by a chairlift, that adventure requires a bit of uncertainty, and that sometimes the best way up a mountain is in a machine that looks like it has no business being there in the first place.
