When they left it was down to the Scott Lake Lodge worker bees who tackled the shut down process which is many days with many people and the main lodge renovation. That group lead by Scott guide Paul Hamilton, teamed up with his dad Ted, hit the ground running. Before they wrapped up the fall work on September 17th, they had the addition fully closed in and had put new shingles on the entire roof. There turned out to be a lot of talent hidden (not so well hidden it turns out) on the Scott Lake guide team. Who knew that Mike Demyen had been a roofer and that Cory Craig had framed houses in Calgary years before? We know now. Those projects never had a chance.
There were other just plain good workers diving into the construction tasks—Riley Epp, our Beaver pilot who can hammer as well as fly and Mason Merz, our office manager, who was all over the island helping to get things done. Guide Graham Coulombe took the lead in making the rounds of our 20 fly out lakes to service the outboard, repair lots of bear damage to boats and turn over the 16-foot fly out boats. That was a full three days of work with Otter pilot, Travis Peckham, working along-side Graham. Gerry Yanish, our own Silver Fox, directed the lodge shut down which involves boarding up every door and window on every building—all 28– on the island, draining the water system, beaching and winterizing the 15 guide boats based on the island and doing so many other things that this screen couldn’t quite hold it.
A different crew lead by Hospitality Manager Danielle Grunberg started staining log exteriors, cleaning all the guest cabins, doing mountains of laundry and putting it away for the winter. Claire Markle, Brenna Savery and Jackie Tourand all worked on those tasks. The big job cleaning and putting away everything related to the kitchen went to Eli Mahoney and Rachael Basler who stayed on after the Friends and Family week to cook for the construction crew.