The Tyrol Ski and Mountain Club (TSMC or Tyrol) was incorporated by mainly German (along with Swiss and Austrian) immigrants in 1953 as a sports and social club. As the name indicates, it’s goal was to encourage its members to get out and participate in outdoor activities, hiking, cycling, and especially, skiing.

As the Whistler ski area developed as a project in the early 1960s (it first opened in 1965, at Creekside), in about 1963, Tyrol members, wanting to facilitate its members’ ability to ski at Whistler by building a lodge, teamed up with another group of outdoors people, the Sons of Norway, and purchased the 5 acre property before what is now known as Alta Lake Road was built. The 2 groups, based on their investment in the property, agreed that Tyrol would have the northerly 3 acres and the Sons of Norway would have the southerly 2 acres. The 2 groups knew between themselves where the “dividing line” was, but they never got around to legally subdividing the property into 2 separate legal units.

The Tyrol group wasted no time and built the lodge, which opened in 1966. The Sons of Norway never got around to doing anything on their share of the property.

The Resort Municipality of Whistler was incorporated in Sept 1975, and for the first time, the area started to experience bylaws, zoning, regulations, etc…. Still, the 2 groups did nothing about subdividing their property into 2 separate properties, and enjoyment of the lodge continued along blissfully.

In 2010, the Sons of Norway told Tyrol that, as it never used its share of the property, and did not foresee doing so, it wanted out of the project. They were of course very courteous about the matter, but the Tyrol Board of Directors was very aware of the Partition of Property Act of BC. What this legislation does is it empowers an owner of property to force the sale of the whole property if the other owner will not buy it out should it wish to be bought out. Ouch!

Sons of Norway informed Tyrol it wanted approximately $1,000,000 for its share of the property and gave Tyrol 2 years to come up with the funds to buy it out. Otherwise, the parties might have to consider selling the whole property.

The Tyrol Board of Directors went to work and came up with the concept and structure to sell limited partnership units at $5,000 each to members of the Tyrol club and a few friends, to raise the $1M needed. It raised $1,030,000, and negotiated a purchase price of $840,000 from Sons of Norway. In 2012, a General Partnership company (Tyrol Investment General Partnership Ltd (TIGP)), a vehicle to manage the Tyrol Investment Limited Partnership (TILP) units via an agreement between the TILP unit holders, TGIP and Tyrol, completed the purchase of the Sons of Norway 2/5 interest in the property. Since then, the property is owned 3/5 by Tyrol and 2/5 by TGIP. TGIP simply took over Sons of Norway’s 2/5 ownership of the property, Tyrol kept its own 3/5 and owns units in and is currently the largest single shareholder in the TIGP.

The plan was to legally subdivide the property as it should have been done a long time ago, sell the Sons of Norway/TIGP 2/5 share, pay off the unit holders and life would go on for Tyrol. The extra $190,000 raised by the sale of the TILP units was to finance its share of the property till sale thereof, including paying property taxes and expenses it would incur for the subdivision.  Unfortunately, the TIGP found that the Resort Municipality of Whistler had certain other ideas and the subdivision has yet to occur. In the meantime, the excess sum of $190,000 has been depleted on property taxes and expenses incurred to attempt the subdivision and rezoning.

In light of developments, or maybe obstacles, which arose in 2021, the Board of Directors has decided to abandon previous plans to build a “legal” road to the Lodge, a requirement from the RMOW for subdivision: RMOW rules made it legally impossible to have a road come in via the Hillman property to our south, and the prohibitive cost ($3M to $5M) made it impossible to build a “legal” road down from Alta Lake Road to the Lodge.  The BOD, with the support of the TIGP, issued a proposal to remaining TILP unit holders on July 1, 2021 to buy out their units at $3,500 each. As a result, Tyrol was able to acquire a further 54 units, giving it a total of 86, or 40% of all TILP units. In doing so, Tyrol depleted the fund raised for this purpose as a result of the 2019 levy.  The significance of the acquisition of these units is that, with over 25% of all units (86 of 211), Tyrol can now successfully oppose any proposal by the remaining TILP unit holders to sell the whole property, including the Lodge. This results from the fact that any such proposal by the remaining TILP unit holders requires a 75% vote, and Tyrol can oppose any such vote as it holds 40% of units.   As noted, the last few Boards of Directors have chosen to re-define and re-build the membership structure and created a VISION / DRAFT 5 Year Plan to build on the new membership structure, to facilitate growth in membership, and articulate tiers, estimated caps and so on.   The idea is to create a new cornerstone for the future of the club and for each of us as members to engage in.  Keep in mind we are a member run, volunteer organization, building on a history that predates what we know as Whistler.