After living in the city so many years, I wondered if there was a place where tourists could go to feel disconnected and live “off the grid” for a good while. I came across the Nipika Mountain Resort and found a rare specimen of eco-tourist destination in the Canadian Rockies.
Stressing environmental friendly practices, the Nipika resort literally lives from the land, in a way that owner and manager Lyle Wilson describes his lodge as “green as it gets.” The resort is the ultimate dream of Lyle and his wife Diane to create a unique wilderness experience in unison with nature.
Located about 40 minutes from Invermere, British Columbia, the Nipika lodge is solar & micro-hydro powered, and all of the eco-resort’s electricity is generated via clean and natural means. In fact, the majority of Nipika’s heating needs are satisfied by salvaging dead wood from the woodlot and burning it in a central boiler to provide hot water heating to the guest cabins and other buildings.
The eco-friendly resort began with a seed and grew to a tree, I’ve been told. In fact, all the furniture, buildings and facilities are built from dead timber that was lying around the surrounding forest. “Not a live tree was felled in the making of all our buildings,” Wilson claims.
The lodge heats its rooms with bio mass from the forest itself while offering one of the most extensive naturalist programs of any resort anywhere with the Bill Yearling Interpretive Cabin, Winter Tracks programs, Stargazing, and evening shows on all aspects of the natural environment.
While guests do arrive in vehicles, the management of Nipika stresses that the vehicle is no longer needed once you arrive. All recreation opportunities are close enough to smell.
“Right out the door everything is available by walking, running, biking, skiing, paddling or snowshoeing, motors are very unpopular here,” Wilson says. I guess there will be no need to bring my laptop.
