Bolton Lake Lodge & Outposts
Thanks for the memories!!! Bolton Lake Lodge and Outpost Camps has sold to St. Theresa Point First Nations and will no longer be offering any fishing or hunting packages at any of the camps. This is certainly a bittersweet announcement as my family has owned the lodge since 1988 and I’ve been working here since 1990! Jodi and I met at the lodge in 1995 and we were married in 1998 so we’ve been doing this for our entire time together.
We have been in discussions with the Band leaders from STPFN since before Covid as they have always wanted to buy the lodge back from my family, it belonged to the Woods family in the 1980’s before my father bought the lodge. Covid played a role in our decision to sell as it showed us that our business could completely shut down and we would have no control if or when it could reopen. The lack of information so that we could make the right choices was very difficult to handle for 2 years full years. We actually believed when the government said the shut down would only be a month, so we thought we were going to run the lodge in 2020, but in fact we had to remain closed until 2022.
The discussions with the First Nations folks would heat up and then cool down for months at a time without a single phone call, email or text, so we never knew how serious they were about buying. Over the last year they seemed to be getting more serious asking for more meetings and even putting down a good deposit, but we still felt that the sale might not happen. All of the discussions involved turning the lodge into a treatment/healing/learning center for the folks of Island Lake, but they wanted us to run the lodge with guests until they would be able to transition over to solely a community use facility. Up until just a few days ago, we expected to be running the lodge in 2025 as close to normal as possible but due to funding issues, the Band could only access certain programs if they were not going to run the lodge as a business.
As I write this on September 16, 2024, Jodi and I are at the lodge gathering up staff and guest gear that has been left behind so that we can get it all down to Winnipeg to figure out how to distribute it to the guests and staff. We actually have a plane coming today to take some of the gear to Winnipeg already, so we’re making progress. We’re also preparing for many members of the STPFN community coming here this week for a ribbon cutting ceremony.
We are unsure as to what we’ll be doing for the rest of our lives as we thought we would still have another full year of work before we had to start thinking about what to do next. We’re too young for retirement, so I’m sure we’ll find something to keep ourselves busy, but for now we’ll focus on completing this transaction and then selling our float plane and our shares of the air service.
Again, please accept our sincerest thanks for the many years of support, friendship and dedication to making our business such a great place to spend so many years of our lives!!
Trevor & Jodi Dick
PS: If I get to keep the website, I’m going to change a bunch of pages to show more of the history of the lodge, I’ll showcase some of the amazing staff and guests we’ve had over the years and I’ll share some of the crazy stories that happened here assuming the statute of limitations has passed lol!
