Canmore Nordic Centre — Attraction in Alberta

In Short:

Riding was great, the bikes are well fitted. We had an accident happen to the bike which was odd, and possibly a fluke. The non-management staff we dealt with could have been better, but the managers made everything alright. We would go back again. Read on for details.

My Girlfriend and I went to the Nordic Centre and rented two full suspension bikes (Rocky Mountains 27.5”). The price was reasonable, and the service was good on the front end. My Girlfriend took the time to read the contract that you have to sign and she noted that it had a “you break it, you pay" clause. We are strong riders (we both own downhill bikes, and I do a fair amount of cross country), so we were fairly certain that this would not be an issue duh duh duuuuuh…

We did the Orange loop, which was a great intermediate trail. Right in the middle of it is a million dollar view, which was a nice surprise. Experts and intermediates both would have a blast. The elevation change is ideal for a warmup trail of about 1-1.5 hours, with a really hard uphill right away, and then after about 20 minutes it goes to flowy up/downs. The ½ to ¾ stage of trail turns to rooty technical, but by that time you are warmed up enough to handle it. The last quarter of the trail is easy gravel roads heading out.

Here’s where things go wrong:

During the last fifth of the ride, (during the easy road part of the loop) I had a blow-out while I was going down a long hill. In 20+ years of riding I have never seen anything like this.

After I had stopped we realized that the bike was very broken, and if they charged me for the damage I would be out many hundreds of dollars. I had to carry it out of the trail (which took about 25 minutes). We knew that with this happening that we were likely going to be late for the closing time, so a person that we were riding with went ahead to tell them that we had an accident.

The kid that closed the shop apparently told our friend that “it was not his problem” and shut the shop up and left. We arrived there 3 minutes after they were supposed to have closed, and we were locked out.

This meant that we had to drive the bikes back to Calgary, and then back to the facility the next day (Sunday).

At this stage, we were very worried, that we were going to be charged for the damage (which was not my fault), as well as an extra day of rental.

A New Day:

We drove back the next day and talked to the manager. The first thing he asked is if we were OK. He was very upset that his employee left without checking if we were OK, and he was very upset that we had to go back to Calgary and then drive back (1 hour each way). He waved all damage costs (which they technically could have charged us for) and he didn’t charge us for the late arrival.

All in all, I have to commend the manager for what happened. Sometimes employees don’t have the same drive to please customers, and we get that. A bad business would have charged us for the damage (not our fault) and the late return (also not our fault).

Stuff happens, and sometime silly stuff happens, But at the end of the day, the people running the Nordic Centre care about the ride, and the customer. In terms of the riding, it...

The trails here are fantastic quality, lots of variety and choice, good grooming, and nice views.

The food and coffee at the day lodge are actually also quite good, and the equipmemt shop has a lot of good gear for sale.

However--and this is a big however--the maps and trail markings are some of the worst I've ever seen.

The trails are a complicated spiderweb of interconnected stubs and loops, which wouldn't necessarily be a problem. But the popular loops named on the map (lighted 6.5 km, and the 11, 13, and 12 km loops) are given the same colours as the difficulty ratings (green, blue, black) with nothing to distinguish the loop from other trails that share that colour. Junction maps don't mention these popular loops at all. Some junction numbers appear more than once at different spots on the trails and map.

If you don't know these trails well you are forced to stop and look at the maps at every junction in order to avoid going through wrong way, which sort of gets in the way of a nice smooth ski.

Overall I'd say the maps definitely need fixing with better marking for the four popular loop trails, and the trails could probably also stand some simplification, removing some of the connections, overlaps, shortcuts, and crossings. It would make navigation a lot easier and the map a lot less of a spaghetti bowl of...

Although the scenery is great the centre has I believe a way to go with customer satisfaction. I was there for a wedding and about 2 min after the ceremony staff were taking chairs down and away, thus having my mother in law of 80+ years getting up and standing while the ceremony was being completed. I carefully looked around to see if another wedding was being set up and there was none to be seen. I understand business but to be that quick seemed a bit unnecessary. We were also told that we could not set up a little before the ceremony otherwise there would be an extra charge. Seems a bit hypocritical. At the centre a microphone was used for speeches but did not work most of the time. Instead of just replacing it, we had to keep trying to fix the one that was there. To top it all off, we were leaving and my wife went to use the washroom on the main floor. Upon coming out the young gentleman politely said (I understood it was his job) that we shouldn't be using that washroom because the wedding had not paid for it. Wow. It seemed like everyone was in quite a hurry to get out of there. Left a very bad taste in people's mouth. It seemed that the centre was only interested in the business and not the event that was...