New Enchanted Forest owners hope for highway fix

It’s been an intense summer for the new owners of tourism attractions The Enchanted Forest and SkyTrek, who took over in May.

Operator Blair Johnson said he is notching upwards of 150 days straight at work this season but he is clearly doing something he loves.

“I look tired but I feel great,” he said. “It’s been so much fun and very exciting and a huge learning curve for us.”

SkyTrek and The Enchanted Forest is located right off the busy Trans-Canada highway. Photo: Emily Kemp/Revelstoke Mountaineer.

The Johnson family has long-term ties to the local area and has visited the attraction many times over the past years. Blair and his wife MJ both come from a corporate background in information technology and organisational training, and when the opportunity presented itself earlier this year to get into a different type of business, they jumped at it.

“We bought it at the end of April,” Johnson said. “We have been long term fans of this park. We have been coming for many, many years.”

The Enchanted Forest’s previous owners Rocky and Juliet Ehlers have been around to help the Johnson’s on this new endeavour.

“We all felt really good about how [the sale] went,” Johnson said. “They were almost our exact same age when they started doing this, so we feel the baton has been passed hopefully for about the next 25 years. And then we will pass that baton to another family to carry it on.”

While you might expect the heads of operation to be tucked behind a desk directing staff from a distance, the pair is active in their new roles and take charge from the front-line. Both Blair and MJ don high-visibility vests regularly and perform the role of parking attendant, among their other responsibilities. It’s no doubt a good strategy to provide that initial friendly smile and also get first-hand feedback on their customer’s experiences.

The parking lot is a busy area with customers coming and going from the Trans-Canada directly next to it. The section of the highway between Revelstoke and Sicamous is a windy stretch of road notorious for car accidents and just last week a car navigating the turn into the attraction was rear-ended and the highway was closed for three hours.

Johnson said he’d love to work with the Ministry of Transport to speed up improvements to the area.

“That’s certainly something we want to talk about,” he said. “The previous owner has been down that road, no pun intended, many times. We’re all for it. We want to know what we can do to speed that up or how we can plan around how that happens.”

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