BCAA Travel Blog

Travellers motoring along the Trans-Canada Highway west of Revelstoke, B.C., are often astonished to see a large complex of red-roofed buildings suddenly appear like a scene from the Mediterranean. The 200-room hotel, called Three Valley Lake Chateau, is the creation of Gordon Bell, a hard-driving visionary, who made an indelible impression on every one he encountered. I met Bell two years ago, while writing a Westworld magazine piece about his hotel and adjoining “Three Valley Gap Heritage Ghost Town.” Although a senior citizen, Bell had the energy of two men. I can recall being startled to see him out in the parking lot at 7:00 a.m., hauling his guests’ luggage out of the hotel to a waiting tour bus. It was hard to imagine another hotel owner doubling as a bell hop, but then Gordon was a hands-on kind of guy.

I was saddened to learn recently that Gordon passed away in November 2007, at age 74. Fittingly, he died on the job–out on the road, attending tourism conventions. Gordon will be unreplaceable, but his four children: George, Carol, Melody and Rene, together with his wife Ethel, are continuing to run the business as they always have–as a family unit, which is just the way Gordon intended.

In memory of Gordon, I’m including the story that I wrote about him and the construction of his lifelong dream.

Some people collect stamps, others collect coins. Gordon Bell collects history. The size and scope of his treasure trove is mind-boggling. Over a five-decade span, this eccentric entrepreneur has amassed everything from early gramophones and telephones to old pianos and arrowheads, from vintage roadsters and steam locomotives to historic buildings. The individual collections are the working parts of his dream creation-–the Three Valley Gap Heritage Ghost Town, situated just west of Revelstoke behind his hotel, the Three Valley Lake Chateau.

The hotel’s setting, rimmed by towering mountains and mist-draped canyons overlooking the shore of Three Valley Lake, is not only visually stunning, it is also historically significant. It was here in 1865 that surveyor Walter Moberly discovered a pass through the mountains while searching for a route to build a wagon road connecting the Shuswap to the Columbia River. Eagle Pass, as Moberly named it, would be used by the Canadian Pacific Railway for years before a highway was built. Later, a section house and a large sawmill were erected on the site by the Mundy Lumber Company, as well as an office building with rooms for employees that was known, ironically, as the “Bell Hotel.” Today, Gordon Bell’s sprawling red-roofed hotel, a local landmark since 1960, uniquely celebrates that pioneering legacy. Its metamorphosis from seven-room motel to 200-room chateau, its sculpted fairy-light-lit grounds and the roundhouse and ghost town have been Bell’s life’s work, an amazing accomplishment that he typically underplays. “All I wanted to do was to build a place where my family could work and live together,” says the gregarious 73-year-old, whose four children and 12 grandchildren have all, at one time or another, been involved in the operation.

As eagles ride the thermals over Mount Moody and the rushing water of Eagle River gurgles in the background, I follow Bell on a tour of his tribute to B.C. history. The ghost town contains more than 30 buildings from the late 1800s and early 1900s, all saved from the wrecking ball, then dismantled piece by piece, and each board and log numbered for transport and reassembly at the Three Valley Gap site. Today, the village includes the three-storey Hotel Bellvue, a general store, barber shop, smithy, laundry, tobacconist, furniture repair shop, trapper’s cabin, Finnish sauna, church, jail, saloon, and a 300-seat theatre at which Sky Floyd Drew and his wife, Dana, stage nightly presentations of their Canadian Cowboy Show. Not only are these original buildings, they are outfitted with authentic decor and furniture. The Hotel Bellvue’s dining room, for example, contains the original bar, curtains, tables and chairs, dishes and breakfast menus from 1898, the year the hotel was built in Sicamous. “When I began collecting these buildings, people thought I was out of my mind,” Bell admits. “But today a lot of people appreciate what we’re doing.”

Equally impressive is Bell’s Antique Auto Museum, featuring beautifully restored cars from the early 1900s acquired because of their pivotal role in early automotive history. Bell points out a 1902 Curved Dash Olds, the first mass-produced car in North America, and a gleaming black 1914 Model-T Ford. “It was actually the first version of the Model T to be painted black. Before 1914, they came in four colours,” he says. “They went to black because it was the only shade that would dry fast enough to keep up with production. In 1914, Ford was turning out a million cars a year.”

Another building on the site houses a large railway museum, which boasts an array of locomotives and private coaches from the steam era, including a rare Pullman business car built for Sir John Eaton in 1916. The historic coach was used to transport doctors, nurses and relief supplies to the Halifax explosion in 1917. After Eaton’s death in 1922, it was sold to the CNR, where it served as the coach for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth on their 1939 Canadian tour and later as a meeting place for Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill during the Second World War. One recent addition of which Bell is quite pleased is the railroad coach from which Prime Minster Pierre Trudeau flashed the folks of Salmon Arm his infamous one-finger salute in 1982.

Bell’s knowledge of automotive and railway lore and B.C. history is exceeded only by his boundless energy. He typically sleeps only four hours a night and arises at 3:30 a.m., and regularly helps carry his guests’ luggage out to the parking lot at dawn, always in the same attire–blue pants and white shirt. He owns 20 sets of the ensemble. As one might surmise, being stylish is not a concern.

Bell was born in Calgary during the Great Depression and says the experience instilled in him a keen desire for independence and self-sufficiency, which helps explain why he decided to build his own hydroelectric plant in 1980 after BC Hydro wanted him to pony up $450,000 to bring electricity to the isolated site. The fact that he knew nothing about generating hydroelectricity didn’t dissuade him. Eventually, after the construction of a dam and turbines, the installation of 2,400 metres of submarine cable under Three Valley Lake and 56 kilometres of overhead power lines, the hotel had its own independent source of electricity, and for half the price quoted by BC Hydro.

Bell’s drive and ambition were evident at an early age, a boy in a hurry to be a man. He landed his first full-time summer job at 11, working for a farmer. While finishing high school, he put in stints as a dishwasher, clothing salesman, logger and carpenter’s helper. He built his first house at 16; six years later he was running a house-building company in Regina with 100 employees and was married with children. He bought the Three Valley Gap lakeshore property in 1956.

“Lakeshore property” may sound romantic, but the reality was somewhat different. “It was all swamp back then,” says Bell, who solved the problem with 25,000 truckloads of rock and fill, a landfill operation he supervised, along with the construction of the hotel, while continuing to build homes in Regina. After quitting work on Friday, he and his wife, Ethel, would pack their kids in the car and make the 13-hour drive to Three Valley Gap, hammer away on the hotel, then drive home on Sunday. “We must have made 50 trips like that,” he recalls. “In winter we’d take the train out.” In 1960, the Bells opened a seven-room motel with a coffee shop and a small museum. In March 1963, they left Regina for good and moved to B.C.

The hotel has been enlarged and remodelled several times since then. Its 200 rooms now include novelty digs such as the Eagle’s Nest, a two-level suite with windows facing all points of the compass, and the Cave, a one-of-a-kind hideaway made entirely of rock; others are gradually being refitted with antiques and curios from Bell’s vast assemblage of memorabilia. The hotel’s major clients are foreign tourists, who overnight here in the midst of weeklong bus trips across B.C. and Alberta. Roadtrippers find the hotel makes a strategic base for touring the Victorian heritage homes, art galleries and Saturday farmer’s market in Revelstoke; historic Craigellachie, where the CPR drove the last spike in 1885; Halcyon Hot Springs resort, just a short ferry ride across Upper Arrow Lake; and the most accessible alpine meadows in B.C., on Mount Revelstoke, whose summit can be reached by car. Tourism in this corner of the Rockies is also fuelled by an increasing stream of heli-skiers and outdoor buffs, an influx that will mushroom if the $20-million development of a major ski resort on Mount Revelstoke proceeds as planned.

Meanwhile, Bell is constructing the only covered railroad turntable and roundhouse in Canada. The huge complex, which encompasses 8,300 square metres, is topped by a roof 100 metres in diameter. Completion is slated for September 2006, to mark the 50th anniversary of the year they “bought the swamp.” He is also creating a new museum to house a replica of a mine with a rock-faced mining shaft, “all wheelchair accessible,” he notes. Then there is the challenge of what to do with his most recent purchase. “When we were in Toronto last year we saw this sawmill, and I just had to buy it,” says Bell. With so many projects on the go, one wonders if he ever foresees a day when the vision will be complete. Bell chuckles at the notion. “There is no such thing as saying, ‘finished.’ I just want to get as much under roof as possible, and then my kids can finish it off.” 

Filed under: Destinations