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LAKE LOUISE — In 1981, the population of Calgary was less than 600,000 people, snowboarding wasn’t an Olympic sport and Calgary hadn’t yet hosted the Winter Games.

It’s also the year mountaineer Charlie Locke purchased the Lake Louise Ski Resort, in the heart of Banff National Park.

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“In those days, there was only double chairs,” Locke recalled in an interview with the Herald this week. “There was only double chairs, there was no snowmaking and it was a much shorter ski season.

“In the late 80s, we started putting in high-speed chairlifts and built four or five of them over the years. That changed skiing fairly rapidly.”

The resort, now the third largest in Canada, has about 1,200 hectares of developed area with four mountain faces filled with bowls, steep chutes, a terrain park and tube park for up to 6,000 skiers and snowboarders daily from November until May.

It’s also open in the summer, when visitors can take the sightseeing gondola to view grizzly bears or dine at a mid-mountain lodge — and it wants to keep growing in the next five to 15 years.