On his first-ever heli-skiing trip, Jeff Pensiero didn’t know that he would go on to create one of the most iconic backcountry lodges in the world. What he did know was that heli-skiing culture was too rigid for him. The year was 1997, in the Columbia Mountains of Western Canada. Pensiero, a recent college graduate hailing from the Lake Tahoe region of the U.S., was the lone snowboarder on the trip.
His snowboard wasn’t the only thing that set Pensiero apart. He didn’t jive with the lodge’s décor: old-timey wooden skis and snowshoes hung on the walls. Or its cuisine, including Alps-inspired meals like raclette. He found the tradition of tallying vertical elevation skied each day — and turning it into a competition — more off-putting than enjoyable. And he did not like the guide. “He had this pompous, ass-holy air about him,” Pensiero remembers. “At dinner, he told that stupid joke: ‘What’s the difference between a snowboard and a vacuum cleaner? Where you attach the dirtbag.’”
Looking back, Pensiero recalls the trip as the inception of Baldface Lodge. “I just thought there had to be a different way to do it,” he says. “And I was in the right place at the right time to be the one to try.”
Two years later, in 1999, Pensiero opened the world’s first snowboard-centric backcountry lodge. He chose 32,000 acres of rugged Selkirk Mountain terrain, just north of Nelson, in southeastern British Columbia. He named it Baldface, after the creek that cut through the valley. Along with antique skis, Pensiero decorated the walls with vintage snowboards. Along with European cheeses, Baldface’s kitchen staff butchered and cured Canadian bacon. Pensiero also stocked the lodge with guitars because who doesn’t enjoy a good jam session more than tired jokes?
Instead of helicopters, Baldface employed snowcats — grooming vehicles modified to carry passengers — to shuttle snowboarders safely up to the ridgelines. “We get too much snow to fly helicopters,” Pensiero explains. He hired the best guides in the industry, people who would set the standard for backcountry snowboard guiding worldwide. But he made sure Baldface guides stayed down-to-earth by insisting they were the ones to serve dinner to their guests.
There would be no tallying of vertical elevation ridden at Baldface. But there would be world-class snowboarding competitions and leading-edge avalanche safety courses. Pensiero’s mission was to share the infinite wisdom of the backcountry with the people who came to seek it out.
Twenty-five years later, his version of “different” has proven wildly successful. Everyone who is anyone in snowboarding — and many in skiing — has eagerly made the pilgrimage to Baldface. Pro snowboarder Travis Rice, who has repeatedly hosted his game-changing Natural Selection Tour on the terrain there, calls Baldface the “epicentre of snowboarding culture.” The all-inclusive lodge, including seven chalets built in 2005, sells out every season and has for about a decade. The current waitlist is nearly 3,000 names long.
Jeff Pensiero grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, an urban center among the expansive farmlands of the U.S. Midwest. His dad worked in food sales, and his mom stayed home with him and his brother. His first love wasn’t snowboarding — it was music. “I fell asleep at night listening to my dad play piano,” Pensiero recalls. He took piano lessons until around age nine or ten, when he picked up a guitar and never put it down.
In the winter, the family went on ski vacations to Sun Valley, Idaho. Pensiero also cut his teeth skiing at the modest resorts of northeast Ohio. He left home at age 18 to attend Colorado State University as a music major, then transferred to Sierra Nevada College in the Tahoe region to study ski resort management. It was there, at Squaw Valley, now known as Palisades Tahoe, that he became enamored with snowboarding. “Even with fat skis, it’s like ten times more fun in pow,” Pensiero says.
He also enjoyed learning about business in school and the real world. Throughout university, Pensiero maintained employment with various ski and snowboard companies, extending a four-year degree to seven years so that his winters could be focused almost exclusively on working and snowboarding. After graduating in 1995, he worked full-time in sales for a grassroots company called Crap Snowboards. The industry was exploding.
By the time he headed north to Canada to go snowboarding at a heli-skiing lodge, Pensiero had already been brainstorming with his friend Jim Fraps — a fellow graduate of the ski resort management program who owned a local pizza joint — about striking out on their own. The Canada trip crystalized Pensiero’s ambitions: they would open an “epic backcountry snowboarding lodge” in the “epically snowy” Kootenay region of British Columbia.
1998, Pensiero and Fraps left Tahoe and moved to Nelson to pursue their vision. There, Pensiero reconnected with his college girlfriend, now his wife, Paula, a Canadian ski racer turned journalist. The trio went to work attempting to lease backcountry land from the provincial government and raise CAD 3 million from investors to build a timber-frame lodge and staff housing.
For Pensiero, “the rockstar-cowboy-salesman,” as his Mountain Operations Manager calls him, the focus was on relationship building. “All of the magic happened because of the people who showed up to support us,” Pensiero says. One of his earliest and most fortuitous acquaintances was Nelson resident John Buffery, a mountain guide who pioneered avalanche awareness training for snowboarders. He became Baldface’s first guide and created the protocols and procedures to make the lodge synonymous with the word safety.
Buffery also introduced Pensiero to the late Craig Kelly, a professional snowboarder considered the godfather of freeriding. Kelly became part owner of Baldface and used his star power to promote it.
Some of Baldface’s earliest investors were Foo Fighters’ Nate Mendel and Dave Grohl. “They wrote the check that bought our first snowcat,” Pensiero says. Mendel returns yearly to shred Baldface’s fir- and spruce-forest glades, open bowls, and countless natural terrain features — as do most guests. Baldface has a 98-percent guest return rate.
That doesn’t mean Pensiero’s job is easy. From the beginning, he, Paula, and Fraps had their work cut out. Their first step — attaining a land tenure from the province — took over a year and involved a heated public consultation process. “People didn’t like these American dudes coming in with this big idea,” Pensiero says. “But they eventually came to respect our hustle.”
Once they had the land, raising the money to build the lodge took so long that they operated day trips based out of a hotel in Nelson for three seasons. When they finally broke ground in 2001, the events of September 11 brought everything to a standstill, followed by the primary funder backing out entirely. Ten years later, a massive snow load collapsed part of the roof. No one was injured, but the damage was extensive. The rebuild cost was upwards of $4.5 million. Pensiero says he didn’t take a paycheck until 16 years in.
Some people might have thrown in the towel at many points, but not Pensiero. “He was just undaunted,” Buffery recalls, “So keen and so curious about everything, even the challenges.” Paula echoes Buff’s sentiment. “He never gives up,” she says. “But it’s the vision combined with the grit — JP has great clarity as a leader that can cut through all the external noise and all the contrary opinions.”
Pensiero says his challenges have been interspersed with many priceless rewards. He still gets excited thinking about when Absinthe Films came to Baldface in 2007 to shoot the classic snowboard film Optimistic? Or when the late Jake Burton came out for a week with his wife and kids in 2012, not long after Burton’s cancer diagnosis, and wrote that his time at Baldface “reminded me not just of what we’ve all created, but why it really matters. And that riding answers everything.”
Most recently, Pensiero watched his oldest daughter (the Pensiero’s have four children), Estelle, 21, become a professional snowboarder. Estelle also serves as an event director at Baldface, running an annual program she created called Low Maintenance that pairs twelve seasoned pros with twelve up-and-comers for a week of riding and mentoring.
Pensiero’s latest challenge is sustainable growth. There’s a huge demand for what Baldface has to offer. In 2021, the Pensiero’s (Fraps is no longer an owner) purchased a cat-skiing operation in a neighboring valley and renamed it Valhalla Baldface. They currently offer day trips from Nelson to the 21,500-acre tenure. Pensiero hopes to build a lodge there, similar to the one at Baldface and is working through the public consultation and approval process with the provincial government.
Next, Pensiero aspires to purchase a third operation. He thinks three lodges is the correct number to make a dent in the Baldface waitlist while staying within the bandwidth of his existing administrative staff. Ideally, by that time, he will have created a keystone local business, a legacy for his family and employees. “Then I’ll retire,” he says. “I’ll get something really comfy — like one of those pickup trucks with a super fancy camper shell on the back — and tour around and play music.”
Not bad for a dirtbag.
