Lodge owners to retire after 30 years

Bishop Creek Lodge, located on South Lake Road west of Bishop, has operated as a fishing lodge since it was built in 1928. In 1985, Gary and Suzie Olson bought the lodge, continuing the family fishing tradition for almost 30 years.

After the season ends this fall, Gary and Suzie will be retiring and selling the lodge, although the new owners don’t plan on changing much.

Gary was an avocado farmer in Escondido before moving to Bishop in his early thirties with three young children. Both avid skiers, Gary and Suzie tried to relocate to the Eastern Sierra for seven years before buying Bishop Creek Lodge.

“We wanted [to live in] the area. We wanted a lifestyle change,” Gary said. “I wanted the change of seasons,” Suzie added.

Gary and Suzie looked at several other businesses in the area, including the Bridgeport grocery store, Lakefront Restaurant at Twin Lakes in Mammoth, several liquor stores, the Best Western Hotel, and even came close to buying Sierra Meadows Ranch. The two were willing to try anything to be up in the mountains.

Eventually, they settled on Bishop Creek Lodge.

“I couldn’t be a mechanic, because I wasn’t a mechanic,” said Gary; “I couldn’t come up and be a painter, because I wasn’t a painter. And I couldn’t grow avocados.”

“We were green,” Suzie said about starting at Bishop Creek. “We had never even worked a cash register.” The Lodge includes a restaurant, general store, cocktail bar, and 12 cabins for rent.

“We dealt with trees before. I talked to trees all day long, not people,” Gary added. “We had no experience in the retail business, or hospitality, or serving.”

Gary and Suzie welcomed their first guests, a Sierra Club Group, in February of 1986. “We had to find out where to turn the power on … where to get the water from … where are the propane tanks to get the heaters going?” Gary said. “We had no direction.”

Suzie and Gary have worked every position at the lodge over the last 29 years:  cleaner, cook, waitress, store clerk, bartender, bookkeeper, and maintenance worker. “We always made it a point that we could do everything that was there. We wouldn’t allow the lodge to go in a direction that we couldn’t handle,” Gary said.

Suzie remembers hiring a younger girl once who balked at cleaning a cabin, insisting she was hired to run the register. When Suzie told her “everyone here does everything,” the girl quit. “That’s what’s so nice about the Lodge: every day is different. Every hour is different,” Suzie said. “If you don’t like diversity, it’s not a place for you.”

Gary said the adjustment from avocados to running the Lodge was “major, [but] it beats having a real job of going to work in a cubicle. No matter what’s broke or if a toilet is overflowing in a cabin, you still look around and think I could be on the 405.”

Despite hearing horror stories of dealing with people in the service industry, Gary said 99 percent of their guests have been great. “They’re on vacation and here to have a good time,” he said. Although both he and Suzie laughed while remembering some of the not-so-great guests.

One particular group started off quite demanding before eventually coming around. “It was a rainy day and I was doing bookwork in the office when the restaurant filled up,” Suzie said. She went down to help waitress and was serving a table of fathers and sons. One dad “kept demanding that his pizza be served and I went to the cook and it wasn’t done,” she said. “So finally I served a raw pizza to him.”

The next day, he came in to complain to Gary about the waitress, at which point Gary asked, “Oh, you mean my wife?” When Suzie walked out of the kitchen, “The guy was shocked,” Gary said. “He totally backtracked and apologized profusely. They came back for the next six years or so with bigger and bigger groups.”

“They were a nice group of people eventually,” Suzie said. “After the pizza.”

Gary also remembered another group that came in for a one-night stay. The Lodge was extremely busy and the people paid cash, so Gary just gave them a key to their cabin without getting any information from them. “The maid goes in the next morning to clean and comes out saying ‘where’s the toilet and the bathroom sink?’” Gary said, laughing. “They stole the toilet and the bathroom sink. We had people checking in so we had to scurry to get a toilet and bathroom sink in there.”

But most of the guests have become friends, Gary said, returning year after year. 85 percent of the guests at Bishop Creek are repeat business and some 60 percent have been coming since before Gary and Suzie bought the Lodge. “We knew a lot of the people before they had kids. And now they have kids and we’ve seen those kids grow up and now those kids are having kids,” Gary said. “They’re our customers and guests, but they are truly our friends.”

Gary and Suzie expanded the business a few times, adding cross-country skiing in the winter for about five years in the early 90s and running Parcher’s Resort and boat landing for 14 years, in addition to Bishop Creek. But they always settled back into life at Bishop Creek Lodge, where they could run the business and spend time with their family.

“We had no time off, no days off, and the summer was always packed with the business of running two resorts,” Gary said. “It was too much strain and not enough time to spend with the kids.” Gary and Suzie now have five children, two who are still at Bishop High School. They sold Parcher’s Resort nine years ago.

After shutting down the cross-country ski operations in the winter, Gary and Suzie spent a lot of their time off at a cabin in Lake Tahoe with their family. They recently bought a place in Mammoth and plan on spending as much time as they can there, too.

Gary and Suzie, who have been actively involved with the Bishop Chamber of Commerce, Fish and Game, and several other local organizations, will remain involved in the community, although mostly through their kids’ activities. And they will still live in their house across the street from Bishop Creek Lodge for the next few years while their kids finish school.

Suzie said she’s looking forward to staying home and watching Sunday football, as well as never cleaning cabins again.

“Its’ going to really be neat to go over, have dinner, have a couple of drinks, pay the bill and say good night,” Gary said, although Suzie seemed hesitant. “It will be hard to get up and just leave our plates on the table,” she said.

Karrie and Canon Maurice, the new owners of Bishop Creek Lodge, have been vacationing near South Lake for over 10 years. Canon’s dad owns a cabin in Aspendale and is a nightly regular at the Lodge. “There’s a group that we call our mountain family,” Gary said.  Canon’s dad is “an integral part of that family. So [the Lodge] is kind of staying in the extended family.”

Karrie and Canon currently live in Hesperia with their three children, but have been traveling up on weekends to learn from Gary and Suzie how to run the Lodge. “We’re transitioning them in,” Suzie said. “Whereas when we bought the lodge, it was closed. We had no idea what we were doing at all. None.”

“As we get older, we see that it needs younger people with new fresh ideas,” Gary said.  “The tourism industry is all electronic now. I could do it, but I don’t want to learn it and that’s really where the industry is.”

Although Karrie and Canon will bring new ideas to the Lodge, they want to keep the Bishop Creek Lodge “family based,” Karrie said. “We love seeing all the different families up there alongside the fisherman and hunters.”

Karrie said their family has felt a warm welcome from the community and Gary and Suzie, in particular. “We are going to follow in their footsteps and keep it running as they did,” she said. “We have big shoes to fill but we’re ready for the challenge.”

“It’s been a great life,” Gary concluded. “We’ve just met a lot of nice people. It’s a nice lifestyle. It did everything we wanted it to do.”