OUR PEOPLE | Marnie Graf
Marnie GRAF
If you’ve skied at Mica, then you’ve talked to Marnie Graf. If you’re thinking about skiing at Mica, you’ll talk to Marnie. She’s one of the few Mica staff members that literally every guest connects with because, as our Guest Services Manager, she handles a monumental thing called logistics.
She helps you through your booking process. She answers questions about getting your gear and any little (and not so little) extras to our lodge deep in the wilderness where the concept of a physical address for UPS delivery is a laughable myth. She makes sure your needs are sorted when you get to our headquarters in Revelstoke and manages all people and things in-and-out-bound from the lodge.
Mica’s magnificent remoteness is one of the assets that make it such an extremely special place, but that isolation also poses one of the greatest challenges to our operation. Guests’ journeys to Mica often begin days prior to the start of their ski adventure. The closest airports are Kelowna, two hours west, or Calgary, five hours and one monster mountain pass east of the tiny, snowbound Revelstoke where our headquarters are nestled. From town, it’s a two-hour drive to the end of a mostly empty road, and then a helicopter flight over the sweeping Columbia River to reach the lodge’s spectacular perch on the edge of the Rockies.
So, yeah. Marnie is a lynchpin. A wizard. And always ready to walk you through what is needed to make those logistics easy.
She didn’t start out in hospitality or the ski world, though. Marnie, in fact, is a scientist, a forest entomologist who studied mountain pine beetle and then worked in environmental and wildlife management. But a lot of her work required time away from home, and when she had her first child, that time away became less attractive. She happened into the Mica family in a sort of serendipity, doing town-based odd jobs in 2010. She started in on logistics the following year and has been with Mica ever since. It isn’t the career path that she had imagined, but she has found an amazing home and true fulfillment within the Mica family. If that weren’t the case, she wouldn’t be working on her 14th winter!
There are a few things you should know about Marnie.
She grew up in Quesnel in central British Columbia, learning to downhill ski at a little resort called Troll Mountain where the runs are named after Disney characters.
She Nordic ski raced through University and is now a Nordic ski race coach in Revelstoke’s youth program.
She’s a distance runner who tackles hundred-mile races. For fun. And with her family, she takes on multi-day backcountry mountain adventures.
She’s a dynamite karaoke singer and takes pride in dressing with pizzaz.
She’ll take any opportunity to put on a costume that sparkles, which makes her an MVP at après when she’s up at the lodge.
And, she’ll do (pretty much) anything for Mica guests.
Like the time a longstanding guest who hails from a desert country planned to bring his wife to Mica for the first time, but she had no high mountain clothes to speak of. He called Marnie and gave her his wife’s size and favorite colors. Marnie obliged with a shopping trip and had cozy and stylish mountain outfits ready and waiting. Or the time she had to help coordinate the long lining of a baby grand piano to the lodge when we hosted a concert on a glacier by a professional classical pianist.
Marnie is a master of “special transfers,” backup plans and those tricky days where the details don’t QUITE work out as planned. She’s someone you want on your team and understands the importance of “not delaying the ski program."
Marnie likes to say that she works behind the scenes. But when you’re everyone’s first and last point of contact, working magic as a day job, we’d say that’s pretty front and center.
