Zoey Duncan
A half-century ago, 12-year-old Bill Lee caught his first Canadian fish with the help of his parents and a guide who knew the local waters better than most people know their own town.
Now 62, Lee is just back home in Missouri after his latest trip to Helliar’s Family Fishing Resort in Nestor Falls. Only this June, for the first time, he brought his grandchildren on the same 16-hour drive that he’s been doing for decades.
Since Lee’s grandfather, George, took his own initial outing on Lake of the Woods all those years ago, five generations of Lee anglers have made Helliar’s Resort part of their summer plans.
“This is a traditional thing that they love,” Lee said of his family. “They love to fish, they love the camaraderie of going up, shore lunch, going out and getting out of the boat at lunch, cooking the fish you caught that morning. Frying potatoes and onions.
“I mean it’s wonderful.”
Helliar’s Resort will celebrate its 75th anniversary on Canada Day and families like Lee’s, who return generation after generation, are unofficially the rule at the resort, rather than an anomaly.
“They don’t just show up here once and then that’s their vacation and then they’ll go somewhere else next year,” noted Les Helliar, who was born the same year his parents started the tourist business.
“We have lots that have come for 40 years.”
Lee remembered one summer as a teenager when he thought he was “too good” to join his parents at the resort. Then, they phoned him their first day on vacation.
“I could just almost smell the fish through the telephone,” Lee recalled. He took a plane to International Falls the next day in order to join his family and get his annual Helliar’s fix.
“We have probably 95 percent repeat customers,” said Wayne Helliar. “Of that five percent [in new guests], the average customer stays 20 years, so we pick up five percent every year.”
Growing up at the family-run resort meant Wayne and his brother, Glen, began to feel like all those repeat customers were part of their family. For Lee, the feeling is mutual.
“Having known them over the years the way we do, and respecting them and enjoying their hospitality and their friendship, it’s like a family,” he remarked.
The Helliars’ story began in 1936 when fire swept through the family bakery in Rainy River. Les said that while things looked “pretty black” after the blaze, his father, Charlie, turned the devastation into an opportunity.
At the time, his grandfather was employed by a Depression-era work project, clearing the right-of-way for Highway 71, so Charlie and his wife, Florence, moved up the highway seeking opportunity.
“This was kind of opening up here and we had to go somewhere,” Les reasoned.
They set up on Sabaskong Bay in a Nestor Falls that was very different from the one visitors see today, but it was a location destined to charm tourists.
In the early days, Charlie Helliar continued to bake bread in his oven, which had survived the Rainy River fire, and delivered loaves to residents of Sioux Narrows. Then, as highway construction wound down, the time was ripe to start building a resort.
“The thing just evolved,” Les said.
Construction companies were leaving the area and the Helliars jumped on the chance to purchase a couple of “highway shacks” that had been used by the highway crews
“We turned them into a cabin,” Les said. “The next thing you know, we acquired a boat.”
Business carried on until the Second World War, during which the area became a veritable ghost town.
“Everybody was gone, there was nothing,” Les recalled. “Then right after the Second World War, tourists just came in droves and we just kept adding things and adding things.”
The Helliars ended their bakery operation sometime during or after the war, he said, but they added a popular 72-seat dining room. It, too, would fall by the wayside, though, when the highway between Fort Frances and Dryden was built.
“It just diverted so much traffic around us that we closed it up,” Les explained. “If we were to continue, we would’ve had to downsize.”
Today, Helliar’s has 13 cozy, modern cottages and six motel rooms on the lakefront, and they continue to see their American customers return despite that country’s slow crawl out of recession.
“This is probably our best-looking year for about five years,” Wayne Helliar said. “It just seems like you can see the change in the customers’ attitudes this year.
“They’re buying stuff in the store, they’re more relaxed. . . .
“We are way competitive with anywhere else you can go,” he added. “We’re cheaper than Quebec, we’re cheaper than Manitoba.”
For John Radewald, there may as well be no other fishing resort in North America. Helliar’s captured his heart 12 years ago when his travel agent invited him to join her family for a weekend fishing trip.
He’s booked the same cabin every visit since and makes the trek from California each summer.
“You couldn’t ask for a more beautiful place than here,” said Radewald, a retired plant pathologist who taught at the University of California, Riverside.
“This is, without a doubt, probably the finest lodge I’ve ever been in, it really is,” he stressed.
Most cabins are filled with familiar faces, but once in a while a new guest makes their way north for a visit—even without a friend’s recommendation.
Amanda Kane and her husband, for instance, flipped through travel magazines and scoured the Internet to find a cabin for a short reprieve from day-to-day life in Kiel, Wis. The couple was looking for a destination that was within their budget and wasn’t too far a drive from home.
“There were a lot of horror stories out there for other resorts of cabins still dirty from previous visitors and bare bones’ accommodations, which is fine if you plan on being out on the lake all day,” Kane wrote in an e-mail.
“Advice from people who stayed at these places were things like, ‘Bring candles to cover up the stench, you’ll have to clean the place of cobwebs and fish guts before you bring your stuff in.’”
When Kane discovered Helliar’s Resort, she was thrilled she could stay within her budget and have the comforts of fresh towels, a stocked kitchen, and nearby shopping.
“We haven’t travelled a lot, but we had more fun there [at Helliar’s]—and it was more relaxing—than our honeymoon in the Bahamas,” she remarked, adding that while on vacation, their neighbouring guests shared stories from multiple years of visits.
The Helliars have no formal celebration planned for their diamond anniversary this Friday, other than to keep doing what has made them successful through the changing decades.
And through three-quarters of a century, some things at Helliar’s certainly have changed: customer service is not only delivered at check-in, but also to your e-mail inbox.
As well, ice cream is kept chilled with electricity rather than rock salt; and the Canadian dollar is worth a whole lot more than it used to be.
But the core of Helliar’s Resort hasn’t changed.
“It’s the beautiful scenery that you all have up there; it’s the fresh air and it’s the fishing,” said Bill Lee.
“We save our money and plan the trip, and it’s worth every penny to have the family together,” he enthused.
