Wild road to health and fitness

Andrea and Shayne Stuchbery and Shayne's father, Colin, at the $2m Coastal Trek Lodge in the mountains of Vancouver Island. The lodge, 670m up and overlooking Georgia Strait, will provide a regime for Americans and Canadians wanting to lose weight.

The Maori guy in the Ngapuhi T-shirt and jandals comes down the muddy driveway, his hand extended and face beaming a welcome.

Drifts of snow almost a metre deep lie against the garage, others are brushed into the shadows around the base of the dark pines.

Shayne Stuchbery - formerly of Whangarei and seemingly impervious to the cold - is here in the mountains of Vancouver Island, Canada, and behind him is the $2 million Coastal Trek Lodge, a 12-room fitness centre-cum-health retreat with its own restaurant, outdoor spa and large lounge dominated by a huge fireplace made of river stones.

This luxury lodge, 670m up and overlooking Georgia Strait, is where wealthy Canadians and Americans are going to come, Stuchbery hopes, when their doctors tell them to lose weight or they'll fall over and probably not get up again.

His Canadian father-in-law, Jim McLeod, got that message a few years ago and tried to find a place where he could get fit and shape up. All he was offered were health spas, but he needed to get into better physical condition, not relax to massage tapes.

So McLeod identified a niche in the high-end health-lodge market and, with wife Susan, son-in-law Shayne and daughter Andrea as on-site managers, plus Andrea's brother and his wife as partners, they raised loans and went ahead with this ambitious project in a place of breathtaking beauty - and bears.

"Oh yeah, there are bears," says Stuchbery. "Just the other day a baby bear climbed a tree beside our deck and got stuck. It was making a helluva racket and where there's a baby bear there's sure to be a mother bear."

Gazing across the tree line, Stuchbery continues: "You have to watch the kids round here." Because of bears? "Yeah. And cougars."

People don't just drop in on the Stuchberys, their two young children and dog Barlow. They may be only three hours north of Victoria but the final 45 minutes of that drive is up an unsealed road which climbs somewhere close to the roof of the world at the end of Forbidden Plateau Rd.

But from there is a view which seems to take in most of Canada and half of heaven. Golden eagles circle above and, the air is so clean, years of bad things are exhaled in every breath.

"Not bad, eh?" Stuchbery says with admirable understatement.

The back boundary of the property, through which they will take clients on escorted hikes, is Strathcona Provincial Park, the oldest provincial park in British Columbia.

So what brought a self-confessed odd-jobber from Kiwiland, all the way to this remote place?

Love is the answer.

Stuchbery met Andrea McLeod from the coastal town of Sechelt on the Canadian mainland in New Zealand in 2000. She had come over for a friend's wedding.

"I was the best man, the only unattached guy there, you know how that is."

Stuchbery had a varied career in New Zealand: Sawmilling, construction, running his own hay-contracting firm and, when the two met, he was at Lincoln University doing a sociology degree.

He moved to Sechelt in early 2001 and worked in his prospective father-in-law's refrigeration business.

After McLeod's health scare, they found the property in 2002 and the 6ha - already cleared of pine and with little regrowth - cost only $110,000.

Stuchbery has acted as on-site manager and general tradesman, and his father, Colin, has been up helping out in the months before the soft opening next month.

They have a manager and a staff of eight, including a fitness instructor, with Andrea Stuchbery doing breakfasts and lunches, and overseeing dinners.

The emphasis is on fresh, organic food, plenty of seasonal fruit and vegetables, and sensible (which for most clients will mean smaller) servings.

The six-day health and fitness plan will cost clients about $4000.

From October to July, when the lodge could be snowed in, they will host live-in conferences - they have snowmobiles for transport and a van to pick up clients from the airport at Comox on the flatland below.

It's an ambitious project and a financial risk. Not that they probably think about that when looking across the valley to the snow-capped peaks of mainland Canada in the distance.

The other day I got an email from Stuchbery way up on the roof of western Canada where the wild things are. "About those bears mate," he wrote.

"Andrea and I had us a bloody huge one that clawed bloody great marks down our basement walls the other night ... I opened the front door to find that our mellow, good-natured Barlow was actually a psychotic, murderous bear-chasing machine ...

"Barlow nipped the big fella's ass all the way down the front section ...

"That's four in the morning on the mountain for you ... "

* Graham Reid flew to North America courtesy of Air New Zealand.