While they were only on screen for about ten minutes, it took months to prepare for the Malahat Skywalk’s appearance on The Amazing Race Canada.
General Manager of the Malahat Skywalk, Ken Bailey, says they were discovered by a friend of a producer who was visiting the attraction.
“One of the producers from Amazing Race received a text from a friend of his that was at Malahat Skywalk,” says Bailey. “So the producer said we need to go see that when we’re scouting locations.
“Fast forward, they phoned me, they said, ‘Would you be interested?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ So they came and did a scout and they thought it was one of the most beautiful things they had ever seen. So they said, ‘Yeah, we want to do something.'”
The team bandied about a few ideas of what racers could do while at the attraction, but settled on a scavenger hunt, taking pictures of the ten driftwood art sculptures on display on the grounds.
“We went through a whole series of different ideas. They like to rappel. We have an adventure net at the top, so we talked about different ideas with that,” says Bailey. “What we came up with was that just finding the animals at 6 o’clock in the morning is challenging enough, plus having to do that under duress of racing against everybody else.”
With the activity nailed down, they had to pick someone to approve or deny racers once they thought they had photographed all ten.
The original idea was that it was going to be Tanya Bubb, who was the artist that did all of the driftwood art, but the day before, Tanya got sick,” says Bailey. “So Shawna, our director of operations, agreed a little bit reluctantly to be the star for Malahat Skywalk.”
It was about six months from their initial point of contact until filming in April. Bailey was on-site for part of the shoot and says the filming process itself went rather quickly, with the whole crew being out before the attraction opened at 10 am.
“They’re up very early on-site and I think they were done by 9 am,” he says. “They’re extremely professional. They’re highly organized. And it’s pretty remarkable watching the cameramen running back and forth chasing these racers.”
After filming, he says the producers didn’t make him sign a non-disclosure agreement, or anything like that to keep the things or results that they had seen secretive.
“I’ve worked with other productions that were pretty strict on [secrecy], but they just asked us not to talk about it before it aired,” says Bailey.
He says he kept the secret to be a nice surprise for his friends and family who watched.
“I did not tell my friends and family beforehand, it was pretty funny,” says Bailey. “All of our staff were very proud to be part of it. They work so hard on a daily basis, it’s just really nice to be recognized and profiled in a show like The Amazing Race.”
It’s the second time that Bailey has been a part of an Amazing Race stop, having done so in a previous position in Squamish. He says it’s been helpful in opening eyes across the country to their relatively young attraction.
“It’s just so much fun,” he says. “It’s such a great concept. It’s a visual postcard of what we have in this country.
“We do a lot of our marketing locally, but when you talk about further away places, it’s fantastic. It’s like everybody got a marketing postcard in their mail that night […] I got a text from my mom who hasn’t been out to see it yet, and she said ‘Now I really understand what it looks like.'”
The Malahat Skywalk was one of four stops in the July 25th episode of the show, called This Ugly Duckling is Now A Swan (season nine, episode four). It’s available to watch for free on the CTV app or the CTV website.
