Sarah Cruse

Sarah Cruse took an unconventional route to Clayoquot Wilderness Lodge. Her career began not in hotels but on the golf courses of Muskoka, Ontario, where she became only the second female golf-course superintendent in Canada before studying hotel management at Cornell University. She went on to spend a decade leading Quail Lodge and Golf Club in Carmel, California, but Sarah believes those early years in agronomy still shape the way she leads today. “I use the same principles for growing people that I once used for growing grass,” she says, describing a philosophy of creating the right conditions for people to develop and thrive. When her career eventually brought her into wilderness hospitality, the connection was immediate. On her first visit to Clayoquot, Sarah found herself sitting on a log in the estuary, already wondering how she could buy the property herself. “I’m home,” she remembers thinking. The horses sealed the deal.

Sarah later left for Dunton Hot Springs in Colorado to deepen her experience in wilderness hospitality, but Clayoquot followed her. “I honestly left my heart at Clayoquot,” she says. She returned in 2020 and today serves as both General Manager and the lodge’s affectionately dubbed “Camp Mom,” leading a seasonal community of up to 100 people who live and work together off-grid. For Sarah, the wilderness isn’t scenery surrounding the guest experience; it sets its rhythm. She starts her own days biking with her dogs and cold plunging in the Bedwell River, and has learned to expect daily curveballs from what she calls the lodge’s real boss, Mother Nature. It is precisely that surrender to nature that she hopes guests discover, too. “Once they feel the spirit of the property and give in to the rhythm and ripples of the surrounding nature, they’ll slow down,” she says. After all these years, Sarah already knows what awaits them. She felt it herself the first time she sat beside the estuary and realised she had found home.