Iconic Bend ski shop to move

Skjersaa’s Sport Shop, a descendant of Bend’s first ski shop, is moving.

The ski and snowboard shop at 130 SW Century Drive is playing musical chairs with Gear Fix, an outdoor-equipment consignment and repair shop two blocks south at 345 SW Century Drive.

Gear Fix is moving to a larger space in the Old Mill Marketplace. Owners of the respective shops said the moves take place Saturday.

“We’re actually going to try and do it without closing” the shop, Jeremy Nelson, who owns Skjersaa’s with his wife, Shannon Casgar-Nelson, said Monday. “I know that sounds absurd.”

Gear Fix has occupied its two-story building since October 2010, shop owner Josh Sims said Monday. He said he hoped to accomplish the move over the weekend and open Monday in the new space at 550 SW Industrial Way, Suite 183, next to Immersion Brewing.

“There’ll be a couple of late nights and early mornings,” Sims said.

The property that is home to Skjersaa’s, built to resemble a ski chalet by its original, namesake owners in 1965, is for sale by its current owner, Martha Coker Merrill, with a list price of $1.25 million.

That’s down from the original asking price of $1.5 million set when the 6,240-square-foot building and one-third-acre lot were first listed in June, said Brian Fratzke, whose firm, Fratzke Commercial Real Estate, listed the property for sale.

The original owners, Terry and Judy Skjersaa, sold the shop and retired in 1996, according to The Bulletin archives. The shop was the last version of a ski shop operated by a family whose name is synonymous with skiing in Central Oregon.

Terry Skjersaa’s parents, Olaf and Grace Skjersaa, opened the first ski shop in Bend in the back of their home on 10th Street in 1939, Terry Skjersaa told The Bulletin in 2013. As early as 1938, Olaf was already making and selling wooden skis with metal edges in the garage of the family home on Florida Avenue, said Tim Gibbons, guest curator of a coming exhibit, “Winter Comes: Oregon’s Nordic Ski Heritage,” at the Des Chutes Historical Museum.

After the 10th Street shop, the Skjersaas opened another on Greenwood Avenue at about the same time they ran the first ski shop at Bachelor Butte, later Mt. Bachelor, Gibbons said, citing his research for the exhibit.

Nels Skjersaa, Olaf’s older brother and a founding member of the Skyliners mountain climbing and ski club, helped bring outdoor recreation to the prominence it still enjoys in Central Oregon, Gibbons said. And, he said, thousands of skiers have Olaf and Grace Skjersaa and their family to thank for fitting them for their first pair of skis and introducing them to the sport.

“Olaf was the expert,” Gibbons said. “He was bringing his expertise out of the field and into the shop and that’s what they were known for.”

In 1965, what would become Skjersaa’s Sport Shop on SW Century Drive was a vacant lot outside the city limits. Except for a local tavern, the street was empty.

“We had no running water out there,” Terry Skjersaa told The Bulletin in 2013. “The water stopped at Albany (Avenue), so I had to bring the water line in from there. You wouldn’t believe it.”

On Tuesday, Fratzke said his firm has fielded several offers for the ski-shop property since June. It once went into escrow before the prospective buyer backed out, he said. Fratzke said the price came down because the building needs some improvements.

Nelson said the likelihood that the shop could one day lose some of its parking was one consideration for moving, although that prospect is far off, according to city officials. Bend has some money left from the $30 million transportation bond approved by voters in 2011 to spend on improvements to SW 14th Street and SW Century Drive between Galveston and Simpson avenues, said Jeff England, Bend assistant director of engineering. That project is still in the discussion phase, he said. Curbs, sidewalks and drainage could be part of the plan. To install a sidewalk along SW Century at Skjersaa’s could one day mean reducing some of the shop’s parking space.

In the meantime, putting that property to use for anything other than retail would require improvements, such as bike parking and trash screening, said Colin Stephens, Bend city planning manager.

The existing shop, which sells snowboards along with skis and other gear, currently shares space with the Bend Lax Shack, a lacrosse equipment retailer, that Nelson said will stay put. Upstairs, residential tenants occupy two apartments. Heat in the first floor is provided solely by a fireplace, he said. Nelson is moving the shop into a slightly smaller space than it occupies today, about 3,700 square feet.

At Gear Fix, Sims said the 7,000-square-foot space at Old Mill Marketplace is more than he needs, but will afford space on one floor for his bike- and gear-repair technicians, their work stations and sewing machines. Customers will be able to see Gear Fix employees at work, he said.

“Dinner and a show, I guess,” Sims said.

The two-story warren of Gear Fix shops, offices and retail space on SW Century Drive speaks to the need to expand, he said. The Old Mill Marketplace, although renovated recently, dates to the 1920s. Sims said the interior beams will preserve the feel of Gear Fix as an outdoor-oriented enterprise built on the idea of maintaining and re-using outdoor equipment.

“It’s important to maintain the atmosphere of the shop,” he said.

The move brings Gear Fix close to its roots. The shop originally opened in August 2006 at 507 NW Colorado Ave., a site now occupied by Cascade Rack and before that by the Horned Hand night club.

— Reporter: 541-617-7815, jditzler@bendbulletin.com