Bryce Campbell’s Journey To and Away From Minnesota’s North Shore

FORT FRANCES, ONTARIO – The gi­ant moose seems out of place.

Inside the lobby of the Copper River Inn – located on the out­skirts of downtown in this sleepy village just across the Rainy Riv­er from Internation­al Falls, Minn. – the hotel’s owner, Bryce Campbell, explains that the inside of the lodging facility is drastically improved from the way it was when he bought it in 2014.

“You should see the before and after pho­tos,” he says.

Among the items on display near the front lobby is a full-sized taxidermy mount of a moose. To see the giant figure towering near the hotel’s main entrance gives one the feeling of walking into a Cabela’s depart­ment store, or a Forest Service ranger station near the Boundary Waters.

“That’s some moose,” I say.

I’m here to talk with Campbell about a lot of things, including how he came to live in the Copper River Inn, a reality he faces with every setting sun these days. One year ago, Campbell was living in a large con­dominium he owned near Two Harbors on the shoreline of Lake Superior. On paper, at this time last year, Campbell had more than $30 million in assets. Among the no­tables on the itemized list of things and prop­erty he owned were Superior Shores and Lutsen Resort on Min­nesota’s North Shore.

The fire changed all that. Just after mid­night on Feb. 6, 2024, Lutsen Resort caught fire. The blaze obliter­ated the historic lodge. The investigation into the fire remains ongo­ing. Campbell is now the centerpiece of mul­tiple investigations led by state agencies, insurance companies, and private firms into his business dealings and his whereabouts the night of the fire.

In addition to the fact Campbell was in the building less than an hour before the fire started just after mid­night, it became appar­ent that the resort was suffering major finan­cial problems. Unpaid bills were mounting from contractors and townhome associa­tions, and the possibil­ity of not making pay­roll was all looming in the leadup to the fire.

After losing Lut­sen Resort to that fire, about six months lat­er, Campbell lost his other resort in Minne­sota, Superior Shores. A judge removed that resort from his own­ership due to a com­plex web of financial issues.

And that’s why we’re sitting around this large circular table inside the Copper Riv­er Inn having a con­versation about his life and times. Campbell himself has become as much a part of the story of the fire at Lut­sen and the loss of Su­perior Shores as have those tangible realities themselves. Campbell, who stands at 6’4” and often sports a beard, is largely viewed as an enigma in Cook and Lake counties. His rise to prominence in the local business commu­nities here is matched only by the rapidness of his descent from them. What remains to be seen is if this is only a bump in the road for his business dealings on the North Shore, or something more permanent.

Campbell, 40, is the owner of North Shore Resort Co., which sits under the umbrella of the Campbell Hospi­tality Group, a Cana­dian-based company he founded with his mother, Sheila Camp­bell. Shelia died in August 2021 at the age of 64. Dating back some 20 years, the Campbells’ hospitality group acquired hotels, motels, and restaurants in numerous locations, including their first purchase, a small drive-in restaurant in Manitoba that they bought in 2001 when Bryce Campbell was 17. Twelve years later, they sold the business.

Along the way, Campbell Hospitality Group bought Main Street Inn and Suites and Rest’n Inn, both in Manitoba. They purchased the Cop­per River Inn in Fort Frances in 2014. Af­ter renovating the ho­tel and expanding its restaurant, Campbell was named the Entre­preneur of the Year in 2015 by the Rainy River District Cham­ber of Commerce.

Campbell told me he aspired to be in this food and lodging industry from a very young age.

“I think my dream of hospitality began when I was 10 going on 11 with our annu­al family vacation in Jackson Hole (Wyo­ming) that year,” he said. “I was mesmer­ized by the hotels and resorts and that year my ‘when I grow up’ switched from want­ing to be a veterinari­an to wanting to own a resort or a restaurant.”

Campbell never graduated from high school, something he attributes to his severe asthma, challenges with passing a physi­cal education course, and a general lack of interest in finishing his final exams. Instead, he turned to business. The month he should have been graduat­ing from high school, Campbell said, he was working the grill at the drive-in restaurant.

“I decided to only write half of my final exams and for the rest of the month I learned how to flip burgers and clean the ice cream machine,” he said.

Not one to quote the likes of Kurt Vonnegut or Margaret Atwood, Campbell told me the only books he’s ever read are a series titled “Great Lodges of the Canadian Rockies.” He first received one of the books while still a teenager as a gift from his Aunt Rhonda.

“I was absolute­ly fascinated by the ‘park-itecture’ in these books and the fasci­nating history,” Camp­bell said. “One of my favorite quotes from one of the railroad bar­ons in the books is, ‘If we cannot export the scenery, then we shall import the tourist.’”

Campbell arrived to Minnesota’s North Shore in 2018, not long after he pur­chased Lutsen Resort for $3.35 million with no down payment (ac­cording to legal re­cords in Cook County) from longtime owners Scott Harrison and Nancy Burns. I was the news director at WTIP radio in Grand Marais at the time. Longtime Cook County reporter Rhonda Silence went to Lutsen to meet with Campbell, Harrison and Burns to cover the change in ownership at the historic lodge, and we ran a story fea­turing the news of re­sort’s sale. Listening back to the interview from 2018, Campbell sounds optimistic and genuine. He sounds, to use a simple word: kind.

“You are from Can­ada?” Rhonda asks Campbell at one point during the interview.

“I am, eh,” he re­sponds, accentuating his Canadian accent.

Within four years, a much different ver­sion of Campbell, at least in terms of pub­lic perception, would emerge. Locally, he became known as the pompous owner of Lutsen Resort and Su­perior Shores, accord­ing to multiple busi­ness owners in Cook County who’ve had dealings with Camp­bell over the years. During one meeting of North Shore movers and shakers, a source said, Campbell boast­fully announced that he would be interested in purchasing Superior National Golf Course, which sits directly across Highway 61 from Lutsen Resort.

“I remember think­ing, ‘Who is this guy?’” the source, who wished to remain anonymous, said.

Many of the peo­ple I’ve talked with about Campbell over the past year wish to keep their name out of the story. The rea­sons vary, from the fact Campbell owes them money and they don’t want to further risk not getting paid, or simply because they don’t want to be asso­ciated in public with Campbell. Nonethe­less, there was a time when Campbell held stature in the local business community. In 2021, for example, Campbell was ap­pointed to a three-year term as the treasurer of the Visit Cook County Board of Directors. He was appointed to the post by the Lut­sen-Tofte-Schroeder Tourism Association.

In 2023, Visit Cook County and the Cook County Chamber of Commerce partnered with WTIP radio in Grand Marais to run business stories. Aired and published un­der the name, “Local Business Spotlight,” the radio station works with the tourism agen­cy to “highlight the community’s econom­ic strength and inno­vation of both new businesses as well as existing business­es.” That September, WTIP, with guid­ance from Visit Cook County, chose Lutsen Resort as the featured business. During a nearly 20-minute in­terview, WTIP host Kalli Hawkins talks with Campbell and the resort’s then gen­eral manager, Edward Vanegas, about ex­pansion plans for Lut­sen Resort. Hawkins, Venegas, and Camp­bell share details of a third-floor remodel of the lodge, along with other potential chang­es to the resort in the future. Among oth­er things, Campbell hoped to transform Lutsen Resort into a luxury boutique lodge, with the addition of a $4 million Nordic spa.

Less than six months after that interview, Lutsen Resort burned to the ground. A week before the fire, and a week after, two liens were placed on the property by the archi­tects and construction companies Hawkins, Vanegas, and Camp­bell discuss in the WTIP interview. On Jan. 29, 2024, Double Jack Design Work­shop, a St. Paul based architecture firm, filed a mechanic’s lien of $84,664 against Campbell and North Shore Resort Co. for architectural services for the redesign plans for Lutsen Resort. On Feb. 13, 2024, about a week after the fire, a mechanic’s lien of $270,965 was filed by Highmark Builders Inc. for work on the third-floor remodel.

Campbell is gen­erally very wary of the media. He once called this reporter “his harshest critic,” largely based on a sto­ry I wrote about work the resort did on the Poplar River in 2022. That fall, Lutsen Re­sort was issued a cease-and-desist order by the DNR after the North Shore resort attempted to repair a set of cov­ered bridges that were damaged by flooding in the Poplar Riv­er earlier in the year. The article is based on facts, and Campbell himself is quoted in the article after he re­sponded to questions I asked him about the unpermitted work that was being done in the river. Campbell re­peatedly tried to dis­credit the article (and this reporter) after it was published.

Nonetheless, about two years later, Camp­bell agreed to start cor­responding with me. Many other journal­ists, including Cathy Wurzer with Minneso­ta Public Radio, have asked why Campbell agreed to start com­municating with me, including two separate in-person conversa­tions where we talk­ed for more than two hours each time.

“I felt like you had an opinion of me that might not be correct at all, or only half cor­rect,” Campbell told me Jan. 29. “And I was like, ‘You know what, I’m going out of my comfort zone here and see if I could turn it around.’”

Broadly speaking, Campbell is easy to talk with. He doesn’t come across as some­one who is hiding something, though he is clearly well caffein­ated (he drinks about six Diet Cokes and two caramel macchia­tos a day), which gives him a bit of nervous energy. He talks qui­etly and is undemon­strative as he describes what some are calling his fall from grace, though for Campbell it’s what he calls his life. He’s in the middle of it. It’s unfolding in real time. Campbell responded to every question I asked him during our recorded interview, the bulk of which will be shared on a podcast that I’m currently creating with other media partners about Lutsen Resort, the fire, and tourism on Minnesota’s North Shore. The podcast will be available later this year.

If Bryce Campbell is to be involved with the future of Lutsen Resort, he’ll need a favorable settlement from the insurance company. He said the current claim is around $18 million, a far cry from the $3.35 million Campbell paid for the resort just six years before the fire. He’ll also have a mountain of debt to pay off, and creditors and oth­ers are waiting to see how the situation un­folds. While he waits, Campbell says he sell­ing the motel where he is currently sleeping each night, the Copper River Inn in Fort Fran­ces.

Before revisiting the seemingly out of place moose at the front en­trance of the hotel, and while we’re still seated at the large ta­ble where we spoke at length on Jan. 29, I pause temporarily be­fore asking Campbell directly if he started the fire that burned down Lutsen Resort.

“The million-dollar question,” I say, “that many people, from community members, to friends, to media want to ask is, did you start the fire?”

“Pretty straight­forward question,” Campbell said. “I can also answer, no, of course not.”