Who is Bryce Campbell, accused of torching Lutsen Resort?

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LUTSEN, Minn. – Bryce Campbell had big dreams of owning a lodge similar to the ones that inspire visitors to national parks, with timber construction and stately dining halls.

So when the historic Lutsen Lodge came up for sale along Lake Superior’s rugged North Shore, he was thrilled to buy the resort with his mother in 2018. Employees said he soon envisioned transforming it into a luxury destination that would draw monied guests with $1,500 bottles of wine and lavish spa treatments.

Some eight years later, Campbell is now living quietly in modest, rundown housing nearby, awaiting trial on charges that he burned down his dream property in February 2024.

Campbell’s rise and fall isn’t surprising to some who know him. The 41-year-old Canadian citizen started in the hospitality industry at a young age emboldened with a passion for culinary arts and his mother’s business acumen. But he had no formal education in the profession. He was a difficult person to work for, some former employees have said, and they saw his expensive ideas put him in financial straits.

Locals cast suspicion on Campbell immediately after the fire, whispering that he owed money to several area businesses. Authorities arrested and charged him with arson and insurance fraud in early last December. He was released after posting a $100,000 bond with conditions that include needing court permission to leave the state.

Campbell has maintained his innocence, even suing his insurance company recently for nonpayment. Neither he nor his husband returned messages for this story. His attorney also declined to comment.

“You have no idea what it’s like to lose such a big piece of your life [that] my mom and I were building together,” he wrote.

Campbell vowed to rebuild his dream.

Campbell’s first exposure at age 10 to the resorts of Jackson Hole, Wyo., set him on a course to hospitality, he said in an email to journalist Joe Friedrichs for his podcast “The Fire: A North Shore Story.” Friedrichs shared the email with the Star Tribune.

It would be a life different from that he had on the 660-acre cattle farm where he grew up in rural Reston, Manitoba, and where several of his family members were involved in agriculture and the oil industries.

In an email, Campbell said that because he missed a physical education credit due to an extended illness, he didn’t graduate from high school. A chance ice cream outing with his mom to a local drive-in his senior year altered his intended path to enroll in a culinary arts program.

Sheila Campbell shared some of the same hospitality dreams as her son, Bryce Campbell wrote, as her father had years earlier tried to buy the once-grand Marlborough Hotel in Winnipeg for her and her sister.

Campbell flipped burgers at the drive-in and learned the ins and outs of restaurant work for a couple of years before he and his mother sold it, said his former general manager, Edward Vanegas. They eventually formed the Campbell Hospitality Group and bought more small inns, according to newspaper accounts.

In 2014, the Campbells bought the Copper River Inn in Fort Frances, Ontario, where they made extensive renovations and earned the 2015 “entrepreneur of the year” award from the Fort Frances Chamber of Commerce.

“Bryce had amazing renovation ideas,” said Cheryle Wolff, who worked at the hotel as office and front desk manager until, she said, she left after disagreements with Campbell about wages. “He had a vision and spared nothing to get it done.”

Later, the Campbells faced lawsuits for workers’ rights and wrongful termination at the Copper River Inn. The termination lawsuit ended with a $20,000 payout to a former employee in 2020, Ontario court records show.

In 2018, Campbell and his mother bought what they called Lutsen Resort and its assets for $6.7 million. Three iterations of the lodge had been in operation for nearly 140 years. Situated between the Superior National Forest and Lake Superior, the original resort was built by Swedish immigrant Charles Axel Nelson. The lodge was destroyed by fire twice before Campbell bought it.

For Campbell, the lodge was “love at first sight” for its stately dining hall and resemblance to national park lodges, he told Friedrichs.

In 2020, the Campbells bought Superior Shores — a Two Harbors, Minn., lakeside resort that includes a condo development — for $15 million. Campbell lost operation of the property last year when he missed payments.

Frank Jermusek, president of SVN Northco Real Estate Services, represented the sellers in both sales. He didn’t return a request for an interview, but told the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal in 2020 that Campbell was “a really good operator.”

“He is young, aggressive, creative and he is putting a ton of money into restoring Lutsen Lodge,” Jermusek told the journal.

Former employees and people who have met Campbell described him as quiet and shy. But some employees have called him “mercurial” and “mean.” He had a temper, Wolff recalled, but he could also be fun.

Alex Hilterbrand, who worked as a guide at the resort for five months in 2023, said she quit because of the way Campbell treated employees.

She said a plaque on his desks at both the Lutsen and Superior Shores resorts read: “In charge of all you (expletives).” That, she said, symbolized his attitude toward staff.

“He really just kind of does whatever he wants and says whatever he wants, whether or not it’s unhinged,” Hilterbrand said.

Once, she said, Campbell made her leave a meeting because she offered an idea that opposed one he had.

Vanegas, who said he isn’t convinced Campbell started the resort fire, worked with him for six years. He called Campbell an “HR nightmare” who often needed to be chided and told to apologize behind closed doors for “condescending” things he said to his staff.

Employees said negative reviews of his properties angered Campbell to the point of researching and “trolling” the Facebook pages of the critics.

But Gunflint Lodge owner John Fredrikson saw something else in Campbell after serving with him on Cook County’s tourism board. Fredrikson had moved to northeastern Minnesota to buy and run Gunflint Lodge in 2016.

He said Campbell seemed proud to own Lutsen Resort. Fredrikson said he was a businessman keenly aware of how the resort was faring, never hinting at financial troubles.

Campbell was known to think “outside the box,” he said, which added to his status as a controversial figure among some of his contemporaries.

Vanegas said he sees the death of Sheila Campbell in 2021 as the start of her son’s financial problems.

Campbell told Friedrichs that his mother had “looked after” the books for their businesses and acted as a sounding board for him.

“We talked every day,” Campbell said in an unaired recording. “It’s hard. I didn’t just lose my mom. I lost a pretty important business partner, too.”

Campbell began making bigger changes to the Lutsen property, altering its vibe to make it more posh and exclusive than the North Woods family-friendly feel it had for more than a century.

He sold its sea kayaks and stopped allowing weddings on site. His spending accelerated after his mother’s death, Vanegas said, with a third-floor lodge renovation and plans to build a Nordic spa and a second lodge building. He wanted Lutsen Resortto appeal to the same customers who stayed in high-end resorts in Colorado and Montana and drove Range Rovers and Audis.

Campbell made gimmicky marketing moves such as offering $100,000 Home Depot gift cards to potential condo buyers in Two Harbors.

Envisioning his historic lakefront lodge in the same vein as national park lodges, he spent about $1 million on two vintage buses from Yellowstone National Park, Vanegas said.

Campbell told Friedrichs in the email the only books he ever read came from a series about great lodges of the Canadian Rockies and national parks.

“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 wrote.

Campbell had visions for his properties that couldn’t be dissuaded, Vanegas said.

A $125 prix fixe menu debuted at the Lutsen Resort restaurant at the start of 2024. A fondue-only concept replaced a beloved pub. Wine inventory included $1,500 bottles.

The place where locals came for burgers and beer was gone.

But electrical and plumbing problems constantly plagued the 72-year-old structure. And cosmetic upgrades weren’t enough to justify price increases, employees said. As legacy visitors stopped coming, wealthier customers weren’t responding.

On the podcast, Campbell said he disagreed that the resort’s vibe was no longer welcoming to locals.

“That would mean you’re determining welcoming by price. … In reality, I think we made the place more welcoming than ever when it comes to service … and offerings,” Campbell said.

“When has Lutsen ever had a doorman?” Campbell asks in the podcast.

Campbell also managed several condo and townhouse associations surrounding the lodge and had combative relationships with some of the owners. He eventually ended contracts with all of the associations, losing revenue for managing dozens of properties that amounted to several hundred thousand dollars.

Campbell didn’t want to answer to the owners, Vanegas said, and a second lodge building was going to offset the loss of that revenue.

Several condo owners sued Campbell over missed payments.

“He’s just completely been a destructive force on the North Shore since he got there,” said John Trettel, former president of the Poplar River Condo Association, a condo group Campbell managed until 2023.

It would cost up to $30 million to replicate the Mesaba Red U-shaped Lutsen lodge, a construction company told Vanegas and Campbell after the fire.

St. Paul architect Edwin H. Lundie designed the original lodge with its prominent chimney and beams carved from centuries-old White Pine. The lodge destroyed by fire two years ago was built in 1952 with the same plans.

Rebuilding it didn’t seem feasible, Vanegas said.

Campbell had filed a $16.5 million insurance claim after the lodge was destroyed. His business debt, which included his other ventures, was more than $14 million at the time. Court records show that shortly before the fire, Campbell didn’t have enough money to pay resort employees.

In January, he sued his insurance company for denying the claim he filed to collect on the lodge that he’s accused of destroying.

“A lot of people could have gotten hurt,” said Tofte Circle K owner Brian Olsen, a volunteer firefighter who helped battle the blaze that night. “He shouldn’t be out.”

Hans Strengel, who owns the WatersEdge Trading Co. in Tofte, said he was glad to hear Campbell is back.

“I was more distraught that they let him out and thought he would bounce out of the country immediately,” Strengel said. “I want to see due process work.”

Campbell appeared anguished by the loss in interviews with Friedrichs months after the fire.

He said on the podcast that he watched the blaze for hours, falling to his knees in grief after his legs gave out.