Lake Louise Archives - Alberta Views

Wildfire in the Bow Valley

Adrienne Mason — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:00:01 +0000

Across the valley, on the slopes of the Colin Range, Jasper National Park is burning—and my boyfriend is helping to ignite it. Using a torch dripping a flaming mixture of diesel and gasoline, he and his park warden colleagues set a line of fire that’s snaking up the slope.

I’m watching from a pullout down on the Yellowhead Highway. As a young keener with a summer job as a park interpreter, I’m tasked with explaining to people why a national park is purposely lighting its much-beloved forests on fire. Visitors are confused, sometimes angry, almost always annoyed that the smoke now swelling up the slope in menacing black plumes threatens to ruin their holiday.

It’s May 1989 and this purpose-lit fire—a carefully planned prescribed burn—is an early effort by Canada’s national parks to bring wildfire back into a landscape where for over a century it’s been largely banished. Fire is as natural as wind and rain across most of Canada’s forests, which have evolved to be recycled and renewed by periodic burns. Trees such as lodgepole pine, for instance, require heat to melt the resin that tightly binds the scales of their cones, releasing the seeds inside.

Since the 1980s, Jasper National Park has been a leader in reintroducing fire and in acknowledging that fires are necessary—and inevitable. It’s a challenging choreography, since what can renew can also destroy. In addition to letting some wildfires safely burn and lighting others purposely to reduce fuels and break up similarly aged stands of densely packed trees, Parks Canada has been actively mitigating wildfire risk around the built environment. They have created fire breaks, thinned and limbed trees, and removed deadfall and woody debris. During my time in Jasper in the late 1980s, for instance, Parks Canada cut trees on the Pyramid Bench behind the townsite, hauling the logs out by horse and snowmobile.

In July 2024, over 35 years after the Colin Range prescribed burn, my then-boyfriend-now-husband and I watched—from a distance and through digital screens—as Jasper burned again. On the evening of July 22, in the forest alongside the Jasper–Banff Parkway about 22 kilometres south of town, lightning struck three times in three minutes. Fire hazard was extreme, following a month-long drought and with temperatures reaching 38°C. Within 10 minutes fire had reached the crowns, rendering it virtually unfightable. Gusts of wind as strong as 87 kilometres per hour energized the blazes, and they soon merged into one fire and advanced north up the valley. In the end, the inferno covered about 33,000 hectares—about 40 per cent the size of Calgary—and destroyed 358 structures in the Jasper townsite.

I’m tasked with explaining to people why a national park is purposely lighting its much-beloved forests on fire.

The Jasper wildfire held national and international attention—for a while. Almost two years on, other news floods the airwaves, even as our fire risk persists. In 2025 more than 6,000 wildfires burned across this country, making it Canada’s second-worst wildfire season. (Only 2023, the year before Jasper, was worse.) The threat continues to resonate, however, south of Jasper, in the Bow Valley. If a wildfire could so quickly reach one mountain town, despite decades of preparedness on the ground, could it do the same in Banff?

For Marie-Pierre Rogeau, there’s no question. She is a Banff resident and wildfire research scientist who for over 30 years has studied Alberta’s fire history, including that of Jasper and Banff national parks. “We’ve gone so far without having any fire at all,” she says. “[It] isn’t just a probability; it’s a 100 per cent chance.”

Rogeau’s fire history studies, along with those of Cliff White—a leader in fire management, both regionally and nationally, now retired from Parks Canada—show that until around the 1880s, forests and grasslands in the Bow Valley burned about every 20 to 200 years, depending in part on the elevation. The valley bottom burned regularly. Intervals were longer on cooler, moister slopes.

While lightning did ignite wildfires, this wasn’t as prevalent as is often assumed. A band roughly 20 kilometres wide on the east side of the Continental Divide, including the Bow Valley, is in a “lightning strike shadow.” Instead, human-lit fires were prevalent land-management tools. They were part of the “seasonal rounds” as Indigenous people moved across their territories to hunt and gather, explains White. “[The strategy was] to burn early and burn often,” he says. Regular, low-intensity fires, usually ignited during the spring or fall, were used to herd bison or other wildlife, renew grazing meadows and berry patches, open areas for easier travel, and for dozens of other applications.

The fires created a medley of habitats with different species and ages across the landscape. Natural fires—often igniting during the hotter days of summer—might then burn less intensely, since fuel hadn’t accumulated. Trees with multiple fire scars, for instance, reveal they’d seen many fires but none severe enough to kill them.

Colonization doused the flames. Settlers used fire initially to clear the land, and construction of the national railway sparked the occasional blaze. But once crops were planted, fences were built, homes and businesses became permanent settlements and forests started to be seen as a resource to extract, fire was deemed a menace. With the creation of Banff National Park in 1885, Indigenous cultural fire was banned.

Fire threatened “pristine wilderness.” Fire detection and suppression became a primary duty of the national park warden service, which was established in 1909. The men hired as fire and game wardens rose to the task and fanned out across parks to help protect the forests and “their primeval charms.”

“Culturally, we flipped so fast,” says White. In just a century, after generations of living with wildfire, humans effectively took it away. In a study of wildland fires in Banff National Park, White tracked their decline. In the decade 1880 to 1889, an estimated 37,050 hectares burned; by 1980 to 1989, it was down to zero.

Now, after more than a century of fire suppression—compounded by more droughts and erratic weather thanks to climate change—fire is back with a vengeance.

Instead of burning in a patchwork landscape with varying levels of flammability—grasslands and open meadows, willow fields, stands of leafy green aspen and balsam poplar, clusters of lodgepole pine or Douglas fir—21st-century fires feed off densely packed, fuel-rich forests dominated by 125–175-year-old lodgepole pine primed to burn.

This is what happened in the forest around Jasper. Hot and dry conditions; a continuous source of fuel, including mountain-pine-beetle-killed trees; rapid ignition; and strong convective winds sent the fire into the crowns, where it spread rapidly tree to tree. The fire generated its own weather, including tornado-like winds of nearly 200 kilometres an hour, in places ripping centuries-old Douglas firs out by their roots and levelling the forest, wrenching metal fire grates and bear-proof garbage cans from their concrete pads and even levitating a 3,000-kilogram construction waste bin and tossing it into the Athabasca River. Instead of a mixed-severity fire with the flames moving between the ground and crowns—calming down in places, flaring up in others, burning with varying intensities throughout—fires like Jasper’s level the forest, replacing entire stands, in places incinerating the soil and exposing bedrock.

Today, we’re in a worst-case scenario, says White. After removing human-caused fires, “Now we’re walking into climate change.”

“Fire has a way,” says Rogeau. “It’s like a wick. It will find whatever path… can burn.” The challenge for communities built in the middle of fire-shaped landscapes—such as the Bow Valley towns of Lake Louise, Banff and Canmore—is to employ strategies that trim the wicks and reduce the pathways.

But how do you fireproof a valley?

For one, you can fight fire with fire. About 75 years after the creation of the Park Warden Service, which had so effectively removed fire from wildlands, it was also park wardens who started bringing fire back. Cliff White helped write Banff National Park’s fire management plan and was on the ground at the park’s first prescribed burn, three hectares in size, near Two Jack Canal in 1983. Since then, the park has burned about 31,000 hectares.

One of the largest burns was in the Fairholme Range in 2003. It was a gutsy move. The prescribed fire was on the eastern edge of the national park, near the highway and between Banff and Canmore. Ecologically, the fire aimed to restore the historic landscape by reducing dense lodgepole pine growth and expanding meadows, and to get ahead of a beetle infestation. It also provided protection for Harvie Heights, a small cluster of homes on the park boundary. The project took years to plan and included an extensive fuel break about 500 hectares in size—larger than the Banff townsite. Within the burn, the forest was thinned and grasses and understory—including highly volatile juniper—were burned off.

The Fairholme Fire was a success. For White, it stands as a great example of how agencies and communities can work together to both restore fire-dependent ecosystems and protect communities.

But 23 years later, there’s still so much work to be done. As we walk the fuel break in October 2025—now a field of dry, golden grass and post-fire regrowth of shoulder-high lodgepole pines studded with large old-growth Douglas firs that were protected—White explains that prescribed fires aren’t just “one and done.” Follow-up burns remove the charred wood and dense stands of pine that regenerate in the fire’s wake. “The first [fire] is interesting,” he says. “But it’s the second one that’s really something.” Burning sooner, and with some regularity, maintains a break’s functionality. The longer you wait, the more challenging the job, says White. “If you wait 30 or 40 years, it will be huge.”

Parks Canada has had a reburn of Fairholme on the books as a priority for years, but, to date, it hasn’t occurred. The agency’s communications team says only that “the project is currently under expansive planning and will proceed once conditions are met.”

Despite the success of the initial Fairholme fire and a management plan that supports burning, prescribed fires haven’t been used extensively in the front country of the national park in recent years. A small area was burned near the Banff airport in 2022 and another nearer to town in 2023—controversially so, as it escaped containment—but other than that, there hasn’t been a prescribed fire in the Bow Valley since 2014.

With prescribed fire seemingly on the back burner, another tool has rolled into the valley to help reduce fuel and “cool” the landscape, one that not long ago would have seemed incongruent with the philosophy of parks: logging equipment.

Above the Lake Louise village, Parks Canada is constructing a community fire guard. Averaging 400 to 500 metres wide, the guard stretches from behind the Chateau Lake Louise down to the village and across the highway to the parking lot of Lake Louise ski hill. The lake on one side of the valley and the tree-free alpine of Whitehorn Mountain on the other anchor the guard with two fire-resistant landscape features.

In the upper section of the guard, completed in the winter of 2024–25, a lone tree stands in a snow-covered clearcut. Left as a bird perch and habitat for cavity nesters, the snag is a sign that logging—or mechanical tree removal, as the agency prefers to call it—within a national park comes with a particular set of rules.

Shelley Tamelin, the wildfire risk reduction project manager for Lake Louise as well as for Yoho and Kootenay national parks, explains the strict parameters for the company contracted to do the work—everything from leaving wildlife trees and buffers around wetlands to working only when the ground is frozen. Roads are carefully planned, constructed and mitigated, and contractors are required to place spill trays under equipment that’s not in use, to catch fuel or oil drips.

Despite their name, fuel breaks or fire guards can’t be counted on to suddenly stop a fire. “The guard gives our operations folks a place to work,” says Tamelin. This can mean laying down sprinkler lines to wet the forest or assets such as critical infrastructure, or lighting a fire in the direction of the approaching fire, consuming the fuel in the process.

The Lake Louise Community Fire Guard is just one of several along the Bow Valley within the confines of Banff National Park. In addition to the guards already built, “risk-reduction projects” involving forest thinning and log hauling were completed over the winter of 2025–26 on Tunnel Mountain and the Spray Valley–Middle Springs area near the Banff townsite as well as in multiple smaller sites within a 15-kilometre radius of the townsite.

Jasper’s wildfire held national and international attention for a while. Now other news floods the airwaves.

Farther down the valley, the Town of Canmore, Municipal District of Bighorn and the Kananaskis Improvement District are building the Bow Valley Community Fireguard. Construction started in winter 2024, with support through the Forest Resource Improvement Association of Alberta Community Fire Guard Program. When completed, the guard will surround Canmore, the Canmore Nordic Centre Provincial Park and the communities within the Municipal District of Bighorn, including Harvie Heights and Deadman’s Flats. The program has had full co-operation from the province to allow logging within provincial parks.

Despite the idea of logging in parks being anathema, White suggests we might need to do even more of it to protect the Bow Valley and the towns and infrastructure within it. He proposes the creation of a not-for-profit society to oversee the ongoing work of maintaining fuel breaks and fuel-reduction programs just beyond community boundaries under the guidance of professional foresters and in concert with community fire departments. Income generated from log sales would go back into the program to maintain it over the long term. In time, he says, these areas could be maintained through periodic burning. Carefully done, this could serve as a prototype for how to both live with wildfire and protect communities from it.

Ultimately, though, efforts to mitigate and hopefully minimize the impact of wildfire on towns like Banff and Canmore lie within those communities themselves. Wildfire will come; there’s no doubt. Fire guards may or may not help slow fires’ approach. And while “fear is a good starter, [it’s] a poor finisher,” White said in a recent presentation. The key for people is to put their fear into action.

The Jasper townsite didn’t burn because a wall of flames surged into town. It ignited after an aerial ember attack. Flaming branches, burning pinecones, moss, bark and other firebrands rained down like an assault of arrows. Wooden rooftops were the first to ignite, then decks, debris-filled eaves, bark mulch, fences, trees. Soon multiple buildings were aflame and the fire was spreading from structure to structure.

Ember showers are one of the most frightening aspects of wildfires. Fuelled by strong winds—fire weather generated by the blaze itself—embers can leap ahead by as much as 17 kilometres. They’re the reason an otherwise natural wildland fire can morph into a disaster. We wouldn’t be talking about the 2024 Jasper fire today if embers hadn’t ignited the town.

In Banff ember showers could come from any direction, but Sulphur Mountain is a commonly cited vector. White often refers to the mountain on the south side of town as “Banff’s volcano.” If fire coming from the Spray Valley breaches Sulphur Mountain, it could volley embers onto the community below.

The threat of ember showers in communities on the edge of wildlands is the impetus behind the FireSmart program. The national initiative gives dozens of actionable steps to reduce the wildfire risk to homes and properties.

Wildfire will come to Banff; there’s no doubt. The key will be for people to put their fear into action before it’s too late.

Chris Worobets has lived at the base of Sulphur Mountain for almost 30 years; the threat of wildfire is quite literally in his backyard. For several years he’s been helping to reduce the wildfire risks in Valleyview, the townhouse development in Banff where he lives. He’s clear-eyed about his chosen home. “We [built] in a forest,” he says. “This isn’t an urban centre.” As such, he sees homeowners as critical partners in fire prevention.

Worobets chairs the FireSmart committee at Valleyview and has been helping with mitigation since 2006, when the townhouse replaced its highly flammable cedar shingle roof. Volunteers have since moved combustible items away from structures, removed and limbed trees, planted low-risk deciduous trees, purchased sprinklers, held work bees to remove debris such as cones and needles and are working on making all decks and outbuildings built to FireSmart standards. It’s a slow process, though, even for a neighbourhood that’s largely onboard with the idea.

The Town of Banff is a booster for the FireSmart program and is implementing the program’s protocols, including tree removal, on municipal property. The town’s full-time FireSmart coordinator, Chris Pottie, provides free FireSmart assessments to homeowners—conducting over 150 in 2025—after which residents can apply to the town for discounted rooftop sprinklers, $1,200 roof-replacement rebates and financial support for coniferous tree removal. Pottie says there was a definite uptick in interest in the FireSmart program after Jasper townsite burned, and in 2025 the rebates were fully utilized.

While this is something, on the ground it means 120 sprinklers installed, 15 roofs replaced and 173 trees removed. Some private citizens do their own hazard reduction work even without the rebates, including Rogeau, who replaced her deck and removed trees. But for a town with almost 3,000 residences, it’s a long way from being well protected from flaming embers.

Effectively fireproofing a community requires widespread buy-in from residents, something that can be a hard sell in places famed for their natural beauty. And it’s frustrating to spend time, money and effort fireproofing your property if your neighbour does nothing. To date, the “stick” used by municipalities like Banff is more like a pool noodle—focusing on education and nudging people into doing the right thing.

The approach is toughening, though. Any new construction in Canmore and Banff is subject to building and landscaping requirements that mitigate risk from wildfires, including use of Class A roofing materials, which have the highest fire resistance. And Banff revised its community standards bylaw to mandate the removal of fire hazards such as dead trees, long grass, bark mulch and other combustibles within 10 metres of structures. In the end, insurance companies may provide the incentive that inspires action. Claims from wildfires are increasing, insurance premiums are rising, and money talks. Co-operators, for instance, offers a discount in Canada for FireSmart-certified properties.

Even though the loudest narrative coming out of the 2024 Jasper fire is that one-third of the community burned, it’s important to emphasize that two-thirds of it didn’t, including the critical infrastructure such as wastewater treatment needed for the town to function and rebuild. An extensive Natural Resources Canada report detailing the event acknowledged that more than 20 years of hazard-reduction treatment by Parks Canada around the townsite had moderated fire behaviour. It specifically noted that the town had made more fuel mitigation efforts than any other Canadian community under threat of wildland fire. (Although the report specifically mentions Parks Canada, FireSmart measures have been ongoing for over two decades.) These treatments helped reduce fire intensity in parts of town, knocking it out of the crowns and onto the ground, where it was easier to fight, ultimately reducing the spread of embers and saving structures.

The resounding message to be learned in Banff from understanding the history and role of fire on the landscape, and from the analysis that has come out of Jasper, is that the world of today isn’t the world of a century ago—or even 20 years ago. Wildfire suppression has only made our forests more combustible. Now, with the climate warming and becoming less predictable, fire seasons are longer and fires are more intense and harder to control. The risk to Banff is urgent.

Fire historian Stephen Pyne has coined a term for our era: the Pyrocene. “We’ve made an alliance with fire,” he writes. “It took us to the top of the food chain and now threatens to unhinge the planet.”

Adrienne Mason is a former Jasper National Park interpreter and now a full-time science writer and editor living in Tofino.

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MELTDOWN

Lynn Martel — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 10:00:24 +0000

The mood was celebratory. The smoked salmon appetizers were scrumptious, washed down with wine. Oohs and aahs filled the gallery as the buzz intensified while a lineup waited outside the Whyte Museum in the winter air. The launch event of MELTDOWN: A Drop in Time, an exhibition of large-scale photographs of glacial landscapes, was a resounding success.

The images were downright jaw-dropping. Giant prints—some wider than many living room walls—featured sculpted, polished and glimmering blue glacier ice, some resembling splendid precious gems. Others showed no ice at all. Dry rock, bare, sharp ridgelines, rubbly moraine slopes, naked cliff bands. Dark, dirty, dry and withered ice. Dying ice. On one hand, the ultimate eye candy for a glacier lover; on the other, a bitter aftertaste of reality.

MELTDOWN was conceived by Jim Elzinga. A groundbreaking Rockies-based alpinist since the 1970s, Elzinga led the 1986 team that supported Canmore’s Sharon Wood to become the first North American woman to summit Mount Everest, climbing a never-repeated route. Elzinga followed up with a 25-year international career as an organizational development consultant.

Now, with his hardest climbs behind him, the glacier-draped peaks and ice cliffs he ascended are diminishing too.

The loss of these inspired him to found Guardians of the Ice, a non-profit focused on the steadily shrinking Columbia Icefield as indicator of the worldwide climate crisis. Spanning approximately 200 km² atop the Continental Divide where Jasper and Banff parks meet, that icefield is a significant bellwether of Earth’s warming climate.

“One of the many reasons I want still photography to be part of the Guardians project is the ability to make large high-quality prints that immerse the viewer, like an IMAX film,” Elzinga said. “I feel this is the best way to create an emotional connection with the viewer and provide an experience as if they’re actually in the mountains. Our purpose is to effectively engage the public to build support for a low-carbon future.”

Using a high-resolution Phase One medium format camera, Elzinga partnered with friend and cinematographer Roger Vernon. To create each image required three people—one to hold the camera, another to recalibrate the settings on a laptop, and a third to pilot the helicopter.

Leanne Allison, Jim Elzinga, Roger Vernon and Tiffany Shaw. Whyte Museum

That January 2025 night at the Whyte, however, was more than a photo exhibit. It was also the official launch for the Canadian branch of the 2025 United Nations International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. The IYGP was proposed in 2022 by Tajikistan, whose 13,000 glaciers supply the mountain headwaters for Central Asia and some two billion people downstream.

The IYGP Canada co-chair is long-time Canmore resident Bob Sandford, senior government relations liaison on Global Climate Emergency Response at the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. Most of the world’s glaciated countries are participating, and with Switzerland’s glaciers having lost 10 per cent of their volume in two years alone—2022 and 2023—that country and France have announced major commitments. “But even countries without glaciers, like Holland, are participating in the full realization of how much glacial ice contributes to the thermoregulation of the entire global climate system,” Sandford said.

The purpose is to raise awareness of the vital role glaciers, snow and ice play in the climate system.

Western Canada’s mountains (combined with the US northwest) comprise one of 19 regions around the world represented in the IYGP, alongside New Zealand, Greenland, Antarctica and the southern Andes. The Year’s purpose is to raise awareness of the vital role glaciers, snow and ice play in the climate system and water cycle, as well as the far-reaching impacts of rapid glacier melt.

A full quarter of Earth’s remaining ice is found in Canada, with some 18,000 glaciers in the mountain west. Alberta’s Rockies hold more than 1,100, including the best-known and most accessible glaciers in the country. This makes Alberta the natural centre for the Canadian IYGP initiative. “The latest scientific research regarding the state and fate of our glaciers originates here,” Sandford said. “As Parks Canada rolls out its 2025 UN Glacier Year program, Canadians all across the country will learn what the Dutch already know: that even if there isn’t one nearby, glaciers contribute enormously to the stability of the global climate.”

Canada’s IYGP objectives include promoting Canadian snow and ice research to improve scientific understanding of climate change impacts and recognizing snow and glacier ice as more than just water resources, with an emphasis on artistic and Indigenous perspectives.

“Terminus.” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

MELTDOWN’s image titles speak volumes: “Terminus,” “The Black Hole,” “Battered Hero.” The latter depicts Mount Athabasca, a peak that’s been trod by countless crampons since J. Norman Collie and Herman Woolley were most likely the first to stand on its summit in 1898. Reaching the mountain back then took 19 arduous days on horseback from Lake Louise; nowadays it’s a two-hour drive. From that summit, they viewed the massive Columbia Icefield, noting that its meltwater flows to three oceans—the Arctic via the Sunwapta, Athabasca and Mackenzie rivers; the Atlantic via the North Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan and Nelson rivers; and the Pacific via the Columbia River.

More ice melted from the glacier in 2023 than in any of the 10 previous years.

Compared to historical photos in the Whyte’s bookshop showing Athabasca’s slopes blanketed in plush white snow and ice during Collie’s time, the MELTDOWN image shows dingy ice clinging to rocky slopes like a threadbare sheet.

Climbers and tourists remain drawn to these peaks. The Columbia Icefield Centre (CIC), located where the Athabasca Glacier terminated a century ago, now hosts nearly a million visitors annually, with more than 400,000 riding specialized snowcoaches onto the glacier. Hundreds more join walking tours, whose guides safely lead them to peer into crevasses and experience coursing meltwater streams close enough to get splashed. MELTDOWN images are now on display at the CIC’s Glacier Gallery having left the Whyte.

Jasper is one of seven national parks—along with BC’s Glacier National Park—where hundreds of glaciers are carefully monitored by Parks Canada. Geological Survey of Canada and Parks Canada researchers recorded more ice melt from the Athabasca Glacier in 2023 than in any of the 10 previous years. In Glacier, as of 2018, 129 glaciers remained, down from 337 in 1978. The next survey is planned for 2026. Scientists estimate that if all the glaciers in Glacier National Park melt, the area’s creeks and streams would carry one-third less water. Many could disappear completely.

“By partnering in the IYGP, Parks Canada can encourage hundreds of thousands of Canadians to reflect on the importance of glaciers and the role of protected areas,” said Louis-René Sénéchal, a Parks Canada manager. “We want to inspire them to do something about climate change and share with them the knowledge to make a difference.”

If all the glaciers in Glacier National Park melt, local creeks and streams could carry one-third less water.

The 2023 NFB film Losing Blue was playing continuously behind a privacy screen at the Whyte. Visually exquisite, poetic and soul-stirring, the 16-minute film by Canmore’s Leanne Allison (whose previous award-winning films include Being Caribou and Finding Farley) posed the question “What does it mean to lose a colour?” The narrator references how the world’s glacier-fed lakes are losing their beguiling turquoise hues as glacial content declines. Drone imagery brings viewers seemingly close enough to touch the glaciers, soaring mere centimetres above an ice cave—which I recognized as Peyto Glacier’s toe, which has since melted and flowed onward to Hudson Bay.

“The ancient bond between glaciers and lakes is ending—the bond that gives the lakes their otherworldly blue,” states the narrator.

A smaller gallery presented an exhibition of images by Canmore’s Glen Crawford titled Etched in Ice. The photos shared perspectives captured by drone at his backcountry lodge in the Rockies north of Golden, BC. Intimate and abstract, their subtlety balanced the raw power of the MELTDOWN images. Dull-grey ice, bisected by a long, skinny strand of whitish snow dribbling into a dingy-green meltwater pool. Pebbles and dirt filling the creases of dark, scrawny ice. Ice resembling hammered metal, scratched and beaten.

“I’ve been very fortunate to live in the Bow Valley and explore the nearby mountain wilderness for 50 years. Glaciers are an integral part of this landscape,” Crawford told me. “They’re also key in helping understand how climate change has an effect worldwide. With potentially 15,000 years of climate record stored in glaciers, they’re a natural archive that is now endangered. I hope the UN IYGP promotes awareness, discussion and motivation that help enact change.”

That hope is shared by other IYGP partners, including Tim Patterson, an IYGP Canada ambassador. A member of the Lower Nicola Indian Band of the Interior Salish-speaking peoples of BC, Patterson is a hiking guide who owns and operates Zuc’min Guiding—the name means “red ochre,” with which Indigenous people painted their faces before entering the mountains.

By sharing Indigenous perspectives with his clients—including during walks on the Athabasca Glacier—Patterson aims to foster Indigenous perspectives and knowledge of Canada’s glaciers, water, ice and snow among international travellers and Canadians alike.

While many of the IYGP Canada team members are Albertans, Québécoise ambassador Caroline Côté shares perspectives as a polar expedition guide. Long before her first Arctic expedition, she was awed by remnants of an ancient glacier, the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which covered much of Canada 20,000 years ago.

“Glaciers are at the centre of my life,” she said. “But I also believe that they are, and must be recognized as, the centre of every Canadian’s life. If you head east of Baie-Comeau, you can still see traces of the last glaciation. What struck me the most was the sheer power of ice, its ability to move mountains and carve valleys, leaving its mark on the rock. Our world, as we know it, was shaped by glaciers thousands of years ago.”

“Battered Hero” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

Early in her career, Côté dreamed of exploring Antarctica, a dream she felt fortunate to fulfill. But she later realized Canada was home to more than 20,000 glaciers, and she needn’t travel so far. “To protect glaciers, my goal in the coming years is to reduce my travel and make more conscious choices.”

During the formal launch of the main UN IYGP in Geneva, Switzerland, on January 21, Canmore resident John Pomeroy, director of the University of Saskatchewan’s Centre for Hydrology and its Canmore-based Coldwater Laboratory, spoke in his role as IYGP advisory board co-chair. He laid it bare. “Global concentrations of carbon dioxide have risen from 315 to 425 parts per million, and as a result winter temperatures in northern Canada have risen over 6ºC during my lifetime. Counterfactual industries and regimes around the world would deny these measurements, but they can’t deny their culpability in the destruction of glaciers that’s occurring before our eyes. Glaciers don’t care if we believe in science; they just melt in the heat for all to see. The International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation provides a mechanism to kick-start renewed efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the science and adaptation necessary to prepare for a warmer, less icy world. There is still time to turn this around.”

This statement brought me to a MELTDOWN image titled “After the Heat Dome.” Dark, severe, rough broken rock dominate the frame, with a thin layer of glacier ice resting on the highest ridgetop, its days obviously numbered.

A 2015 study established that western Canada could lose 60 to 80 per cent of its glacier ice by 2100, and the bulk of the melting would happen between 2020 and 2040. Since then I’ve had one question. What would the melting look like?

For decades, I’ve skied across glaciers and icefields in winter and hiked among them with my camera in summer. The 2021 heat dome that engulfed Alberta and BC was a regional gamechanger, breaking temperature records and being cited as a leading cause of some 600 deaths. It accelerated the deaths of our glaciers too.

On June 30, 2021, Jasper reached 40.8ºC, its hottest temperature ever recorded. The resulting flooding caused by rapidly melting snow and ice resulted in catastrophic damage to trails and bridges in the area; the Berg Lake trail in Mount Robson Provincial Park is still under repair. Heat-absorbing soot from wildfires—including the 2024 Jasper fire—coats glacier surfaces and accelerates melting. Globally, 2024 was the hottest year ever recorded—after 2023, which had set the previous record—all directly caused by humans burning fossil fuels.

In a handful of years, glacier loss has become visible to the naked eye.

Western Canada’s glaciers had been gracing paintings since before the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885. In decades since, photographers, filmmakers and writers have shown us this icy landscape. Adventurers have skied across glaciers for days, weeks, sleeping in tents or snow caves. Guides earn their living on glaciers. We create memories on them.

As they melt, we can honour glaciers by sharing these stories and artworks.

“In this coming year, we will celebrate Canadian researchers and institutions studying snow and ice, and honour writers, poets, artists and photographers working to help us understand what the loss of glacier ice means,” Sandford said. “The UN Glacier Year allows us to halt backsliding in terms of climate action by learning more about what we face, and provides an opportunity to shine on the world stage as an example of everything we stand for.

“After the Heat Dome” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

“We want to be able to tell the world that we as Canadians listened for an entire year to what the disappearing ice was trying to tell us.”

At the Whyte Museum that night, I listened as Alberta-based Métis artist Tiffany Shaw explained how she created her glass sculptures from casts taken from the Athabasca Glacier. “I think these will last longer than the glacier,” she said, “which is really sad.”

Lynn Martel is writer in residence for IYGP Canada, an accredited hiking guide, and the author of three books about local mountain culture, including Stories of Ice (RMB, 2020).

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Read more from the archive “Goodbye to Peyto Glacier” September 2022.

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The War on Trans Youth Comes to Alberta

Marcello Di Cintio — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 09:30:00 +0000

Kimberly Large knew her conversation with the premier wouldn’t go well.

Premier Danielle Smith had released a video entitled “Alberta Transgender Policy” in January 2024. Scored with soothing acoustic guitar music, and with a watercolour painting of prairie farmland as a backdrop, Smith announced a host of proposed policies focused on transgender youth and 2SLGBTQ rights. Alberta’s queer and transgender community recoiled, and critics quickly denounced the measures as “the most draconian in Canada.”

Kim and Ashley Large, parents of an 11-year-old transgender daughter in Smith’s Brooks-Medicine Hat riding, sought an in-person meeting with the premier as soon as the video aired. “As parents and constituents, we needed to sit across the table from her and tell her what we know to be true as people having first-hand experience,” Kim said. When Kim and Ashley arrived for the interview in October 2024, after months of correspondence with Smith’s office, a staff photographer offered to take a photo of them with the premier. The Larges politely declined.

The meeting made Kim nervous. Since they’d come to discuss such an emotional topic, Kim decided to read a statement the couple had prepared in advance. First, she told the premier how their daughter, assigned male at birth, has always loved to wear girl’s clothes. “At the age of 3, there was a Snow White dress,” Kim recounted. By grade 3, their daughter was already firmly gender nonconforming. “I collected dresses from my friends and thrift stores and presented them to her,” Kim said. “And the look on her face. The joy. No one can tell me this isn’t her.”

As the premier listened, Kim described her daughter’s first appointment at the Pediatric Gender Services Clinic at the Alberta Children’s Hospital in the spring of 2022, how she told her parents she “didn’t want to have boy puberty or become a boy,” and how she returned to school for grade 5 as a transgender girl. Kim also told Smith how, after much consultation with doctors, counsellors and an endocrinologist, they decided their daughter was ready for puberty suppression therapy. “Our biggest fear was intolerance and wanting to shield my baby’s heart from the ugliness of the world. I can’t do that. But we can walk with her, supporting her always, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Kim then explained to the premier why she was worried for other trans kids in the wake of the government’s new policies. Kim cited a US study reporting a 72 per cent increase in suicide attempts among trans and non-binary youth in states that had passed anti-trans legislation. Medical decisions around youth transition, she told Smith, should be left to medical professionals, parents and the youth themselves—not to government officials.

After Kim finished reading her statement, she asked Smith if she had any questions. Smith had none. “Then she proceeded to tell us why we were wrong,” Kim said. Smith alluded that the medical establishment couldn’t be trusted on gender issues, for example, and snapped back when Kim referred to the new policies as “anti-trans,” insisting that youth can socially transition all they want. “She did not come to listen,” Kim said. “She did not care. She had a few talking points that she regurgitated at us.”

The moment that most astonished the Larges was when Smith told them that since their daughter had such supportive parents, she was going to be okay. “I didn’t know what to say,” Ashley said. “It was like she was saying ‘your kid’s fine. Why do you care about anybody else What does it matter?’” Ashley recalls the confused look on Smith’s face in that moment, as if she couldn’t comprehend why the Larges would oppose policies that wouldn’t personally affect their own child. “I’ll regret forever not asking, point blank, ‘What about the rest?’”

Alberta’s transgender community didn’t feel loved. They felt attacked. But they didn’t feel surprised.

“I want every Albertan that identifies as transgender to know I care deeply about you and I accept you as you are,” said premier Smith in her January 2024 video. “In the case of children aged 17 and under who identify as transgender, I also want you to know that you are loved and supported…. You never have to feel alone or isolated.”

Then she abandoned them. The following October, as promised, Smith tabled three bills aimed at controlling the lives of transgender youth. The Education Amendment Act, 2024, which the government says would require children under 16 to obtain parental consent before changing their names or pronouns at school and obligate teachers to notify parents if students 16 and over request the same. The Fairness in Safety and Sport Act, which would allow schools and sporting organizations to bar transgender girls and women from participating in sports alongside cisgender athletes. And the Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2024 (No. 2), which would prohibit transition-related surgeries and hormonal treatments for minors. Alberta’s transgender community didn’t feel loved. They felt attacked.

They didn’t, however, feel surprised. “We saw a real hyper focus on trans and queer people following the quieting down of the so-called Freedom Convoy,” said Corinne Mason, co-founder of the Queer Parenting in the Time of Parental Rights research project. Mason and their colleague Leah Hamilton—both parents of queer and trans kids—have been following the threats to Alberta’s queer and transgender community, and especially to trans and gender-diverse youth, since before Danielle Smith became premier. They noticed active bigotry towards Alberta’s queer and transgender citizens rising just as the anger against COVID restrictions was abating.

During the pandemic, the Canadians most angered by the government’s COVID measures had gathered to denounce vaccine mandates and other perceived injustices—a movement that culminated in the convoy to Ottawa and the blockade at Coutts. Their shared rage forged a kinship among the protesters. And when the pandemic restrictions ended, they didn’t want to dismantle the communities they’d built. The real Freedom Convoy, as it turned out, was the friends they made along the way.

The movement needed a new target. Railing against critical race theory never really caught on in Canada like it did in the US, and the “15-minute cities” conspiracy lasted about as long. For a while, the agitators focused on “Drag Queen Storytimes.” Alberta libraries had been hosting such events since 2017, at which drag performers read children’s books aloud, but organized actions against them only started post-COVID. Protesters showed up at story times in Calgary and Edmonton to intimidate and harass attendees. They accused organizers of sexualizing children, and held signs decrying “weirdos in drag” and “gender benders.”

The attacks against drag story time had mostly petered out by mid-2023, but the preoccupation with queer and trans issues stuck, especially in regard to youth. The agitators turned their focus from libraries to the legislature. Attendees at the 2023 UCP AGM in Calgary demanded the government take on issues of gender and sexuality in schools. Party members put forward and approved resolutions to require teachers to inform parents of their child’s intent to change their name or pronouns, to prevent schools from providing materials of a sexual nature to students, and to enshrine what they termed “parental rights” in legislation. The new policies premier Smith announced in her January video seemed borne out of these resolutions.

Canada’s Charter of Rights doesn’t protect parental rights. While Smith’s supporters are quick to quote a court ruling asserting that, as outlined by a Government of Canada site on Section 2(a)–Freedom of Religion, “parents have the right to rear their children according to their religious beliefs, including choosing religious education and choosing medical and other treatments,” they tend to skip the caveat that immediately follows: “However, such activities can and must be restricted when they are against the child’s best interests.”

Regardless of the legal reality of parental rights, or lack thereof, the idea acts as an effective rallying cry and recruitment tool. “‘Parental rights’ as a term is used to bring people into right-wing extremist movements under the guise of loving, protecting and wanting the best for your children,” Mason said. “Because who doesn’t want that?”

The tactic attracts a diversity of actors and broadens the political tent. “Under the guise of parental rights, you’ve got everyday moms, who might be concerned about what sex ed their kids are learning, in the same boat as the Proud Boys,” Mason said. White nationalists march alongside religious zealots. The only qualifications one needs to join this particular club is transphobia.

Ironically, these issues attract a wide swath of people, yet inspire wide-ranging policies about a community that is vanishingly small. While an accurate count of transgender youth in Alberta doesn’t exist, the 2021 Canadian census showed there are about 7,300 transgender and 5,200 non-binary people in Alberta, together comprising less than 0.4 per cent of the population 15 years of age and older. Chances are, the people agitating against transgender youth have never even met a trans person.

A rally outside Calgary City Hall on Feb 3, 2024, to oppose the government’s transgender policies.

The video came out, and all our lives shifted dramatically,” Mason said.

Life has never been easy for Alberta’s trans youth and their families. Now it’s even harder. “I can tell you personally we are all experiencing more insidious and sometimes more emboldened forms of harassment, discrimination, hate and threats,” Mason said. Soon after Smith’s announcement, Mason’s family was accosted during a birthday dinner at a restaurant. Diners at the next table noticed Mason’s partner’s T-shirt from Skipping Stone, a trans and gender-diverse advocacy organization. “They just started absolutely ripping on us as abusers and pedophiles and groomers,” Mason said. “They called gender-affirming care ‘mutilation.’ ” All this occurred in front of Mason’s child. Eventually restaurant staff kicked the agitators out.

Other parents of trans kids have similar stories. They’ve told Mason that Smith poured gasoline on an anti-queer and anti-trans fire that was already burning. “We are all living with that fire burning in so many parts of our lives. It’s at work. It’s at restaurants. It’s at our kids’ soccer practice. It’s at school. It’s at playdates.”

And it’s at the doctor’s office. Peer-reviewed medical research has found that for some trans youth an estrogen- or testosterone-driven puberty will exacerbate gender dysphoria and cause elevated stress. A prescription for puberty blockers provides youth and their parents time to explore future medical options for transition without risking irreversible changes to their bodies. Access to blockers is directly linked to better mental health and well-being outcomes, and in some cases will lessen the need for surgical interventions in the future.

Despite this data, trans patients have faced discrimination from healthcare providers. In the past year Mason has heard a growing number of stories of family physicians who, instead of simply prescribing hormones or puberty blockers, as they would with any other medication, now insist a trans patient seek specialized care. Trans people have also experienced heightened gatekeeping around referrals. General practitioners have refused to send young trans patients to gender specialists, advising them to ask again at a later date if they still want the appointment, thus discounting their medical needs as a phase they’ll grow out of. “The discrimination is getting worse,” Mason said.

This all seems darkly familiar to Victoria Bucholtz, a historian at Mount Royal University with a particular interest in the rise of fascism in Europe in the early 20th century. In Alberta in 2025, she said, “we’re seeing the differential treatment of people based on perceived value—the idea that we’re not all equal and that some people’s rights are negotiable.” That, she said, “is definitely classic fascist behaviour.”

Bucholtz and other advocates feel the UCP’s new legislation is aimed at nothing less than the eradication of trans life. “Once they start denying our humanity around sports and bathrooms,” she says, “it gets easier to legislate us out of existence in other ways.” She predicts an exodus of transgender Albertans unless Smith’s policies are reversed.

This will come too late for some. “There’s already been trans youth who have taken their lives in this province because they no longer see a future for themselves,” Bucholtz said. “Last summer we lost a young member of our community, and their surviving family said they believe that it’s 100 per cent related to this.”

Premier Smith poured gasoline on an anti-trans fire that was already burning.

In September 2024 about 50 people assembled at Medicine Hat’s Athletic Park to participate in the nationwide “1 Million March for Children” protest. They walked to City Hall, where they rallied in favour of “parental rights” and against “gender ideology” in education. Julia Ingram, mother of a 13-year-old transgender daughter named Skyler, joined a group of counter-protesters up the street at the public library. “We were just there with our signs showing love,” Julia said.

They received no love in return. The parental rights demonstrators snarled insults at Julia and her colleagues and called them pedophiles. The worst part of the day for Julia, however, was seeing people she recognized in the crowd of haters. “I’ve been in the city for a long time,” she said. “I know there are people who don’t like me, and don’t like my family, and don’t agree with how we live. To be able to put a face to those people was really gutting.”

Skyler first switched to she/her pronouns in Grade 3. Her classmates didn’t understand the change and teased her. “It’s really weird being trans,” Skyler said. “But it was a big day for me.” Julia had met with Skyler’s principal, vice-principal and school counsellor in advance of the change. The school staff supported Skyler’s pronoun transition, but it took two years for the change to stick. Finally, in Grade 5, teachers referred to Skyler as “she” for the entire school year. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow. I’m actually being respected.’”

No transition journey is easy. Skyler’s father didn’t accept her identity at first. He does now. “We’ve come so far,” Julia said. “We went from wiping off nail polish before her dad came home, to her dad bringing her on a father–daughter trip to Lake Louise.” Just like Kim and Ashley Large with their daughter, ensuring Skyler is supported at home remains Julia’s top priority.

Skyler began her puberty-blocking therapy just a few weeks before the legislation came into effect. The thought of being denied the treatment terrified her. “Not to sound crazy, but I would be really messed up if I couldn’t have hormone blockers. Suicidal. Really depressed. Life would be hard.” Skyler has transgender friends, though, who won’t receive the blockers. “It really sucks for them,” she said. Two of them are gifted athletes who won’t be able to pursue sports under the new rules banning transgender girls from competing on cisgender teams.

In response to the UCP’s policies, Skyler created a YouTube channel, “ProtectTransYouth.” One of her first short videos featured distorted images of the premier flashing alongside screengrabs of news headlines related to the trans policies, all set to a nightmarish soundtrack of woozy funhouse organs—the aesthetic opposite of Smith’s video from the previous January. A caption encourages viewers to sign a petition to stop the legislation.

Julia believes her daughter’s outspoken nature and ferocity—her “attitude and life and brightness”—bode well for her future. “She’s gonna be the first trans kid to do a lot of things,” Julia said, beaming.

Skyler is specific. “I want to work at a nuclear reactor,” she said. “Or be an MLA.”

Not all trans kids enjoy such family support. Hawthorne Guthrie started transitioning when he was 14. His puberty was already in progress by then and it was too late to block it. Instead, he sought hormone replacement therapy (HRT). First, though, Hawthorne had to go through two years of appointments, diagnoses and consultations. Once the therapy started, his medical transition advanced quickly. Hawthorne grew his beard within four months of HRT, though he attributes this as much to his Mediterranean genetics as to the testosterone. “I’m Greek,” Hawthorne said, now 19 years old. “I was already halfway there.”

Hormone medications, whether Hawthorne’s testosterone or Skyler’s puberty blockers, do more than ensure trans youth feel comfortable in their own bodies. Fairly or otherwise, these treatments also allow other people to be more at ease around them. “Gender dysphoria affects every aspect of a person’s life,” Hawthorne said. “It’s not just a discomfort within the body. It’s a discomfort with how people perceive you.” The further a trans youth progresses on their transition journey, especially if they “pass,” the more they’re accepted. This acceptance affords them safety.

Had he been a 16-year-old trans kid in Alberta today, and living under Smith’s new laws, Hawthorne wouldn’t be able to access HRT and enjoy the solace the treatment brought him. Transitioning socially wouldn’t have been enough for him. “HRT was absolutely something I needed to feel fully comfortable,” he said. “That’s not the case for everyone.” He believes that without the therapy, he would never have been safe at school. “I’d be checking my head on a swivel every time I tried to walk into a men’s bathroom.”

Hawthorne grew up in a “nightmare household.” His mother didn’t support his decision to transition. She believed Hawthorne had been brainwashed by the “woke mind virus” and figured his gender dysphoria was a phase he’d inevitably get over. She came around eventually. Hawthorne’s father, though, never did and is no longer part of Hawthorne’s life.

Like many trans kids, Hawthorne found safety at school, particularly with two of his teachers. In his Ontario junior high, Hawthorne would spend many lunch hours with his school’s music teacher and leader of the GSA club. The two would sit in the music room, play guitar and talk. After Hawthorne and his mother moved to Calgary, Hawthorne’s high school English teacher became his new lunchtime confidant. “Sometimes I just sat beside him and read quietly,” Hawthorne said.

Both teachers provided Hawthorne with something vital and fundamental. “It’s so important to know that you have somebody around you who supports you, who respects you, who’s going to have your back, and who really sees you,” Hawthorne said. Such teachers are especially important for youth who don’t have such supports at home. “I grew up in an environment where I never felt seen. So just having those little safe spaces, especially with teachers, was amazing. It was everything.” Without safe people in safe spaces, Hawthorne might not have come out as trans at all.

Had these teachers disclosed their conversations with Hawthorne to his parents, the results would’ve been catastrophic. “If my being trans was thrown into the loop, that would’ve been really, really horrible,” Hawthorne said. “That’s an understatement. It would’ve been disastrous.” When questioned about the dangers of mandating teachers to out trans kids to potentially violent parents, premier Smith has said Alberta already has “child protection laws that will be strictly enforced.” Smith loves trans kids enough to rescue them after they’ve been abused, and maybe punish their abusers, but not enough to prevent them from being abused in the first place. In other words, why worry about preventing fires as long as we have a fire department to fight them once they’re blazing?

Two days after the UCP’s Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2024 (No. 2) received royal assent, Egale Canada, Skipping Stone and several families in Alberta launched a lawsuit against the Alberta government. Lawyers claim the statute violates the Charter rights of young Albertans—particularly their right to security of the person, their right to be free from cruel and unusual treatment, and their right to equality.

Mason, and many of the families of trans youth they speak to, have invested their hopes in such legal battles and court injunctions. The outcome of this suit remains uncertain. The premier has already threatened to use the notwithstanding clause to override the Charter if necessary. “But at least we can tie these up in court for as long as we can in order for their families to have the most protection and the most access to life-saving care,” Mason said. The longer they can hold up the legislation, “the longer trans kids can continue playing on their soccer teams with their friends and enjoy their regular lives.”

In the meantime, transgender Albertans and their advocates are gathering resources in order to minimize the harm inflicted on their community. “There are already major pushes to build support networks to help trans youth who are struggling and facing negative mental health outcomes because of this,” Bucholtz said. And they want to make all Albertans understand what’s at stake. “It’s shocking how many people still don’t know what’s happening to us.”

Hawthorne agrees. “People don’t listen until we’re dead,” he said. “The time for polite allyship is over.”

Marcello Di Cintio is the author of several non-fiction books, including Driven, Pay No Heed to the Rockets and Walls.

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Read more from the archive “System in Chaos” November 2014.

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Should National Parks Have Entrance Fees?

Kevin Van Tighem and Ian Urquhart — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 10:00:57 +0000

Kevin Van Tighem says YES

Alberta-born author, naturalist and former Banff National Park superintendent (2008–2011)

Over four million people visited Banff National Park in 2023. Some got lost or hurt and had to be rescued. Others fed bears and had to get straightened out. All flushed toilets, drove on roads and parked in parking lots. Campgrounds had to be maintained. Signs, picnic tables and boardwalks had to be repaired. The list goes on. It’s costly.

A lot of Canadians, however, didn’t visit Banff or any other national park—either because they couldn’t afford to or weren’t interested. It’s not clear why their tax dollars should finance holidays enjoyed by others.

Should the occupants of all those vehicles streaming into the park each day pay their own way Of course they should; they get to enjoy a costly privilege that others don’t. But the core costs associated with national parks should be funded through the public treasury. That’s not a contradiction, because it’s not the same thing.

National parks are institutions that represent the part of our Canadian identity defined by our nature and our history. Parks ensure we’ll always be able to know ourselves, because we’ll always be able to find ourselves. That mandate is a benefit to all—visitors or not—and a legacy to future generations. Like our national archives, military, treaty obligations and other institutions, it makes sense to fund our parks with tax revenues.

And, in fact, every Canadian should be welcome to visit and be inspired by their national parks without paying a fee. The parks are ours, by virtue of citizenship. But here’s the problem: when we choose to visit by means of a vehicle, that creates costs unrelated to protecting heritage—and compromises that very mandate. Without cars, we wouldn’t need to replace wildlife habitat with kilometres of paved highway lined with noxious weeds. Without cars there wouldn’t be bear jams and traffic gridlock. Snowplowing, parking lots, fencing, roadkill—all are in service of vehicles and those of us who insist on using them.

When I was responsible for Banff National Park I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation and found that well more than 75 per cent of the park’s budget went to providing for the use of—or mitigating the impacts of—vehicles. Recently congestion has brought parts of that park to a virtual standstill. An added irony: the exhaust gases spewing from those engines contribute to a climate disaster that makes park protection increasingly hopeless as glaciers melt, fires burn and wildlife comes under growing stress. In Banff’s case the problem is compounded by a species of mandate creep that has turned a protected heritage place—dedicated only to future generations of Canadians—into an international tourism resort. More vehicles.

So here’s my idea: the basic costs of protecting parks—our national birthright—should be fully funded by tax revenues. Canadians arriving on their own two feet should get in for free. But anyone who comes by vehicle should pay a substantial fee that accounts for the full cost of that privilege. No free rides.

Ian Urquhart says no

U of A professor emeritus and former editor of the AWA’s Wild Lands Advocate

Free admission to Canada’s national parks was a gift Ottawa gave Canadians in 2017 for this country’s 150th birthday. It was a good idea then; it’s a good idea now.

Entrance fees are a revenue source for Parks Canada, albeit a small one. In 2022/23 the agency spent $1.28-billion; entrance fees paid for $91.5-million, or 7 per cent, of those expenses. Why get rid of these fees I recently posed this question to Catherine McKenna, the federal minister who delivered free admission to national parks in 2017. Today she strongly believes parks should be free “because we need people to understand the value of nature,” and that spending time in the outdoors may be the best way to do that. She suggested free admission helps parks promote many values, including health, equality, biodiversity, climate change mitigation and Indigenous partnerships. I agree, and I’ll just address two of them.

Research into the nature–human relationship clearly shows the health benefits of spending time in nature. Greenspace exposure reduces high blood pressure, high HDL cholesterol and cardiovascular mortality. Nature delivers similar mental health benefits. Connectedness with nature reduces stress while increasing happiness and cognitive abilities.

The research demonstrates parks are essential health care institutions. Dr. Melissa Lem agrees. She’s the director of PaRx, Canada’s prescription for nature program. Parks Canada has partnered with Lem’s program to enable registered health professionals to prescribe an annual park pass to patients. Alberta doctors who register with PaRx can prescribe this access to Alberta’s outstanding national parks. Calgary physician Andrea Hull regards PaRx as “an exciting way to showcase the health benefits of time in nature.”

Inequality is another important foundation for opposing entrance fees. User fees discourage people with lower incomes from participating in outdoor activities. Personally, $22 for a day pass to Banff isn’t going to stop me from visiting, but I’m lucky. The cost of a family day pass or annual pass ($151.25) puts time in national parks beyond many people’s reach.

I couldn’t support abolishing entrance fees if I thought it would mean damage to the parks. Maintaining and restoring ecological integrity is the first priority of managing the national parks. But the experience of 2017, when entry was free, allays my concerns. Parks Canada used other measures, such as buses and area closures, to manage the increase in visitors.

Banff National Park’s assessment of the 2017 season argued that McKenna’s decision was ultimately justified. Free passes “allowed more Canadians… to connect with these wonderful places that are actually their places.” The feared additional damage to nature from more visitors didn’t arise.

As minister of environment and climate change, McKenna favoured this tagline for our parks: “Discover. Connect. Protect.” Today let’s adopt it and add the word “Free.”

kevin van tighem responds to ian urquhart

Ian Urquhart argues that national parks should be free to Canadians because of parks’ health benefits. It’s hard to disagree with that view, but to an unfortunate degree it’s an idealistic one that doesn’t reflect the actual park experience for many visitors. It’s hard to see how sitting in a traffic jam on Banff Avenue or jostling with the crowds that throng the Lake Louise shoreline is good for health. If anything, the tension experienced by visitors during crowded times—which, increasingly, is most of the time—frays tempers and exacerbates the social stresses those visitors went to their parks to escape. That’s not healthy.

Minister McKenna’s 2017 decision to provide free access to Canada’s national parks was not the painless success that Urquhart suggests. Yes, in many less visited parks and historic sites, Canadians did connect to their heritage. But Alberta’s already crowded mountain parks saw worse traffic, bigger crowds and the diversion of budgets from priorities such as trail maintenance and wildlife management to crowd-control. When a national park visit becomes an exercise in navigating traffic cones, being directed into emergency parking lots by safety-vest-clad employees, crowding onto buses and waiting endlessly, something has gone wrong. It certainly wasn’t good healthy fun for anyone, including those harried park employees.

Yes, Parks Canada scrambled to mitigate the challenge by setting up public transportation. But those buses, signs and flag-people came at a cost. Nothing is free, after all. Somebody has to pay. In 2017 it was Canadian taxpayers who picked up the tab. I’m not sure how this was fair to the large percentage of those taxpayers who chose not to visit a park that year—partly because of the well-publicized crowding issues.

Nothing guarantees a right to private vehicle use in the parks. Kilometres of pavement compromise nature.

Social equity challenges don’t just involve the cost of getting into a park. People who can’t afford a park pass generally live far from national parks. The economic challenges involved in enjoying those parks include the cost of transportation to get there, finding accommodation and paying inflated prices for meals and other amenities in parks that have been taken captive, to a considerable degree, by a tourism industry that targets well-off motorized travellers. Low-income Canadians unquestionably deserve the opportunity to experience their national parks, but the cost of admission is often the least of the barriers they face.

For all those quibbles, I generally agree with Urquhart. National parks are meant to benefit every Canadian; every Canadian should be able to enjoy them for free. But the traditional emphasis on private motor vehicles can make parks less than enjoyable.

Public transportation is one way to democratize access to the national parks. For that truly to work, it has to include not just internal options such as Banff’s Roam bus service but also services to help Canadians get to their parks from the cities and towns where most of us live. That’s a costly proposition, given that the country’s infrastructure is built around the private vehicle. It was no accident, after all, when Greyhound folded. Cars rule.

But the value of good, affordable public transportation to and in our national parks would go beyond social equity; it’s a critical part of any meaningful response to the climate crisis—a crisis that threatens both human health and the natural environment.

So how could we pay for it Collect high fees from those who insist on driving their vehicles to the parks. Progressive economic policy requires that those who demand special benefits that work against the public good should pay dearly for their privilege.

Nothing in the Canada National Parks Act guarantees a right to private vehicle use in the parks. As Urquhart points out, parks’ first priority is the protection of ecological integrity, something inevitably compromised by the kilometres of pavement covering what was once wildlife habitat; the hundreds of birds, mammals, amphibians and insects killed each year by vehicles; and the climate chaos engulfing us because of all the CO₂ those cars release.

National parks are dedicated to future generations of Canadians as places that provide for the benefit, education and enjoyment of people. Private vehicles aren’t required for that; just the opposite. Nature is off-pavement.

Anybody who doubts the need to challenge conventional car-centred logic in the management of national parks should take a trip to Banff on any summer weekend. Yes, national parks should be free to all Canadians. But not to our cars. If we charged private vehicle users the full cost of their privilege, we’d start generating the kind of revenues needed to fund public transportation for all. We might also restore the peaceful enjoyment of nature—the kind of real national park experience that is rapidly becoming roadkill.

ian urquhart responds to kevin van tighem

Kevin Van Tighem believes that anyone using a private vehicle to visit national parks should pay a “substantial fee.” Why Because such visitors compromise Parks Canada’s heritage protection mandate. He uses Banff National Park to make the point that vehicle congestion can produce gridlock. Banff again is used to argue that managing private vehicles costs a lot of money. Such costs are compounded, in the case of Banff, by the park’s alleged transformation from “a protected heritage place” into “an international tourism resort.”

Much of his argument is Banff-based. Banff is unique, and we should be wary of generalizing from what we think is best for Banff to all national parks. That said, I believe his prescription is wrong even for Banff.

Before I critique the former superintendent’s position, readers should know he misrepresents Banff’s history. Tourism, not heritage protection, motivated the establishment of Canada’s first national park. Sir John A. Macdonald concluded Banff could be “a great place of resort” that would attract people from across North America and Europe. Banff was created to be an international tourist destination. Decades later, parks commissioner J.B. Harkin wanted the parks to serve all Canadians. Ironically—given this dialogue—he saw roads and the automobile as the way to do that. Promoting tourism is a constant, not a novelty, in Banff National Park’s history.

We agree, however, that tension between human desires and heritage protection is another constant in the history of our mountain parks. Today’s volume of vehicle traffic to Banff attests to this.

But all visitors, including those in cars, are more than simply threats to heritage protection. They are potential allies to promote that mandate. Their support for parks is an important political resource in the annual competition for Canada’s tax dollars. Building public support for Parks Canada is especially important now. The agency benefited from the 2021 federal budget’s $2.3-billion investment in nature conservation. But the funding was temporary. It will dry up in 2026–2027, and with it will go an important chunk of the agency’s budget.

All visitors are potential allies to promote heritage protection. Support is more likely when entry is free.

Parks Canada needs our support to try to secure dollars to invest in its core mandate. Support is more likely when nearly all visitors say they would recommend their experience to others. In 2022–2023, 95 per cent of visitors to Canada’s national parks surveyed said this. A new, substantially increased entrance fee, a form of double taxation, might damage or kill that support.

A substantially higher fee would also make access even more challenging for lower-income Canadians. Today, as a century ago, the car offers the most practical and affordable means of travelling to Alberta’s national parks. The least expensive round-trip bus option for a family of four going to Banff from Calgary is just under $95, or $117 with a day pass. If the same family’s SUV uses 8 litres per 100 km, the fuel cost will be less than $35.

A bus trip to Jasper is a non-starter for a family of four living in Edmonton. The only commercial bus service to Jasper would cost them $344.44—one way. And if you live elsewhere in Alberta… An automobile is your only practical means for visiting.

The report of the expert advisory panel on moving people sustainably in the Banff Bow Valley (2022) saw pricing as one of its eight key strategies. But the panellists wrote that if a pricing strategy didn’t consider income it could “create equity issues and discourage lower-income persons from experiencing the park.” Van Tighem’s position sounds like it would do exactly that.

Do vehicles produce gridlock in parts of Banff National Park Absolutely. But the panel suggested that serious transportation issues arose only “in a relatively small portion of the park. [Some] 97 per cent of the park is declared wilderness, where development is prohibited.” When gridlock occurs, it likely arises in the town of Banff, Lake Louise or Lake Minnewanka.

I’m writing this on a Sunday afternoon in July while looking at the Town of Banff’s traffic cams on my computer. The cameras show considerable traffic entering, leaving and driving around town. But while I’d be annoyed by this traffic if I lived in Banff, I can’t conclude the cars I’m watching constitute gridlock or pose a serious threat to heritage protection.

Without tourists, especially Canadian ones, the future of our national parks would be dim. Canadians’ support is vital to the heritage protection mandate that Van Tighem and I both value. Slapping a substantial fee on visitors who drive threatens that support. Instead of higher fees, Parks Canada should do what it does already for youth, members of the armed forces/veterans, and new Canadians—offer free entry. And let’s all join the fight for additional tax dollars.

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How to Quash a Mine

Ted Morton — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 10:00:26 +0000

Most accounts of a minister’s career are based on what he or she achieves in terms of new policies. But what the public usually doesn’t see—which is often just as important—are the policies or decisions a minister prevents. For me, this was the proposed Micrex Mine—a proposal to build an open-pit magnetite mine on the flanks of the Livingstone Range. The Micrex file came across my desk the first year I was at SRD (Sustainable Resource Development)—2007—and, as it turned out, was the last thing I did going out the door in December 2010.

Magnetite is a heavy magnetic iron ore used for coal upgrading and steel production. It is not in short supply and so is relatively cheap. To be profitable, a magnetite mine needs to be large to benefit from economies of scale. That is what did not make sense about the Micrex proposal. Their original plan called for a mine to cover 13 kilometres of public lands in the Livingstone Range. But by the time I became minister, the proposal had been scaled down to just 5.5 hectares—barely larger than a football field. It wasn’t too difficult to figure out why. At that reduced size, it did not trigger a legal requirement for an environmental impact statement (EIS) under the Public Lands Act. However, Micrex had actually purchased 36 square miles, or 56,909 acres of land. The smaller, revised proposal looked suspiciously like a toe-in-the-door strategy that would lay the foundation for future expansion.

There were good reasons for Micrex to avoid any type of EIS. The Livingstone Range is certainly the steepest and arguably the most dramatic front range in all of Alberta’s Eastern Slopes. If you’ve never expeOttawa

More Alberta, Less Ottawarienced it, view the online video provided by the Livingstone Landowners’ Group. Or drive down the North Burmis Road, just to the west of Highway 22. Better yet, go for a hike there, or take a trail ride with one of the local outfitters.

The proposed mine was in the middle of the designated DU Ranch Heritage Viewscape. It provides home habitat to a prolific mix of bighorn sheep, elk, moose, deer and the usual mix of predators that feast on them—grizzly bears, black bears and cougars. The proposed smaller mine site was adjacent to the spring lambing grounds of a resident herd of 200 bighorn sheep. The access roads required by the mine would destroy native grasses that would be difficult if not impossible to restore. Storing topsoil on slopes that regularly experience 100-kilometre-an-hour winds would be either impossible or very expensive. The new access roads would also increase hunting pressure on the wildlife mentioned above—especially by Indigenous hunters who are not subject to legal limits or seasons and can hunt year-round. And of course, there are water issues. The Micrex properties cover much of the headwaters of the Connelly Creek watershed, a significant tributary to the Crowsnest River, which flows into the Oldman and then the Bow. Erosion from the mine and the access roads would inevitably degrade water quality.

It quickly became evident that Micrex did not make sense either economically or environmentally. Even at full production, the proposed mine would pay virtually nothing in Crown royalties—several million dollars a year—and create fewer than 10 full-time jobs. The bottom line was neatly summarized by a letter to minister Knight, myself, and other ministers, signed by 125 local residents in the Livingstone Landowners Group: “There is a proven economy in this area already…. It is based on ranching, home businesses, tourism, hunting, fishing and equestrian outfitting—all things that would be negatively impacted by a mine, no matter its size.”

I agreed! And so it’s time again for full disclosure. I know this area and many of its landowners quite well. My colleague and friend Rainer Knopff has lived there on and off since 1992. Through Rainer I met Dan and Puff McKim, who operate the historic DU Ranch, a purebred Hereford bull operation just off North Burmis Road. With Rainer and his sons, I have hunted the Livingstone slopes for elk, moose, deer and grouse. In the summer my wife joins us for hikes above the DU Ranch and fly-fishing in the Crowsnest River. The McKims are active in the Livingstone Landowners Group.

In the 2008 Alberta election, many of these same people helped to elect Evan Berger as the new MLA for Livingstone-Macleod. I had met Evan during my 2003 “More Alberta, Less Ottawa” speaking tour, and he had helped in my 2006 leadership bid. Evan, a third generation Alberta rancher, runs a mixed livestock–grain operation west of Claresholm. I immediately appointed Evan as my parliamentary assistant because I knew he could be a constructive bridge to the rural landowners as we implemented the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan, which included all of Livingstone-Macleod. Evan was an effective advocate for his constituents, almost all of whom opposed the mine.

In my mind’s eye, when I imagined the Micrex Mine, what I saw was a second industrial scar on Alberta’s Eastern Slopes—like the Lafarge limestone quarries and cement plant in Exshaw. The Lafarge plant is located 80 kilometres west of Calgary, at the gateway to Banff, Lake Louise and the Canadian Rockies, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the largest cement plant in Canada. It’s located less than a mile from the Trans-Canada Highway, so you can’t miss it as you approach Canmore. And it is just plain ugly and totally out of place—a huge scar on the face of the Rockies, with large stacks belching smoke.

In 1906, when the mine and plant were first opened, it made good sense. Alberta was the poorest of all the Canadian provinces, with a mostly rural population of less than 200,000. And the Lafarge plant has served Alberta well, providing most of the cement that has built the province into the wealthiest province in Canada with a population of 4.8 million. One hundred years later, however, you would never build the same plant at the gateway to a UNESCO World Heritage Site. So I decided that such a thing damn well wasn’t going to happen again on my watch.

The question was how. While I could have engaged either or both the energy and the environment ministers (there was overlapping jurisdiction), I decided the path of least resistance was simply to rope-a-dope it to death with one administrative delay after another. Without initial public-lands sign-off from SRD, it couldn’t go anywhere. While most of the delays were achieved simply by foot-dragging on administrative technicalities, there were two potential deal-stoppers for Micrex. One was the then-pending South Saskatchewan Regional Plan (SSRP), being developed under the newly adopted Alberta Land Stewardship Act (ALSA). The SSRP encompasses all the watersheds feeding the Bow, Elbow, Sheep, Highwood, Crowsnest and Oldman rivers—basically everything south of Calgary and the Trans-Canada. The advisory committee for the SSRP, which I had hand-picked, would never recommend approval of project like Micrex, as it failed both the Act’s environmental (water and wildlife) and economic criteria.

When I imagined the Micrex Mine, I saw an industrial scar on Alberta’s eastern slopes.

The second trump card that I could have played was to refer the entire project for a full cost-benefit analysis by Alberta’s Natural Resources Conservation Board (NRCB). The NRCB reviews non-oil and gas natural resource development projects and any other development projects referred to it by cabinet. At a minimum this would have added at least another year to the approval process. It was also highly unlikely that Micrex could ever pass a full NRCB cost-benefit analysis, and the Micrex team knew this. Just the referral would have been enough to kill the project.

While I never played either of these cards in my multiple meetings with the Micrex lobbyist, I made her aware that I considered them as viable options. This worked as long as I was minister, but that came to an end in January 2010, when I was moved to Finance. My replacement at SRD was Mel Knight. Mel was a northerner and had little interest in either ALSA or conservation issues in southern Alberta. In the thinly populated north, when someone wants to invest millions of dollars in a new mine, they are welcomed. The Micrex promoters were alert to the opportunity presented by a new minister and were quickly in Mel’s office lobbying for SRD sign-off.

For the rest of 2010, I was much too busy at Finance to pay any attention to the Micrex file. I spent 12 months trying (unsuccessfully) to build a two-step budget process to get us “back in the black” by Budget 2012—an election year. In addition to four painful weeks lost to shingles in May, I was immersed in budget meetings with my officials and Treasury Board. But as December approached I was informed by Evan Berger, now minister of agriculture, that Mel was getting ready to approve the Micrex licence. Mel subsequently confirmed this to me, stating that the government could not and should not stop all development in the province until the land use planning process was completed. I responded that while this was true in the abstract, it was completely unacceptable in the specific context of Micrex. But Mel was not persuaded.

I received an angry phone call from minister Knight. What the hell did I think I was doing?

The Federal, Provincial, Territorial (FPT) Finance Ministers semi-annual meeting was in Kananaskis on December 19 and 20. So, as I prepared for my second (and presumably last) FPT meeting, I decided to do something I had never done before—leak a self-serving story to the media. There were several cabinet ministers who did this regularly to curry favourable treatment by the legislative reporters. We all knew who they were, and I held them in contempt. However, given that I had already made my decision to resign from cabinet the following month, I figured I had nothing to lose.

I phoned Kelly Cryderman, then the legislative reporter for the Calgary Herald. Kelly is a cousin of Sonia Arrison, whom I knew through her public policy work at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver. I had developed a cordial professional relationship with Kelly, so I was comfortable asking her for a favour: Would she mind asking me a question about how minister Knight was handling the Micrex file She responded, correctly, that this had nothing to do with the FPT meeting and would violate the unspoken rule of ministers not publicly commenting on each other’s work. I replied simply that I was asking a favour.

The FPT meeting in Kananaskis went according to schedule. As is customary at the end, there was a joint media scrum. Most questions focused on the about-face that federal minister of finance Jim Flaherty had done on Canada Pension Plan reforms—now favouring Alberta’s position of allowing private sector alternatives rather than increasing CPP premiums. But, just as the scrum was breaking up, Cryderman asked me about Micrex. She then did me the favour of quoting me verbatim in her subsequent Calgary Herald article: “Morton said, ‘It would be premature to approve a project like this before the regional plan for the South Saskatchewan region is finalized. … If you look at the policy document for the land-use framework, it identifies the Eastern Slopes in terms of priority use, as watershed and recreation—not mining.’ … Morton suggests the company’s application may be subject to review by the province’s Natural Resources Conservation Board.”

Less than 24 hours later I received an angry phone call from minister Knight. What the hell did I think I was doing I replied that I was just repeating what I had told him before the Christmas break. He was not impressed. While this tactic unfortunately cost me my friendship with Mel, it did get the policy results I wanted. Cryderman’s article triggered a flood of phone calls and emails to both Knight’s office and the premier’s office—all opposing the Micrex mine. It took several months to grind through the formal process, but in April SRD announced cabinet approval of an order-in-council mandating a full NRCB review of the Micrex proposal. But it never happened. Knowing that it could never pass the NRCB review, Micrex placed the project on hold.

So how was I able to block the Micrex mine I’d like to say because it was so clearly without merit. But we all know that governments routinely enact poor policy. Just look at the Stelmach government’s New Royalty Framework and North West Upgrader. The primary factors in the Micrex defeat were that it did not have any champions in the cabinet, in the civil service, or in any influential business stakeholder groups. Contributing factors were the lobbying and public relations efforts of local residents—the Livingstone Landowners Group—which were effectively communicated by their MLA, Evan Berger. While these factors probably would not be enough to establish a new program, they were sufficient to allow a motivated minister—me—to block a project that clearly violated our government’s stewardship and conservation goals.

After the 2012 election, in which both Evan Berger and I were defeated, Micrex almost succeeded in resurrecting their mining project. They applied for a mining permit on a piece of property adjacent to their earlier proposal. Since it was a different block of land, the requirement for the NRCB review did not technically apply to it. The Livingstone Landowners Group communicated this to me in November 2012, and I immediately passed on their concerns to Ken Hughes, the new minister of energy in the Redford government. Ken was a long-time friend of mine. He had grown up on a ranch near Longview, where his family had settled in the 1890s. He knew and loved the Foothills. I pointed out that the “new” Micrex proposal was not new at all, but just a clever attempt to bypass the requirement of the NRCB review. All the environmental issues were the same. Once Ken became aware of this, the permit was denied.

Ted Morton is a former Alberta MLA, cabinet minister and political science professor at U of C. This piece is an excerpt from Strong and Free: My Journey in Alberta Politics, U of C Press, 2024.

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Requiem for a Mountain Sanctuary

Sid Marty — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 09:00:57 +0000

There was an era when we believed our shining Rocky Mountain glaciers were as obdurate and eternal as the rocky beds in which they reclined. Eternal seems a very Victorian notion about mountains, part of the “golden age” of Canadian mountaineering, when most of Canada’s major peaks were first ascended. It was a delusion I succumbed to for many years concerning Abbot Pass, the glaciated canyon between Mount Victoria and Mount Lefroy, which rise high between Lake O’Hara in Yoho National Park and Lake Louise in Banff National Park. For over a century Abbot Pass has been the main access route to ascend those peaks.

I had the same expectation about Abbot Pass Hut, a solid stone building on the pass summit constructed by the Canadian Pacific Railway’s Swiss mountain guides in 1922 for the use of their mountaineering clients.

Abbot Pass Hut, 1924. The hut’s footing of compacted scree and rock was made stable by permafrost. Photo: Whyte Museum.

At an elevation of 2,925 metres, it was for many years the highest habitable structure in Canada, since edged out by Neil Colgan Hut on the Fay Glacier, at 2,957 metres. Abbot Pass Hut was officially acquired by the Dominion Parks Branch in 1968, then assigned to the control of the Alpine Club of Canada in 1985. In 1992 Parks Canada designated the so-called Abbot Pass Refuge Cabin and its surroundings as a national historic site. But this year, Parks Canada did not announce a centennial celebration for the beloved refuge. Instead, the hut will be removed this summer. Like the Lower Victoria Glacier that it overlooks, the hut is yet another casualty of climate change and glacier recession.

According to an old colleague of mine, Robert Sanford, who is a Global Water Futures fellow at the Institute for Water, Environment and Health, some 300 glaciers disappeared from the Rocky Mountain national parks between 1920 and 2005. Things are getting worse. In the extreme summer heat of 2021, the toe of the Peyto Glacier retreated some 200 metres. This is “10 times faster than the last half century of retreat,” according to hydrologist John Pomeroy of Global Water Futures.

The Abbot Pass Hut’s foundations are sitting on the headwall of the Lower Victoria Glacier. The lip of the ice at one time nearly reached the hut’s east wall. Now the glacier’s edge lies 50 metres downslope. The builders and stonemasons in 1922 may not have realized that the col of compacted scree and fallen rock had been stabilized over time by snow, ice and permafrost. This matrix is melting and eroding. According to Parks Canada, in 2021, “approximately 114 cubic metres of material fell from the slopes under the hut.”

This undermining of the hut foundations threatens to topple the building. Since 2017 Parks Canada has spent some $600,000 on geotechnical studies and the installation of rock anchors to try and save the hut. The anchors have been to no avail. The work was also interrupted by bad weather, lifting limitations of supply helicopters and pandemic health mandates; the hut is now too dangerous to use.

Zac Robinson, vice-president for mountain culture with the Alpine Club, describes the news as “devastating for our members and for the history of mountaineering in the Rockies.”

A toll booth between heaven and earth, risen from the rocky saddle…

The men who built the hut—without the backing of their employer Canadian Pacific Railway—were two Swiss guides named Edward Feuz Jr. and Rudolf Aemmer, who, as Robinson says, “were homesick for their Swiss mountain culture.” The duo hired local outfitters to haul building materials up the glacier with horses and mules as far as they could go. When the ice got too steep for the equines, the men used sleds and winches to move the material up to the summit.

Although it looked more Swiss Alps than Rocky Mountains, the little cabin, made of limestone quarried on site, had the organic presence of a temple, or a toll booth between heaven and earth that had risen magically out of the rocky saddle of the Great Divide. “Where else can you climb two 11,000-foot glaciated peaks in one short trip and have such a wonderful place to stay between climbs?” asks Robinson.

“It was such a special place. There was always a group of people staying there, often a lot of strangers. So after the climbing was over for the day, the cozy little hut made for such warm camaraderie and good cheer. The place was just made for storytelling.”

I have traversed the Abbot Pass from Lake O’Hara in Yoho National Park and Lake Louise in Banff National Park many times, starting in 1962 when I took a summer job at Lake O’Hara Lodge and began climbing. Patrolling the pass was part of my duties in 1966 as an assistant park warden at Lake O’Hara.

As a warden, I often overnighted at the hut, sometimes accompanied by my supervisor, Bernie Schiesser. The hut will sleep about 20 people, and the attic contained dozens of red Hudson’s Bay point blankets that had been packed up from Lake Louise by the CPR’s Swiss mountain guides back in the 1920s. These made for cozy, if not dusty bedrolls on stormy nights. We kept them draped over a wire clothesline out of reach of the pack rats that sometimes haunted the joint.

We were responsible for maintaining the hut in those days, and every week found one of us (usually yours truly) backpacking supplies of firewood, kerosene, shingles and hardware from Lake O’Hara at 2,020 metres up to the 2,925-metre pass. The trek involved a gruelling slog up 457 metres of loose scree to reach the hut.

In those days the heavy snowfalls of winter refreshed the world-famous view of the Lefroy and Victoria glaciers, that much diminished selfie-scape that is jpeg-ed a thousand times a day every summer from Chateau Lake Louise. Snow often packed the crevasses of the Lower Victoria Glacier in Abbot Pass with solid bridges that lasted into late summer. It took from two to three hours to reach the hut if conditions were favourable.

It is an easy hike of less than six kilometres from Lake Louise to the Plain of Six Glaciers Tea House. But from there the trail ends and the route up to the hut threads through the notorious “Death Trap” canyon of the lower glacier.

This spot is particularly prone to avalanches and ice falls from the upper glacier on Mount Victoria. It was always an eerie place for mountaineers to transit; nowadays the Death Trap is impassable. The worst climbing accident in the history of the pass occurred in 1954, when four climbers fell near the summit ridge of Victoria and rolled in a snarl of ropes and crampons down the ice, then plummeted over a glaciated cliff to smash into this forbidding redoubt.

Even back then, the Abbot Pass route should never have been attempted by people who lacked crevasse rescue training and equipment. But as a 17-year-old ingénu at Lake O’Hara Lodge, I thought nothing of trotting solo over the pass and beetling down the other side among the crevasses on a day off to buy pipe tobacco at the Chateau Lake Louise, then catching the late bus back to O’Hara. I tremble at such blissful ignorance now, even as I long for the speed and stamina that made it possible.

I once encountered a pilgrim of sorts who had made the journey from Moraine Lake to Lake O’Hara via the Opabin Glacier clad in a saffron-coloured robe and straw hat. His feet looked battered and slightly frostbitten. He did point out to me that his sandals had rubber soles made from old car tires which gripped well on ice. When he left me, he was headed for Abbot Pass, and to this day I don’t know if he made it back.

In 1999 I was planning a nostalgic trip through the pass and a sentimental climb of Mount Victoria with two old ropemates. I had not climbed in the area for 20-some years. I checked on the route with Fuhrmann and with a former colleague, Tim Auger, who was then in charge of the public safety team for Banff National Park. The pass, I learned, had been trashed by climate change. “Nobody uses the old route anymore,” Auger warned me. “It’s nothing but holes and seracs.”

“It’s been a no-go zone for at least five years,” Fuhrmann explained at the time. He told me that instead of one bergschrund—the name for mega crevasses that typically form near the top of a glacier—there were now about 20. Fuhrmann has instead revived the old Swiss Guide’s route that follows a yellow rock
band up along the west side of Mount Lefroy to reach the pass.

Describing the hut in my book Switchbacks, I wrote “the first time I saw it was the first time I really understood the love affair between men and mountains. Abbot’s Hut—a place made to be haunted by their shades. At night, the beacon of a candle flame in its window was like a lighthouse in the clouds.”

I am one of those who have seen nearly every home they ever lived in fall to the wrecker’s ball, so memory is constantly challenged by a reality that has erased the objective touchstones of my past. I am not alone in this modern form of spatial amnesia. Still, losing a place like Abbot Pass Hut, which was a focal point for so many lovers of mountain wilderness, is somehow worse.

However this issue is decided, one thing remains clear to me. When the sanctuaries and temples of a culture are gone, the spirits of the past have no place to gather and speak across the ages to the transient souls of today. And we are all lessened, as humans, by that kind of loss.

Sid Marty has published five books of non-fiction and five books of poetry. This article was originally published in The Tyee, Mar 28, 2022. Abbot Pass Hut was dismantled over the last two weeks of June 2022.

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Goodbye to Peyto Glacier

Lynn Martel — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 09:00:25 +0000

Slipping my pack onto my back, I walked along the gravel trail. As it is most summer days, the narrow mountain path was busy with tourists clutching smartphones on selfie sticks and lugging the occasional full-frame camera and hefty tripod. Unbeknownst to most of them, they were following a decades-old ritual, visiting the viewpoint overlooking one of the most photographed places in the Canadian Rockies: the radiantly turquoise Peyto Lake.

Before reaching the lookout I turned onto a smaller dirt trail, and in a few steps I’d left the bustle behind me. Hiking steadily downhill through a forest of brawny old-growth spruce and fir trees, I emerged onto the breezy expanse of gravel beds braided with aqua ribbons of glacial melt, all rushing to fill the lake.

My destination lay four kilometres and 500 metres higher up the rubbly valley—the glacier whose meltwater fills that lake. There, I would rendezvous with several scientists at the Peyto Glacier research site, a cluster of small, weather-worn buildings perched on a rock-cluttered knoll. Built in the 1960s, the site is a living legacy of a worldwide glacier inventory project in which Canada played a key role, and where research continues.

To reach the site I skipped and splashed through shallow rivulets until I reached a larger channel pulsing toward the lake, considerably wider and deeper. Switching my hiking boots for lightweight sandals, I stepped into the icy flow. With a hiking pole to steady me gripped tightly in each hand, the water surged at my knees as my feet sought out the flattest stones that didn’t wobble. I was immersed in the rushing headwaters of the Mistaya River, which feeds the North Saskatchewan River, water that flows through Edmonton to central Saskatchewan and ultimately to Hudson Bay, where polar bears hunt for seals on its winter-frozen surface, and walrus, dolphins and orca swim and feed.

Just as I feared being flushed into the lake and beyond, I reached the north bank. Boots back on and invigorated head to toe, I located the start of the foot-hewn trail. Two thankfully smaller creek crossings later, I ascended the steep hogsback moraine ridge. Finally the glaciology buildings emerged into view, with the glacier tongue beyond. While some of the scientists and bulky equipment reach the site by helicopter, for those who hike the same route as me, it’s just another walk to work.

Caroline Aubry-Wake is one of those researchers. A Ph.D. student with the University of Saskatchewan’s Canmore-based Coldwater Laboratory, she works under John Pomeroy, Canada Research Chair in Water Resources and Climate Change at the university. Her work contributes to his team’s studies to understand how retreating glaciers, changing landscapes and a warming climate are affecting water resources in mountain basins in the Canadian Rockies. Her first visit to Peyto Glacier, though, was in winter, when she and friends skied the popular Wapta Traverse. Carrying avalanche and glacier safety gear plus sleeping bags and food, they skied 40 kilometres across sparkling icefields and glaciers where the only tracks are made by skiers, wind or wayward wolverines, spending nights amidst the icefields in Alpine Club huts.

“I really enjoy spending time on the Wapta,” Aubry-Wake said. “Whenever I go for fun, it also helps me with my science, to see how the landscape evolves in the winter. I can take that understanding into my work.”

In autumn 2017 she launched her Ph.D. project at Peyto. She’d previously spent two summers studying glaciers in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca while earning her masters in earth and planetary sciences at McGill University. For her doctorate she’s working alongside Pomeroy and fellow Ph.D. candidate André Bertoncini to study how wildfire smoke influences glacier melt, by comparing years with a lot of fire activity in Alberta and BC—including 2017 and 2018—with the years that followed, such as 2019, when fires were fewer but a soot layer from previous years darkened the glacier surfaces and increased the melt rate.

Glaciers will shrink 60–80 per cent by the end of this century. The biggest loss is predicted to occur between 2020 and 2040.

Her work with the Coldwater Lab includes computer modelling, collaborating with other scientists to examine conditions at Peyto Glacier from the early 2000s through to 2090 in an effort to understand how the North Saskatchewan River basin will function when Peyto and most of the Rockies glaciers have completely melted. Previous studies by the Western Canadian Cryospheric Network have demonstrated that some 300 glaciers in the mountain national parks of the Rockies were lost between 1920 and 2005. And a UBC study led by professor emeritus Garry Clarke and published in the journal Nature Geoscience in 2015 determined that, based on conditions and trends relative to 2005, the volume of glacier ice in western Canada will be reduced by 60 to 80 per cent by the end of this century. Few glaciers will remain in the interior and Rockies regions, the study concluded, while glaciers nearer the Pacific Ocean, particularly those in northwestern BC, would survive “in a diminished state.” The biggest loss, they predicted, would occur between 2020 and 2040, with potential implications of those reduced/depleted glaciers including “impacts on aquatic ecosystems, agriculture, forestry, alpine tourism and water quality.”

After the summer of 2021’s record-smashing high temperatures across western Canada, however, and the dry weeks with smoke thick as dryer lint from BC wildfires that followed, many doubt Peyto, and other Rockies glaciers with similar characteristics, will last half that long.

Top: Peyto Glacier, 1902. Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, V653/NA-1127. Bottom: Peyto Glacier, 2002. Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.

Aubry-Wake’s work and that of other researchers all contribute to the Peyto’s valuable role as the North American glacier that has been continuously studied the longest. The first photograph of the ancient ice tongue was captured in 1896 by American explorer Walter Wilcox. The lake was known then as Doghead Lake—exactly what it resembles from any high point near its south end looking north. Wilcox renamed it for his guide/outfitter, Bill Peyto, who would later become one of Canada’s first national park wardens. First published in National Geographic magazine in 1899, Wilcox’s image shows the glacier extending nearly to the lake, providing a reference point that remains valuable today.

The first scientific studies recording the glacier’s position began in 1933, and from 1945 to 1960 Peyto was among several of the Rockies glaciers regularly surveyed by the Dominion Water and Power Bureau, which became the Water Survey of Canada. Peyto’s role grew when it was included among five glaciers in western Canada to be mapped and extensively measured annually from 1965 thru 1974 as part of Canada’s contribution to UNESCO’s International Hydrological Decade.

With the viewpoint parking area just a 30-minute drive from Lake Louise up the Icefields Parkway, Peyto Glacier retains its status for two main reasons. “First of all, it’s accessible. It’s not that easy to get to, but it’s easier to reach than a lot of other glaciers in the Rockies: just a three-hour hike in,” Aubry-Wake explained. “The second reason is historical. This glacier has been studied for so many years, and so many different projects have been done in that location. There’s a lot of data and information on that environment. It’s quite rare to have such a long data set to build upon.”

Temperature records in the Rockies were surpassed in summer 2021 not by fractions of degrees but by as much as 3ºC and 4ºC.

That extensive information base proved especially relevant in the summer of 2021, when temperature records were surpassed not by fractions of degrees, as is usual with such records, but by as much as 3ºC and 4ºC. In the town of Banff, where records have been kept since 1887, the temperature reached 37.8ºC on June 29, beating the previous high of 33.9ºC set in 1937 (during a prolonged drought known as the Dirty Thirties). Peyto Glacier’s melt rate was soon far surpassing the 25-metre annual average for the previous quarter century.

“It melted so much and so fast,” Aubry-Wake said. “It was incredible—badly incredible—how much change happened in one season. The toe collapsed and it retreated by 200 metres. And because we have years of data, we can put that extreme event from summer of 2021 in context. If we only had data for as long as five years, it would be really hard to quantify how different that summer was.”

In winter, glaciers appear to be asleep when they’re buried under a blanket of snow that conceals their boundaries and crevasses—where shimmering blue ice splits apart where the bedrock supporting the glacier steepens. In summertime, warm temperatures cause creeks rushing with meltwater to flow on the ice surface, making the glaciers seem alive. But when winter snows aren’t sufficient to maintain the glacier’s volume, that lively melt signals that the glacier is dying.

As one of about 1,160 glaciers remaining in Alberta, all found in the Rockies’ eastern slopes, Peyto provides information that’s representative of hundreds of small glaciers that scientists don’t have the resources to study. Data recorded at Peyto, including air and surface temperatures, precipitation amounts, humidity, wind speed and direction and more, is recorded and transmitted via satellite directly to researchers’ desktops at the Coldwater Lab in Canmore and to Natural Resources Canada in Ottawa. In addition to contributing to Canada’s network of studied glaciers and associated freshwater resources, information from Peyto is shared with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and with Parks Canada, within whose boundaries the headwaters of Alberta’s key rivers are protected. The data is also shared with downstream industries, including mining, hydro power, irrigation, tourism and ecosystem services. And it’s shared with Alberta Environment and Parks to facilitate water management and allocation decisions.

Draining to the north to feed the North Saskatchewan River, Peyto shares similar characteristics with nearby Bow Glacier, which also descends from the Wapta Icefield. As the headwaters of the Bow River, that glacier contributes to the freshwater supply of Alberta’s most populated region, flowing through Banff, then Calgary with its 1.4 million residents, and on to the southeast of the province, where it joins the Oldman River to form the South Saskatchewan River. The North and South Saskatchewan rivers then merge to course toward Lake Winnipeg and ultimately drain into Hudson Bay. Meltwater from the Wapta Icefield helps sustain no less than three provinces.

Left: Scientists at the Peyto Glacier research station (built in the 1960s) after a day spent studying glacial composition and melt rate. Right: Researchers May Guan, Steve Bertollo and Scott Munro set up monitoring equipment on Peyto. This image was taken in 2011; the ice they’re standing on has since melted and formed a large lake. Photos: Lynn Martel.

When asked how Alberta is preparing for a diminished freshwater supply as a result of our glaciers melting, Jason Penner, communications adviser with Alberta Environment and Parks, replied that “glaciers are a relatively small component of Alberta’s freshwater supply.” “While retreating glaciers are a concern, notably in late summer and in drier years, seasonal and year-over-year variability of precipitation has a much greater impact on water supply in Alberta,” he said.

With less snow and ice will come smaller streamflows. Less water will be available to balance things out during hot, dry periods, when it’s needed most.

When averaged out over the year, the annual contribution of glacier-melt to rivers in Alberta might indeed seem small, as low as 4 per cent. But in late summer, when rainfall is usually at its lowest and all the previous winter’s snow is gone, that number jumps to as much as 30 per cent of river flow. Glacier ice is nature’s savings account for water.

“Summer 2021 really showed the role of glaciers in the regional hydrology,” Aubry-Wake said. “This is exactly what’s useful about glaciers: when it’s hot and dry, they provide more water. That’s the fundamental glacier functionality. They help us to be more resilient to dry periods.”

But extra glacial melt has its limits. The heat in the summer of 2021 resulted in Environment Canada recording 219 daily maximum temperature records broken or tied in Alberta, and 49 provincial sites registering all-time maximum temperatures. Alpine wildflowers shrivelled, thousands of oxygen-starved fish died, crops withered and Alberta reported 66 excess deaths—that is, 66 people here died from the heatwave. Those extreme temperatures didn’t happen in the late-summer weeks, though, but from June 25 through July 7. The following five weeks brought only minimal rain, resulting in the province spending $136-million to help Alberta ranchers with feed and water costs.

By November, water levels in the Bow River were at less than half of the average of all observations recorded in the 125 years the Water Survey of Canada has been measuring the river, said John Pomeroy. As of early May 2022 the Bow remained unusually low. Levels were expected to increase as soon as snow melted at higher elevations and spring rainfall arrived.

“Overall, streamflows from most Canadian Rockies rivers were very high as deep snowpacks melted in the heat dome of late June and early July 2021,” Pomeroy said. “Then [they] dropped to half of normal or lower from mid-July onwards as the drought reduced mountain runoff and depleted groundwater that would feed these rivers. The Milk River in southern Alberta had its natural flow go to zero in July. But glacier-fed rivers such as the Athabasca, Sunwapta and North Saskatchewan stayed with high flows due to rapid glacial melt in the heat.”

With that, Rockies glacier melt reached a critical juncture. “As glaciers disappear, this extra water in drought and heatwave years like 2021 won’t be there,” Pomeroy said. “2021 appears to be a tipping point for some Canadian Rockies glaciers. Air temperatures were the highest ever recorded on Peyto and Athabasca. Algae are growing on the wildfire soot and keeping the glaciers dark, so they heat up in the sun and melt fast. Other, larger and colder glaciers such as Athabasca will soon follow Peyto’s path to destruction.”

None of this is news to Pomeroy. But what did surprise climate scientists—not only in Canada but around the world—about the western Canada heatwave was that those temperatures hadn’t been expected for another three decades.

“What happened in BC and throughout the Canadian West during the summer and fall of 2021 should be regarded as a 9/11 alarm that wakes us all up to the climate emergency,” said Bob Sandford, a Canmore-based senior adviser on water issues and Global Water Futures Fellow with the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. “We’ve known for a long time that this day would eventually arrive if we continued to ignore the warnings and the evidence of the risks we were taking,” he said. “But we didn’t expect that climate change impacts projected to appear by mid-century if we didn’t act now to dramatically reduce carbon dioxide emissions would arrive 20 to 30 years early. The West got slammed.”

While a study published in 2021 by Brandi Newton, a hydroclimatologist at Alberta Environment and Parks, showed that from 1951 to 2017 winter precipitation—from November to April—decreased, “November–April precipitation in the Rocky Mountains is projected to increase in the future.”

At the same time, Aubry-Wake’s modelling work found that overall, looking at data from 2000 to 2090, a decrease in future streamflow is predicted. “We’ll have more rain falling, more snow falling—mostly more rain, because it’s warmer, so less snow overall,” she said. “But we’ll still see a decrease in stream flow of about 7 per cent.”

This is because while snow and ice serve our needs by storing water, when rain falls, water flows away. That leaves less water available to balance things out during hot, dry periods, when it’s needed the most. In short: More spring runoff means shrunken rivers in summer.

Meanwhile, with glaciers all around the planet melting, including the massive icecaps of Greenland and Antarctica, more liquid water becomes available to an already energized water cycle. Climate change, Sandford pointed out, is all about water. “It’s estimated that even at 2°C of warming, the concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere could increase by as much as 20 per cent, with a commensurate increase in its power to further amplify warming,” he said. “We must get control of carbon dioxide emissions so that we can limit the damage and the impacts that water—and, in its absence, drought and fire—can visit on the world. If more people understood this, there might be less resistance to climate action.”

Considering that Alberta has had some of the most expensive environmental disasters in Canada’s history—the June 2013 southern Alberta floods resulted in $1.7-billion in insured damage, while the May 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire cost $3.8-billion plus an estimated $6-billion in uninsured damage—it would make sense, Sandford suggested, for Alberta to be leading the transition away from fossil fuels to more sustainable energy sources.

During the NDP term of office (2015–2019), Sandford said, the MLA for the Banff-Kananaskis riding, Cam Westhead, and Environment Minister Shannon Phillips made several visits to the Coldwater Lab in Canmore. But with the Rockies glaciers melting faster than ever, neither Alberta’s current environment minister nor the region’s latest MLA have shown any interest in the scientists who monitor our water, or in their findings. “Minister Phillips was the last provincial politician, MLA or otherwise, to ever visit us in Canmore or to take an interest in our research,” he said.

Researcher Caroline Aubry-Wake, who studies how soot from forest fires darkens a glacier’s surface and increases melt rate. Photo: Lynn Martel.

Researchers aren’t alone in voicing their concern. Recreational climbers and professional mountain guides, who spend countless days year-round amidst millennia-old ice, season after season, are noticing routes becoming inaccessible. “Our final surprise was the view of the Peyto Glacier from the glacial research station,” wrote Association of Canadian Mountain Guides member Maarten van Haeren in August 2020 in a publicly accessible conditions report. “The glacier has a large new collapse in the centre (about 100 m × 60 m in area and ~30 m–40 m deep), and the traditional access from looker’s right to gain the glacier was a 10 m strip of ice that was not underwater. If I had another Peyto Hut booking, I would approach via the Bow Hut trail. Certainly disheartening to see these drastic changes from last year to this year.”

In 1940 the Icefields Parkway from Lake Louise to Jasper opened to automobiles, having been travelled as the “Trail of the Glaciers” by commercial packtrains for decades. The federally funded project had provided employment during the Great Depression. In 1961 the road was paved and upgraded to its current state. At least a million vehicles from every corner of North America drive it annually, mostly in July and August, their occupants stopping at strategically placed glacier viewpoints. It’s consistently rated among the most scenic drives in the world. Alberta licence plates outnumber those of all other jurisdictions combined. Families large and small disembark at pullouts, reciting the glaciers’ names—Victoria, Crowfoot, Snowbird, Athabasca, Angel—as if rendezvousing with friends.

Glaciers have been part of the Rockies landscape longer than people have—more than 11,000 years. Today we hang photos and paintings of them on our walls; local companies use their proximity to the ice-capped Rockies to attract employees. We boast of “our” Rockies when we travel. And by the time today’s children become parents, they will look to many of these high cirques and hanging valleys and see only rock.

It’s not only our landscape that’s changing, but even our language. Historically, the term “glacial pace” meant something was happening so slowly as to be imperceptible. Not anymore. “It used to be that if you wanted to see how a glacier was changing, you had to go every 10 years or so to be able to notice the change,” Aubry-Wake said. “And now it’s like, oh, three months later.”

Lynn Martel explores and documents the mountain world. Her latest book is Stories of Ice (Rocky Mountain Books, 2020).

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Firebird

Agnieszka Matejko — Sun, 01 May 2022 09:00:37 +0000

by Glen Huser
Ronsdale Press
2020/$12.95/286 PP.

Some stories are timeless. The oldest and most enduring is the tale of a young hero who encounters the heights of kindness and the depths of depravity along a perilous journey. It’s the theme of the Epic of Gilgamesh (probably the first fictional story ever written down), and is a tale retold in various permutations right up to Disney’s The Lion King. No matter how familiar, this storyline continues to captivate.

In his young adult novel Firebird, Glen Huser, a Governor General’s Award-winning novelist for young teens, sets his heroic saga against the backdrop of one of Canada’s most shameful historical events. Alex, a 13-year-old immigrant orphan from Galicia (in today’s Ukraine but then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), is left homeless and alone in Vermilion after a fire kills his uncle. It’s 1915 and war has just pitted Germany and Austria-Hungary against the Allies. Thousands of farmers, miners and farmhands, including Alex’s older sibling Marco, are imprisoned as enemy aliens in Alberta. Brutal conditions in the Castle Mountain internment camp near Banff leave Marco emaciated and close to death. Alex, penniless and still new to Canada, decides to make his way from the homestead in central Alberta to search for his brother.

Alex is unprepared for the diverse characters, class structure and rampant racism he encounters. He is called a “bohunk,” “Austro-Hun” and “enemy alien” by arrogant colonial elites and indigent settlers alike. These vivid accounts of life in early 20th-century Alberta make this story a compelling read for adults and youth. Historic sites, some still existing and familiar, such as Edmonton’s High Level Bridge trolley, take on a new life.

But the most eye-opening parts of the book, the descriptions of Marco’s incarceration, are so little known that readers may need to consult theCanadian Encyclopedia to verify that the story is grounded in history. It turns out that across Canada 24 internment camps held over 8,000 people. The majority were Ukrainians of Austro-Hungarian origin. Construction in Banff National Park, including trails, highway construction to Lake Louise, and stone quarrying for the Banff Springs Hotel, was done through forced labour by immigrants, imprisoned behind barbed wire and held at gunpoint. Some, such as the fictional Marco, succumbed to tuberculosis.

Despite the horror, the arc of the story is uplifting. Perseverance and the kindness of strangers allow Alex to reunite with his brother and help nurse Marco in his final days. Ultimately this is a true heroic odyssey. Just as with Gilgamesh, Alex can’t overcome death but can learn to accept it, deepening his courage and character on the path to that epiphany.

Agnieszka Matejko is an artist and writer in Edmonton.

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How I Did Not Try to Kill Andrew Suknaski

Sid Marty — Sat, 01 Apr 2017 20:42:00 +0000

Andy, late lamented friend, celebrated author of Wood Mountain Poems, The Ghosts Call You Poor and many other texts: you were too frail and too medicated, the last time I saw you alive, to chew over the past. The Black Dog had you locked in its jaws. So I couldn’t tell you how what you said to me that day down near Assiniboia so long ago still troubles me. I hear again that shotgun blast; I see you glaring up at me wild-eyed from the bottom of that dry creek bed. Your fist grips the dead cock pheasant by its feet, and like some angry gamekeeper, you hold it up to me and give it an angry shaking. A few iridescent crimson plumes are still drifting out of the sky, one of them is caught in your luxurious beard. I stare at it in puzzled fascination, thinking “Looks like a Christmas tree ornament caught in a hedge.” I wince at that painful simile now.

Sometimes a person feels pain
when poems wait & grow
like feathery hands
silently reaching thru the rib cage
to touch the sun

(From “Circles,” Leaving, 1974)

I don’t doubt it, but after all, you did bag the first pheasant that day, so what’s the beef Some have snidely suggested that I resented Suknaski because he wouldn’t give a pheasant a sporting chance to take flight. If you replace the word “pheasant” with “poem,” there might be a hint of truth in this; otherwise, not. Given his financial situation (non-existent), Suknaski—a hunter and gatherer to the manner born—would not let a perfectly edible pheasant take wing, preferring to put the front bead of his faithful Cooey single-shot on it and blow it skyward himself. But imagine, if you will, having that same 12 gauge shotgun fired two feet from your ear, inside a car that day while you were busily filling your pipe bowl and innocently nattering on about the pioneering imagism of W.W.E. Ross. (The first question that springs to mind for many of you would be—who is W.W.E. Ross?) I think you can imagine the noise of the blast would be astounding. Some might actually piss themselves in terror. But to me, hardened by days spent running a chainsaw without ear protection, this loudly illegal tactic was less traumatic. All I said was, “Nice rain-barrel shot, Andy.”

In the backseat, a shadowy Suknaski, his trusty Peterson bent still fuming away, blinked owlishly at me over the gleam of his wire-rimmed specs. Picture Trotsky riding the Siberian railway in a film noir. He leaned forward and hooked a pipe-ashed thumb out the window at his ring-necked trophy. “Observe carefully, Meester; the muzhik has a pheasant. You and your famous Ithaca 16, you have no pheasant.”

Suknaski, then deeply immersed in Russian and Ukrainian history, constantly referred to himself in the third person in this wise. Muzhik (or mujik) is a term for the Russian peasant. It was a fitting handle, given his ethnic and socio-economic origins and salty rural habits. Ironically enough he was then wintering not in rural but in urban poverty, for a change, in Regina. While in “Redchina” as he styled it—in tribute to the NDP government—he haunted the main library, where the late John Newlove was then writer-in-residence. Arriving with a battery of pipes preloaded and a new MS to hand, he would barrage Newlove with his celebrated ethno-docu poems, then smoke him out of his office into the nearest bar. Newlove summed it up for me in a terse phone call one day: “The halls are alive with the sound of muzhik.”

That annual bird hunt was on a big-sky autumn day with the bite of winter in the breeze. In the afternoon, old pal Brian Coulter and I are busting through buck brush and rosebush on either side of the creekbed, shotguns at high port. Duke, Brian’s black Lab, is buried in willow bush below us. Suknaski is supposed to be between us. Bird hunters keep abreast of each other for safety’s sake, so Brian keeps urging Suknaski to keep up. Suknaski ignores all advice, his position in the thick willows marked only by an occasional smoke signal wafting up from his pipe. I picture him plucking pensively, betimes, at his prophet’s beard, communing with his muse. His battered Cooey, its fractured stock held together with duct tape, rests on the shoulder of his sheepskin coat. That’s right, sheepskin coat. Did I say Trotsky Actually, it was more like going bird hunting with Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Just then Duke sticks his muzzle out of some rose bush, freezes on point, and a cock pheasant bursts up from my feet like a winged rocket. I swivel around, throw up the shotgun, leading the bird’s head on a steep, going away angle.

Now, Suknaski, I know my 16 gauge was pointed your way when I squeezed that trigger, but goddamn it, there was no danger to you. You were bunkered eight feet in the ground and the pheasant was high overhead. A few pellets of spent shot bouncing off that bird, then pattering down onto that infamous railroader’s cap—remember that blue pom-pom and the eagle feather stuck through its strap That does not count as attempted murder, Andy. No doubt glancing up to see the dead cock pheasant falling out of the sky, with talons reaching out for you like a pre-Stephen Colbert eagle, freaked the shit out of you but it is not evidence of any murderous motive on my part, though I can’t speak for the pheasant. In fact, it proves I was not shooting at you and yet you assume the opposite. If ever there were a verbal athlete who could pole-vault over a wall of fact to arrive at a bizarre conclusion, albeit one rife with poetic truth, that would be Andrew Suknaski.

Who cares for lies when glimmerings of possible truth
flood some dark recess of the mind

(From “Dance in Wood Mountain Community Hall,” The Ghosts Call You Poor, 1978)

Exactly, and dark is the operative adjective for your mood change that day. I’m thinking Hillcrest Mine Disaster dark. Back in the car, confronted by an ominous silence, I finally turned around and demanded, “Andy, what the fuck are you brooding about?”

From the shadows, silence and then you muttered those angry words: “You tried to kill me, Meester. Not enough for you to be the mountain poet, now you want to kill the prairie poet and take over here too.”

There was no reasoning with Suknaski in that mood. We dropped him at his shack, the former telegraph office in Wood Mountain, there to brood about a fire that burned down his mother’s church, to ponder on about Babi Yar and Sitting Bull and attempted poeticide, or maybe to summon the ghost of General Custer by Morse code. Coulter and I decamped for Assiniboia to find strong drink and country-western music.

Dear paranoid Ghost-Who-Calls-Me-Poor: This is what happens to us sometimes in this parochial literary culture of hyphenated poets whose authenticity is pegged to ethnicity or postal codes. More to the point, this is what happens when I write a poem about a dead fox in Wood Mountain that gets anthologized more often than your poem about the same fox. And your reaction “You should go skin out the hide and have the fucking thing stuffed.” That was deliberately misleading, Andy. You knew very well coyotes had already shredded that hide. Also—damn your eyes—why do I keep addressing you as if you were alive to read this Get the fuck out of my head, Suknaski! Get back on the page, where you belong.

“Search in vain
in the rosebushes
finding only the cold reproving wind”

(From “The Grave of an Unknown Homesteader,” The Ghosts
Call You Poor, 1978)

Exactly; we all hate wading through rose thorns.

What’s the use. I’m going to be talking to your ghost for the rest of my life. Your death is a hole in my heart no stent of time or laughter can bridge. The last time I spoke to you on the phone and asked “How are you doing?” you said “Big loneliness, Meester; big loneliness.” I could picture nearly every one of the 655 kilometres to that halfway house in Moose Jaw. Do you realize you had no goddamn right to go crazy, get sick and die before your time like that Do I realize that is a stupid question Yes, I do. Do I ask myself questions I already know the answer to Apparently. It has become a form of verbal social disease these days.

Here’s what I think we were all trying to do out there, Andy: We were killing the blues, out where the only black dog was a grinning Labrador retriever. If I could have done it on purpose, I would have dropped another pheasant on your head that day, like some kind of gun-slinging Zen master saying “Yes, the sky really is falling. It’s not just an ethno-cultural memory, it’s right now; duck!”

Once, you were alive in the moment, in both body and mind. I saw your joy every day; I knew your competitive spirit. I remember those days at Lake Louise, where you worked every summer for many years. I can still see you running ahead of me, actually running up the steep mountain trail from Wapta Lodge to Sherbrooke Lake in a plume of pipe smoke, a fishing rod in your hand, a pack on your back and a huge cast iron fry pan depending from the pack frame and banging you on the ass at every step. I recall there was a hatchet head involved sometimes too, so the pan rang you like a bell at every jump, terrifying any grizzly bear within earshot.

Remember how you made the first cast at least a hundred feet from the edge of the lake Sometimes the lure landed on dry ground. I swear to god you built a fire of driftwood with one hand and reeled in the first trout of the day with the other. You never stopped moving, or allowed yourself a grin, until you had that first fish sizzling in a half pound of butter, mixed with shots of Worcestershire sauce and homemade bingo. Then you would reload your pipe with that mundungus blend of willow bark, kinnikinnick and Sutliff Mixture 79, snickering with glee, while I stood there gasping for breath, still trying to put my rod together for the first cast.

In a phone call back in 1989, your voice trembling, you asked, “Do you think we could make it up to Sherbrooke Lake one more time?”

“Are you kidding Listen, I’m sending you a bus ticket today. I’ll carry you up there on my back if I have to.” You chuckled sadly at the notion, and then there was a long silence; the most prolific poet and letter writer I ever knew was too weak to even write a note.

Clinical depression is no joke, but then neither is so-called normal life for a 70-year-old human, so I’ve discovered. Your fierce will pulled you through before, so try again anyway, like all of us crazy bastards have to do, I should have said, even to no avail; wake up for those who loved you and needed you. Don’t abandon us to our own darkness, leaving us with nothing but hindsight and maturity. Though the trail to the abyss is blazed with poems, step back, back from the brink and let that sonofabitch swallow its own disappointment. Let’s step from this dead gray room outside, where the prairie sun waits to throw its friendly arms around your shoulders, and come dwell, once again, in the land of the living.

Andrew Suknaski,
July 30, 1942, Wood Mountain, Sask.–
May 3, 2012, Moose Jaw

Sid Marty is the author of five books of poetry and five of non-fiction. He is currently at work on a new book of poems.

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History of the Fantasy

Katherine Govier — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 21:17:41 +0000

When Rocky Mountains National Park was created in 1887, this beautiful part of the world was deemed empty. “The Indians seem to have feared and avoided the mountains,” wrote Mabel Williams, the federal civil servant whose rhapsodic guidebooks emerged under the guidance of J. B. Harkin, former journalist and popular first Parks commissioner. Mabel Williams was, of course, wrong. She and others of her day.

Williams is a story in herself, one of a surprising number of mid-life women who in the early years of the 20th century found new meaning for their lives in what is now Banff National Park. Others include the American Quakers Mary Vaux and Mary Schäffer, the runaway aristocrat Catharine Whyte of Boston, backcountry lodge host Lizzie Rummel of Germany and the little-known but fascinating Welsh dowager Mary de la Beche Nicholl—who in her 60s, in 1904, hired mountain guide Jimmy Simpson to help her catch butterflies at Mount Assiniboine.

There are a hundred stories like that, about men and women transforming their lives. Wonderful stories. Many of them scarcely known. And we shall see why. The better known are tucked away in archives and out-of-print books. Even pioneers still in living memory are being pushed offstage, their traces removed. They have gone out of fashion. The current version of Rocky Mountains National Park does not include them. They clutter up the wilderness and get in the way of the animals and give people the idea that humans have had a role here in the wilds.

The Rocky Mountains are essential to our image of ourselves, and to Canada’s image around the world. We have redrawn this image every few decades to suit the fashion, and the human stories are now out of the picture. The mountain parks are managed, like a kingdom, but the managers are no longer distant Ottawa bureaucrats. They are us. And what if we, like Mabel Williams, are wrong What if we are in the grip of another fantasy?

A century and more ago, the idea of empty mountains was convenient for the dreamers, inviting and seductive. The Rocky Mountains comprised a brilliant kingdom reserved for human pleasure, offering relief from the workaday world, ruled invisibly by men in Ottawa—but known intimately by the natives, weathered trappers, settlers and miners who called them home.

People like Tom Wilson, born in Bond Head, Ontario, near Barrie. He came west at 18 and joined the NWMP at Fort Walsh in 1880, but quit when he became convinced the government was deliberately starving the Indians. He moved on to Banff. Wilson showed the CPR where they should build the Banff Springs Hotel. He guided the sclerotic Major Rogers over the Pass that bears his name. “Give Rogers six plugs of chewing tobacco and five bacon rinds and he’ll travel for two weeks.” By Wilson’s account, Rogers made his trail over the Rockies by killing trees with tobacco juice: “Not many trees along the trail escaped his deadly aim.” Like most of these early guides, Wilson had a good sense of humour and made light of the difficulties. “I never knew how hard a time we had until I read the book,” he said later.

Wilson is said to have been the first white man to see Lake Louise. He was certainly among the very few to witness the trumpeter swans that landed there before human activity drove them to more remote lakes. He worked with native guides, including the “Twin” brothers, Joshua and William. He guided, among many others, the novelist Agnes Laut to Nigel Pass. Her first novel, Lords of the North, and many later books drew on her summers in the Rockies. But there is no biography of Tom Wilson. No monument.

Nor much public information about Arthur O. Wheeler, the land surveyer who founded the Alpine Club of Canada with Winnipeg Free Press reporter Elizabeth Parker in 1906. Unlike its US counterpart, the Alpine Club of Canada always had women members—in Pushing the Limits: The Story of Canadian Mountaineering, Chic Scott describes “ladies with long skirts and straw hats decorated with flowers”—as well as “men with derby hats and summer straws, some carrying umbrellas.” Stirring prose marked Parker’s contributions to the club: she tells us that “traversing the sources of the great ice rivers and breathing the virgin air above their mute snows is conducive to [a] philosophic [state of] mind.” And while we’re on climbers, what do we know of Edward Wheeler, Arthur’s son, himself a climber and credited with showing George Mallory the best route up Everest (a gesture which Mallory resented for the rest of his life)…?

Mrs. Wheeler and Chief Horse Foot (ca. 1015-1930). (Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies)

More inclined to the public eye was Jimmy Simpson, a miscreant teenage poacher who arrived from Lincolnshire in 1896. He learned the ropes from his idol, Bill Peyto, a wild man who once carried a lynx into a bar on Banff Avenue. Simpson put the capital he’d inherited into packhorses and led big-game hunters, US industrialists, atomic scientists and many others on summer trips through the Rockies. He laid out the route of the Banff–Jasper highway, and in his 60s travelled with zoologist Ian McTaggart Cowan, sharing his knowledge of bighorn sheep. Simpson built Num-Ti-Jah Lodge. His fraught relationship with Parks management fills volumes at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.

Intensely physical and practical, Simpson was not immune to mystical experience. “I went out in a cabin at the head of the Alexandra River. …It was a beautiful winter night, nice and warm. I was thinking what a beautiful country it was. I heard music orchestration came out of the southwest. It passed right over me, I heard it die away going to the NE. That was before radio or anything. It was not supposition or anything like that. I could hear the violins. There are so many amazing things in the world we don’t know anything about.”

That’s an almost perfect expression of the popular 19th-century European notion of the sublime—spiritual transformation before the grandeur and pitilessness of nature. From the time the last spike was driven, CPR trains rolled west across the prairie, filled with the heartsick, the disillusioned, the pent-up, the extraneous and the man on the make. The dream brought mountaineers such as Edward Whymper, greatly past his prime. “He’d sit in camp and drink No. 4 Scotch all day and send his four crack Swiss guides to climb a mountain,” said Simpson. “When they came back to camp and reported he’d then sit down and write a damn fine article for the CPR.”

Empty A convenient fiction, to say the least. Wide open, maybe. How else would there have been the kind of collecting that saw Burgess shale fossils shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, just as fast as the packhorses could get them down the trail Curiously, in the first decades of the 20th century, the “disappearing red man” was added to the romance, perhaps in tacit acknowledgement that the “nonexistent Indian” narrative had become untenable. Now, according to government pamphlets, native peoples had bequested charming legends, and their half-buried dwellings sat at the base of Mount Rundle “where now the tourist plays golf.”

The hot springs at Banff, “discovered” by white settlers and eventually becoming the property of the federal government, had been in use for millennia. Trails and passes, same thing. Archaeological digs begun in the 1970s at the Vermilion Lakes reveal nearly 11,000 years of human use. True, archaelogists had not begun to dig in Mabel Williams’s day, but she was wrong even according to what was known in her time.

But the mountain parks—vast, inspiring, “empty” and uncharted—had a purpose, and the purpose was to heal and soothe white people. When Jasper National Park was created, the Métis were evicted. The case of Ewan Moberly and his family is now cited as an example of the great unfairness of government. He and his people (defined as “half-breeds” and “squatters” although there was at the time no possibility of their registering title to their lands) were trespassing on a dream. >>

Whatever did not serve the dream was removed. Bounties were put on wolves and coyotes, because those species were thought to reduce the numbers of the animals hunters preferred. The government moved with absolute certainty that it was correct.

And the idea of emptiness, of sacredness, was only the first fantasy of the Rockies. Soon after the first blush of discovery came the idea that natural beauty would salve the soul. Since then we have seen spiritual balm commercialized. When tourism proved overwhelming, we adopted the eco-fantasy and its child, the wildlife fantasy. They are most of them wonderful ideas. Too bad they threaten to cancel each other out.

Emptiness was only the first fantasy. Then came “spiritual balm.” Then commercial Banff. Then eco-fantasy…

I’ve been reading about the first white people in these mountains, in letters and diaries at the farsighted, privately founded Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. On audiotapes created by the Luxton Foundation I’ve heard the high falsetto “Oh sure!” of Jimmy Simpson, and the thoughtful tones of Louis Trono, a musician who was born in Bankhead, the coal-mining town that once stood above Lake Minnewanka. Men worked in coal mines all day, then showered off the soot and donned white ties to play in a swing band at the Banff Springs Hotel. What lives! And so recent, less than 150 years ago.

It’s true that Mary Schäffer’s memoirs are tinged with romanticism. In fact, many of these “first” people, pioneers and adventurers, can be a bit tiresome. They were the entitled: they had it to themselves. They arrived when the park was pristine; their glorious adventuring can get irritating. They were suckers for the sublime. Their narratives repeat myths of the vanishing “red man,” the hunted-out game, encroaching civilization. I wonder if the current attitude toward them is tinged with envy. Why should they have had freedoms we don’t But it is hard to disagree that roads and railways—the national dream—have led to the decline of Banff, Jasper, Yoho and Kootenay parks. The mountains have been democratized. They are for the people, and there are too many of us.

The road to democracy in the Rocky Mountain parks has been a twisting one. Promoting the health of Canadians weary of their cities and in need of fresh air and beautiful scenery seemed simple. But there was a question of industry: include it because the railways need coal Exclude it because it’s ugly What about forests In 1911 the Dominion Forest Reserves & Parks Act defined parks as surrounded by forest reserves. Parks would encourage development; reserves would “look to the exclusion of people.” The inner Rocky Mountains Park was shrunk to about 40 per cent of its former area.

Gateposts moved. And what was allowed through the gates changed. Cars had been prohibited; in 1910 they were allowed in. Bankhead was part of the fantasy, with electric lights and running water and a school and churches and a hotel: the houses were better built than those in Banff. Tourists might come and have a look. But Bankhead operated for little more than 10 years. In 1922 there was a strike. The CPR closed the mine and the whole town was demolished, the better buildings hauled on flatbed trucks to Banff. The town was erased.

By this time it seemed parks were losing focus. As a chapter by Alan MacEachern in A Century of Parks Canada notes, Mabel Williams, by her own admission, came up with the next great idea. She found some minutes of the Scenic & Historic Preservation Society of America: one of the “old chaps” got up and said, “You know, when you think of it, these beautiful places are worth money. [They] bring people in to see them.” She carried the idea to her boss. “Tourist traffic” became the rationale for parks in the face of government indifference. Harkin even came up with a figure: scenery was worth $13.88 an acre (wheatfields came in at $4.91).

So parks were for tourists. During the 1920s, promotional literature brought in the glamorous visitors, the golf courses, the movie stars. But these large tracts of “empty” land, out of sight of most Canadians, had a dark side. Already, during the First World War, Ukrainian-Canadians had been interned at Castle Mountain. In the 1930s a large government tent city of the unemployed assembled around Morley. In the 1940s the parks were pretty well left alone—except as prisoner of war camps. During the Second World War, German prisoners cleared what is now Barrier Lake. You can see the guard tower of Camp 130 in the Kananaskis and walk through the bush to see the lines of the barbed wire fences that marked the playing field. But of the tent city, of the First World War camp at Cave & Basin in Banff townsite, there is nothing. It is as if they never existed.

After the war, in the late 1940s and 1950s, Canadian families pulled up to the gates in their cars. You could roll down the window and feed a bear, or watch them eat at the town dump in Jasper, as I did. I encountered the parks in the late 1950s. It was wonderful to ride up to Sunshine in a Brewster bus with skis rattling in the outside rack. On certain hairpin turns, you had to get out and stand off the road while the men pushed.

The thing was, everyone caught on. By the 1960s the campgrounds were overflowing. Tunnel Mountain campground in Banff was party city. Ski resorts burgeoned, and sewage seeped into the creeks below Sunshine Village. Ecological notions were in the air, although park wardens still had the authority to shoot predators on sight. Scientists were invoked, strangely for the first time.

We’ve seen the dangers of whole landscapes guided by the hand of man—guided by politics and fashion.

At the 1968 conference “Canadian National Parks: Today and Tomorrow,” the highly respected zoologist Ian McTaggart Cowan—who had roamed for several summers with Jimmy Simpson—laid it out bluntly. “Ecological considerations had almost no part in the establishment of the Canadian National Parks.” He cited past mistakes in managing parks, such as selling off the land in the river valleys, areas the large mammals needed. He talked about fighting wildfires, because by then we knew wildfires were beneficial for forest areas. We might have learned this from native peoples, but we did not pay attention at the time—it was not fashionable to do so. He pointed out the conflicting motives in parks management, and his timing was right.

The idea of parks protecting nature took hold. Public consultations were arranged. By 2000 a new National Parks Act held as its first priority the “maintenance or restoration of ecological integrity.”

The billboard catches your eye when you leave Calgary driving west: “You are in Grizzly Country.” Never mind that, says The Grizzly Manifesto author Jeff Gailus; the bears are safer living outside park boundaries altogether, for instance in northern Alberta. In this scheme of things, people are an impediment to nature. Either we’re “windshield visitors” or we’re clogging up the campgrounds and leaving our footprints and endangering wildlife.

Parks now have a dual mandate of conservation and recreation. If these ideas aren’t mutually defeating, they are at least hard to reconcile. In the 21st century, voices of environmentalism and of science have become louder. They have contributed much to the conversation. New protections are in place. But now there is a profession of parks people and a new language. You can’t draw a line around a piece of nature and save it: this is, in the parlance of the professionals, “othering” nature. “Islandizing” nature. Parks are “the incarceration of wilderness.” If we are not nature’s jailers, then we are its defilers.

And so we are asked to leave Eden. But what about the pioneers who made places for us to adventure What about the Rocky Mountain Parks belonging, as in the original vision, to the people of Canada What about the tranformative power of this wild place, for people?

A couple of things:

How close were we to transforming, anyway To living in the mountains, as did those first white people Not very close. In fact, today over 90 per cent of park visitors go no farther than 250 m from a road. And that’s a good thing: if everyone hiked the trails, the backcountry would collapse under the strain. Mind you, no one really knows what the acceptable “load” is on the backcountry. It hasn’t been studied; there’s no money to study it. There are quotas on the numbers of people who can take the amazing hike over Jasper’s Skyline Trail. If that doesn’t discourage you, filthy washrooms and tortuous access—viz. the 9-km disused fire road you have to take to get on or off the trail—put off all but the most devoted. Can Parks have it both ways, reaching out to new visitors while discouraging its oldest friends?

And anyway, those guys from the past were politically incorrect. They hunted grizzlies and bighorn sheep and picked wildflowers. They built their little cabins up in the passes and their shacks by the riverbanks. Their horses gouged out the ground around the trails. The parks that gave them free rein were elitist. You had to have money; activities like skiing and golf were allowed, while others, like snowmobiling, were not.

Time to change the fantasy. Aesthetics are out of fashion. Elites are out of fashion. No one goes to babbling brooks in alpine meadows except in a shampoo ad. New but familiar-sounding utilitarian rationales for national parks abound. In Australia the parks system is directly seen as linked to the health system. “Feeling blue Touch green.” People are literally prescribed visits to nature if they’re depressed or ill. Are we heading this way?

Parks have been “ablist,” the pundits now say. That is, they aren’t accessible to those with disabilities. So we have wheelchair walks, and we will have the much reviled, much debated, Brewster Skywalk at the Columbia Icefields. We have urban outreach.

Banff’s Wheeler House was demolished in 2011 to expand a wildlife corridor. What stories has the building taken with it (Courtesy of Neil Young)

The reigning fantasy is one I would call Parks without Borders/Parcs sans frontières. The idea is expansionist. Wildlife migration routes, for instance, lead in and out of parks and have inspired plans to link parks and reach out to more territory. There are plans to bring back bison, to restore Aboriginal presence. There is Y2Y, with its aim to connect all the parks from Yellowstone to Yukon. Remote places, natural and wilder places, seem to promise lessons on how we might manage the rest of our earthly territory. Everywhere, we see clues about what is to come.

Artists have been an enduring presence in the parks since the CPR commissioned Marmaduke Matthews to paint scenery as the tracks pushed west, and the Group of Seven wandered around Yoho’s Lake O’Hara. And the artists are still with us. But they’re not after beauty anymore. Jan Kapitoff paints retreating glaciers out of a concern for climate change. I asked Nancy Townshend, author of the forthcoming Artistic Responses to the Canadian Rockies, Purcell Mountains and Selkirk Mountains 1809–2012, what she thought was the new vision. “Maybe parks will save the world,” she said.

But playing God is tricky. You can get tripped up in your ideologies. “Park” as an abstraction defined by words is easy to manipulate; in the execution it’s messier. One keel remains in the wobbling ship that is Parks Canada, and that is the tenet of emptiness. Today no one in Parks management has much use for Banff townsite. It has “zero conservation value,” one Parks insider tells me. Perhaps. But it has huge historical value, and continues to despite the number of teardowns—the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed pavilion, demolished in 1938, is one that comes to mind.

We have seen the dangers of whole landscapes, living environments, guided by the hand of man when the hand of man is guided by politics and fashion, when testimony and the traces of the people who knew the place best are forgotten. I’m just asking: what if, like Mabel Williams, we are wrong?

On a cold, black night in January, I am at The Edge Gallery in Canmore at an exhibition memorializing Wheeler House, which existed, until one year ago, in Banff. It was the summer home of Arthur Wheeler, grandfather of the local climbing community. Wheeler House became a flashpoint in Banff when Parks Canada decided to demolish it. It had been standing vacant for years. Jenny Compton, Arthur’s great-granddaughter, wanted it saved and told the Parks Commissioner she would raise the money.

But the house stood in a newly designated wildlife corridor. So, despite protests and promises, it is gone. The watercolours, photographs and children’s illustrations on the walls of the gallery show a charming log cabin with a pond set among trees. And they are all that remain, a moment in time. Another superintendent, at another moment in time, might have chosen to restore this historic home so that park visitors could visit and learn some human history. But no. He was in the grip of an idea. Wildlife needed its newly defined corridor. People should not clutter the landscape with their dwellings. Nobody lived here. This park is a fresh slate. What will it be now?

Katherine Govier is the author of nine novels and three short story collections, and the editor of two collections of travel essays.

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