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by Kevin Van Tighem
ROCKY MOUNTAIN BOOKS
2025/$28.00/320 pp.

Kevin Van Tighem is one of Alberta’s most prolific and influential conservation writers. His latest book, Understory, however, is his deepest, most profound work yet. The book is a searingly honest journey into the author’s life from boyhood to adolescence to a young man coming up the ranks of Parks Canada to become the superintendent of Banff National Park. Visceral and poetic, it delves beneath the surface, exploring Van Tighem’s own family history as settlers in southern Alberta, a wider culture of patriarchy and violence, and the tangled legacy that Judeo-Christianity, national parks and resource economy politics have left on Alberta’s landscape.

Understory begins with the unforgettable image of a Brewer’s blackbird, doused in oil from a refinery near Calgary, held in a young boy’s hands. For Van Tighem it marked “the beginning of the end of innocence,” from idyllic days marked by fishing for cutthroat trout with his father in southern Alberta, to searching for ways to repair a damaged world. Van Tighem writes about his young adulthood in the 1970s and early ’80s—hitchhiking to BC, skipping classes to study birds, and dropping LSD—at a time when Alberta seemed hell-bent on bulldozing roads and seismic lines and extracting a drug of a different kind: oil. The author’s coming-of-age realization that the land he loved was also abused was difficult for him to reconcile.

At times he was drawn to activism. In the chapter “Rivers,” Van Tighem shares memories from the fight to protect the Oldman River from being dammed in the 1980s. Paddling the waters and meeting and organizing with people who lived along the river’s banks helped catalyze Van Tighem’s writing career. In the battle to protect Alberta’s last major free-flowing river, he realized both the power of the pen and that “a river is more than just water.”

Perhaps most illuminating is Van Tighem’s unflinchingly honest look at his decades-long career with Parks Canada in Jasper, Waterton and Banff national parks. He confronts mistakes and assumptions he made, and that’s precisely what makes Understory such a satisfying read. The “fundamental mission” of the parks, he writes, should be to draw visitors into a more respectful relationship with nature. At times they do—in the chapter “Grey Ghosts” he describes a hauntingly close encounter with a caribou in Jasper National Park: “We were no longer separate, but together,” he writes. “I felt like this quiet animal had granted me a gift of belonging.” But his description of the politics governing woodland caribou management also shows how we’ve allowed this species to hurtle toward extinction. The parks are failing, he asserts, to change how we care for land and wildlife outside park boundaries.

Understory also questions the darker legacy of national parks, in which Indigenous communities were displaced from their lands and ways of life when the parks were created. In a closing chapter, Van Tighem focuses on a story from his final year as superintendent of Banff National Park, and the rebuilding of a relationship with the Iyarhe Nakoda First Nations, who were excluded from the park in the late 1880s. In 2010 Parks Canada signed a memorandum of understanding with the Iyarhe Nakoda to end their exclusion from the park—signalling a new way forward together. “Eight years after the Stoney people were finally welcomed home, the bison came home too,” writes Van Tighem. Now, over 100 bison roam the mountain valleys. Reconciliation, says Van Tighem, requires the painful task of trying to make sense of our individual and collective narratives on the landscape. “Stories can lead us home,” he writes. “I used to think I knew where that was. Now I listen and hope to learn.”

A lyrical reckoning that burns with honesty and a poetic balm for these perilous times, Understory is a book that will belong on my bookshelf for decades to come.

Trina Moyles is an author and journalist from Peace River.

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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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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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Fast forward to February 28, 2024: the pause was ended—sort of—as premier Danielle Smith and minister of affordability and utilities Nathan Neudorf outlined some of the regulator’s key findings in a report with the windy title “AUC inquiry into the ongoing economic, orderly and efficient development of electricity generation in Alberta, Module A”, dated January 31, 2024.  (Insomniacs can find that on Google; it beats sleeping pills.) A number of conditions would have to be met: for example, protection against losses to the agricultural land base and threats to farming operations would be the number one priority. Rural municipalities were also insisting on being properly consulted on new projects and having a seat at the table when decisions were made by the regulator. And they also wanted assurance that developers would post bonds and agreements to assure reclamation of wind and solar sites when project life was ended. The latter condition is essential in Alberta, where the preferred form of reclamation (think orphan oil and gas wells) is to declare bankruptcy.

As a former talk-show host, premier Smith knows how to give good phone to soothe any rumbling in the belly of the beast, by which I mean her base, which is mainly rural. “Protecting Alberta’s land,” she said sternly, “is also why we will establish buffer zones of 35 kilometres around protected areas and pristine viewscapes as designated by the province.” In a statement that seemed to single out TransAlta’s Riplinger proposal in Cardston County, which would have sited 47 turbines, each 195 metres tall, close to Waterton National Park, she said: “You cannot build wind turbines the size of the Calgary Tower in front of a UNESCO World Heritage site or on Nose Hill or in your neighbour’s backyard. We have a duty to protect the natural beauty and communities of our province.” Now that is some skookum wawa that should thrill the UCP base.

Was Smith not impressed by TransAlta’s claim that Riplinger could produce enough energy in an average wind year to power 138,000 homes or boil 3,960 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water TransAlta’s CEO John Kousinioris responded to the new buffer zone in May of 2024 by cancelling the Riplinger project and (cheekily) putting several other green projects on “pause,” citing the buffer zone and a general lack of clarity coming from the Alberta government in his decision.

I can imagine some readers saying “This is all just batshit crazy,” while others, more sanguine, might opine “It’s about bloody time!” The renewable energy industry, however, has been left in confusion, trying to figure out what qualifies as a pristine viewscape. The map released by our government implies that they mainly consider the viewscapes along the mountain front as pristine. Minister Neudorf mentioned a desire to protect “tourist landscapes” as part of the rationale for his government’s decision, but when pressed by media he admitted “there is no universal definition of a pristine viewscape; however, many use that term to refer to areas that are unobstructed natural landscapes.” The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.

The AUC’s opinion echoes the minister, though it prefers the term “valued” viewscape instead of “pristine.” And yet the commission left the door open for excluding other industries in the buffer zone, maintaining that protection of viewscapes should be “industry agnostic and apply equally to all forms of development.” They didn’t swallow Danielle Smith’s Kool-Aid targeting renewables. The AUC also naughtily pointed out that from 2019 to 2021 the largest driver of land loss in Alberta was the “expansion of pipelines and industrial sites,” not solar or wind development.

Perhaps wind turbines would spoil the view of the coal mine.

Full disclosure: I’m a ratepayer in the MD of Pincher Creek No. 9, a founding member of the Livingstone Landowners Group and no fan of the current political regime. I’m worried about climate change, so I support renewable energy. But I’m also one of many people here who think that nine wind farms in this MD are more than enough for one jurisdiction to deal with. You might expect, given this, that I would welcome a more cautious approach on wind power hereabouts. Not so fast. I’ve found that a steady state of paranoia is the prudent way to deal with the ready-shoot-aim policy shifts of Alberta’s right-wing politicians.

The term “pristine viewscape” trips uneasily from a Tory’s lips. There’s nothing too pristine about their beloved oil sands mines, toxic tailings ponds or clear-cut logging operations. Such things elicit a kind of earth-ravished angst that many Albertans don’t care to contemplate—or even look at. So what has happened to Danielle Smith’s sense of the aesthetic Perhaps some pixie dust from the chemtrails sprayed on her base by the US Department of Defense has expanded her awareness of nature’s grandeur Does she really care about any scenic splendour that has not already felt the caress of a bulldozer blade or the embrace of a feller-buncher?

So many questions, so few answers.

After all, she heads a government that seems hell-bent on resurrecting a zombie coal mine, the Grassy Mountain project just north of Blairmore, that had multiple stakes driven through its heart by the Alberta Energy Regulator, the federal environment minister and the Alberta Court of Appeal. Yet it staggered back to unholy life on November 16, 2023, when energy minister Brian Jean suggested the same AER should take a new gander at Aussie billionaire Gina Rinehart’s favourite dead coal project. By the way, the Grassy Mountain open pit proposal, which includes a “350-tonne load-out bin” and a new railway loading spur next to the Blairmore hospital, is well within Smith’s 35-kilometre buffer zone. Perhaps wind turbines would spoil the view of the mine or fan up too much coal dust in the Crowsnest Pass. Those whirling blades might distract hospital patients from enjoying the lullaby of train whistles and shuttling coal cars being loaded, clang-bang, 24-7.

Further, minister Jean could be feeling nervous about the multi-billion-dollar lawsuit his government is facing from four mining companies after former minister Sonya Savage reinstated the Lougheed coal policy and closed the mountains to new open pit mines in 2022. And worse, Jean’s old political enemy, former premier Jason Kenney, is a senior adviser at Bennett Jones, the firm handling the lawsuit. And lo—that’s the same Jason Kenney who presided over the attempt to overturn the Lougheed coal policy in the first place. “No worries, mate. Just throw Brian Jean on the barbie.”

Good old UCP, still steering Alberta by a broken moral compass. This government suffers from a terminal case of irony deficiency—and from constantly being “hoist by its own petard.”

The new “no-go” zones for renewables include “viewscapes” and “visual impact assessment zones” plus agricultural land. But not all new energy development is banned; the UCP seems to believe coal mines and pipelines are somehow prettier to look at than windmills or solar panels.

Long ago, in a different time and a different world, I wrote: “Each mountain/ its own country/ in the way a country must be/ a state of mind.” I could easily have said there are as many mountain moods as there are mountains. They are that changeable, both welcoming and threatening when you live among nature’s uncompromising cathedrals, these water-towers of the West. When not admiring the constant play of light and cloud-shadow rippling across their ridges, I love to view them from a distance. The Piikani people called them “the backbone of the Earth”; they were known as the “Shining Mountains” to 18th-century fur traders. I can see why their classic profile appears on Alberta’s flag and provincial shield. Something worth protecting, one would assume, and some of us definitely try.

But the shining mountains are no longer the only towering images above southern Alberta’s plains and foothills. White wind turbine towers, some as high as 90 metres from ground to hub, with a rotor diameter of 100+ metres are steadily upstaging the view.

The Municipal District of Pincher Creek was home to Canada’s first commercial wind farm, at Cowley Ridge, in 1993. Its 52 windmills, outlined against the mountain backdrop, predicted how the industry would relate to the “pristine viewscape.” These first latticed towers, some 25 metres high, were replaced in 2017 by a row of 15 turbines measuring 46 metres. According to the US Department of Energy, hub heights of land-based windmills have increased by 83 per cent since 1999. “In 2023,” the department notes, “the average rotor diameter of newly installed wind turbines was over 133.8 meters… longer than a football field, or about as tall as the Great Pyramid of Giza.” The reasons are simple enough: wind shear increases with a gain in height while surface friction (by trees, buildings, grass etc.) is diminished. And the longer the rotor blades, the more energy they capture for the turbine.

In two decades, the mountainous scene west of Fort Macleod and Pincher Creek, from Chief Mountain north to Crowsnest Mountain, and from the Porcupine Hills west to the Livingstone Range, that thrilled many a first-time visitor to this place, has been rapidly transformed by wind turbines as this part of Alberta became the centre of wind farm development. Most locals supported the industry. In Alberta’s free-wheeling energy market, there’s a lot of money to be made by vandalizing the view, both for the developer and for the landowner. I could not obtain information on current leases, but in 2017 Evan Wilson of the former Canadian Wind Energy Association told the Calgary Herald that “every 150 MW of new wind power represents $17-million in lease payments… over a 20-year period and $31-million in property taxes to municipalities.”

Historically, the Alberta Utilities Commission paid little more than lip service to those citizens or local politicians who objected to the pace of development or to turbine placement. The most glaring example of unregulated growth begins a few kilometres west of Brocket, where huge steel transmission towers and a maze of high-tension power lines frame a tangled view of multiple windmills, their huge blades slicing at the sky. Windmills and transmission lines, due to sheer numbers, have become a man-made geographic feature, a creeping industrialization of the signature Alberta landscape that appears on Alberta’s provincial flag. The effect for a long-time resident is a solastalgic assault on the nervous system, a cognitive dissonance where cherished memory meets current realities.

Of course, most of these space-age marvels are well within Danielle Smith’s buffer zone and are grandfathered-in from her newfound pristine obsession.

When it comes to new wind-power development hereabouts, however, the honeymoon phase is probably over. According to the The Western Producer, a survey conducted in 2006 found 90 per cent of MD residents favoured wind-power development. But as development increased, a new survey in 2017 showed only 54 per cent were still in favour of more turbines. The industry is looking farther afield for new sites these days. The local development officer, Laura McKinnon, told me there has not been a new wind-power application here for three years. Right now the biggest windfarm in Alberta so far is the Buffalo Plains facility, and it’s well out on the prairies of Vulcan County. Personally, I think the industry would be more popular here if it had just showed more sensitivity in siting its turbines, sacrificing some height in return for more social acceptance and goodwill.

A “pristine” pumpjack near Longview, in the foothills of the Rockies, on the Cowboy Trail (Highway 22) south of Calgary.

Criticizing wind power during this disastrous era of climate change is like criticizing mom’s pumpkin pie. Calgary politicians have touted the fact that the CTrains run on wind power. But the electrons from wind-powered or gas-powered turbines flow through the same wire. Since urban residences and industry use most of the electricity, why not put the windmills closer to main consumers, thus cleverly reducing material expense and line loss of power over long transmission distances. Why not insist on solar panels on city rooftops, which is becoming the norm in Europe Could it be that city folks might find such installations (especially wind turbines) not to their liking if they were forced to look at them day and night, while watching their electrical bills increase despite all the new infrastructure that comes with new power generation?

While two feuding entities, the Green Genie and Youseepee No-vax, are cudgelling their wits for a social media assault on yours truly, let us slip into a handy thicket of etymology. The word “pristine” derives from the Latin pristinus, meaning “former,” according to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Over time the meaning evolved from “ancient, primitive” to “1: in its original condition; 2: fresh and clean, as if new; and 3: unspoiled (pristine wilderness).”

We’re all familiar with current usages, as in “used F-150 in pristine condition,” “pristine bottled water,” “pristine starter-castle for the millionaire handyman”—whatever. None of these meanings apply to either the viewscape of the Rocky Mountains or the condition of its myriad peaks and river valleys. You may hike up to see the untouched marvels of Window Mountain Lake north of Coleman, for example, but don’t drink the water unless you are hankering for a dram of polycyclic aromatic compounds found in the coal dust blown into it from Teck Resources coal mines just across the Great Divide.

You could also argue, based on several factors, that there is no pristine wilderness to be had in these latitudes, let alone a pristine viewscape.

The view west of the windmills, as I write this, may not be pristine, but as the dwarf birch turns crimson and the aspen leaves go to yellow, the foothills and mountainsides are a watercolour artist’s dream, and that includes the battalions of round hay bales, the yellow fields of canola, the still-green grasslands topping high foothills and the distant ranch-houses and barns backed by the blue-grey walls of the mountain backdrop with endless cerulean skies above. There is a word for a view like this that stirs our heartsprings with love for our native place: sublime. Sublimity is what meets the eye when you leave the wind turbines behind.

As a young park warden in Jasper, I once endured a lecture by a Canadian Forest Service officer who liked clear-cut logging and summed it up: “I love to see the hand of man upon the land.” You can see the hand of man at work in the Alberta Forest Reserve just about anywhere you care to look. It’s there in the roads, in thousands of kilometres of seismic lines, in deeply eroded ATV trails, in clogged-up trout streams, logging clear-cuts and abandoned coal mines and slack piles. There are also pipeline rights-of-way, gas flare stacks and transmission lines criss-crossing and scarring the mountains. Even the tree cover today has greatly increased from what it was before European contact, the result of billions of dollars spent on wildfire control to preserve wood fibre for loggers, or in the case of national parks, to protect the scenery. That accounts for the massive fuel loads that feed today’s forest fires.

But in truth, the hand of man cannot be avoided. Even before European contact, the hand of man was at work doing cultural burning to improve the range for deer, elk and bison, to encourage food and medicinal plant growth and to keep some of the trees in check. Historical photos taken by the early surveyors in places like Waterton National Park show a less forested landscape far different from today—at least before the Kenow wildfire of 2017, that is.

Writing in the anthropology magazine Sapiens, Claudia Geib cites the work of geographer William Denevan, who speaks of the “pristine myth”—the belief that all of nature was once a sparsely populated wilderness where humans had little or no influence. She quotes Kawika Winter, an Indigenous biocultural ecologist at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa who says: “I loathe that word pristine. There have been no pristine systems on this planet for thousands of years.” Such scholars are part of a growing consensus against the old tenets of “fortress conservation”—the Eurocentric notion that “pristine wilderness” can only be protected by excluding human beings, particularly Indigenous people, from within its boundaries.

What we describe as a pristine viewscape is a kind of political mirage.

In Canada, First Nations people were pushed outside the boundaries of our national parks when the parks were founded. Recently Parks Canada has been striving to undo some of the harm by reaching out to Indigenous people and involving them in programs such as the reintroduction of bison into Banff National Park. That effort was marked in October 2024 by sponsoring a ceremonial bison hunt by members of the park’s Indigenous Advisory Council in which eight bison were to be “harvested” and used by First Nations members.

The Parks effort is a tentative move towards a conservation approach that includes humans as part of the landscape and biodiversity that ecologists are striving to protect. Danielle Smith, whose former claims to Cherokee ancestry qualify as “pretendian,” should stop pretending that coal mines and pipelines are somehow prettier to look at than windmills and solar panels. I doubt the public will be convinced by this petrostate gaslighting of pristine viewscapes, distorting the term “pristine” as a means of simply slowing the inevitable rise of renewables in favour of the fossil fuel lobby. It’s a fallacy that Alberta can have both unspoiled natural beauty and unchained industrial development at the same time in the same landscape—everybody going everywhere doing everything all the time.

The oil well access roads, gas wells and clear-cuts that scar Alberta’s east slope are not visible at a distance of 35 kilometres. In fact, what we describe as a pristine viewscape is a kind of political mirage. The concept that mountains are pristine landscapes is a myth. Yet the ranges of mountains on Alberta’s western horizon are sublimely beautiful. They still inspire awe, and I hope that someday, for all Albertans, they will inspire respect for the forests, the peaks and the rivers that lie behind that famous skyline.

Sid Marty is the inaugural winner of the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize for Oldman’s River: New and Collected Poems (NeWest Press, 2023).

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Read more from the archive “Where to Put a Solar Farm” November 2023.

The post Youseepee No-Vax vs. the Green Genie appeared first on Alberta Views.

My own story includes countless summer days camping/hotelling and winter days skiing. In fact, I was in Jasper paddling my feet in Jasper Lake alongside hundreds of others the day before the town was evacuated. We had no inkling of the disaster to come. Officials believed the main fire erupted from lightning strikes the following day, and, in the words of Jasper mayor Richard Ireland, moved with such speed and ferocity it “humbled the humans on the ground” trying to stop the flames.

The only thing that moved as fast was the finger pointing in the days after. The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees said the provincial government had “refused to heed warnings from front-line wildland firefighting staff and bears responsibility for the disaster.” The right-wing sovereigntist group Free Alberta Strategy blamed federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault, saying that “while Ottawa fixates on climate change rhetoric, their neglect of forest fire prevention has left Alberta’s landscapes vulnerable to devastation.”

The day Jasper’s monster fire was born, July 22, 2024, was later determined to be earth’s hottest day on record.

Premier Danielle Smith, ever one to attack the federal government, suggested that jurisdictional barriers impeded the province’s ability to help fight the fire on federal lands. “We can’t just send equipment into federal airspace without coordination,” said Smith, who asked for a unified wildfire command with the federal government.

That’s a great idea. It won’t stop future megafires. It will make fighting them more coordinated. But, according to experts and both the Alberta and federal governments, the Jasper fire was so ferocious and fast, with a wall of flame 100 metres high and generating its own weather system of lightning strikes, no amount of coordination could have stopped it.

Critics blamed Parks Canada for not doing enough over the years to clear out swaths of deadwood created by pine beetles (with the scope of their infestation itself a result of a warming climate). While deadwood creates its own fire hazard, it’s something of a red herring when it comes to the Jasper fire, according to wildfire expert Mike Flannigan with Thompson Rivers University. He pointed out the pine-beetle deadwood had been on the ground for years, and this material “supports intense surface fire but generally doesn’t support crown fires.”

The Jasper fire was a crown fire, where flames race through the treetops and fire-fuelled winds expel burning embers several kilometres ahead, easily crossing fire breaks. It’s the kind of fire that hit Slave Lake in 2011 and Fort McMurray in 2016. “We can’t stop these fires,” said Flannigan, who has been warning us for years about impending wildfires. But even he was shocked by the immensity of Alberta’s 2023 wildfire season, which saw 2.2 million hectares burn, 10 times the yearly average.

Flannigan said better coordination between various levels of government is key to fighting fires, and that we’ll learn valuable lessons from the Jasper one. But in the end the main culprit is something of a taboo topic for the Alberta government.

“We are seeing more disasters because of climate change,” said Flannigan. “We’re seeing more extreme fires.”

Premier Smith, a loud and proud booster of the fossil fuels that are driving global warming, avoids even acknowledging climate change, preferring to spuriously blame our devastating wildfires on arson, careless humans, El Niño and, generically, Mother Nature.

Another scientific canary in the climate change coal mine is Andreas Hamann, a professor in the University of Alberta’s department of renewable resources, who studies how a warming planet affects forests. He says well-meaning plans such as the federal government’s commitment to plant two billion trees over 10 years to renew devastated forests are “pointless, unless species and planting stock are selected to survive anticipated climate conditions for the next 50–100 years. Otherwise they will get decimated by pests and diseases and go up in flames if climate change is not carefully accounted for.”

The day Jasper’s monster fire was born, July 22, 2024, was coincidentally later determined by NASA to be earth’s hottest on record.

But dealing with climate change is a tough sell politically in Alberta and Canada, and mitigation efforts are an easy target to attack for pro-fossil-fuel ideologues. In fact “climate change” has become a trigger phrase for deniers, who lump it in with what they dismiss as leftist “woke” language and who dismiss scientists as “alarmists.”

Climate change has become another weapon in our culture wars. The victims are countless millions of people around the world devastated by a changing climate. They include the residents of Slave Lake and Fort McMurray and, in the summer of 2024, the people of Jasper.

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

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Canmore’s transformation story started over 50 years ago, which makes it a very long and convoluted tale. Let’s start in the early 1970s, when Canmore (pop. ~1,500) was still a coal-mining town, its residents waiting with trepidation for the inevitable closing of the mine, which would happen in 1979. Seeing the end of coal, the responsible men in Edmonton began to execute a plan to maintain the Bow Valley’s role as the little economic engine that must.

In 1973 the provincial government held public hearings about the future of what was then known as the Canmore Corridor. It is unclear how much of the local public knew about the hearings or what the locals thought they wanted, but according to the Calgary Herald, “individuals and groups eager to cash in on what might become Alberta’s Golden Valley” had submitted more than 30 different development proposals. “If even half of the schemes become a reality,” the Herald opined, “the narrow corridor of semi-wilderness would be transformed into a commercial jungle.”

In the 50 years since those words were printed, Canmore (pop. ~14,500) has been transformed from a drive-by town Calgarians only stopped at on their way to and from Banff if they’d forgotten to fill up with gas, into an international tourist destination bending inexorably to the will of wealthy jet-setters and the people who serve their interests. (This probably explains why it’s the most expensive place to live in all of Alberta and much of Canada.) When Tucker Carlson came to Alberta in late January 2024, it was Canmore where he dined with our illustrious premier, Danielle Smith. Whose house they visited is unknown, but I’m guessing it was no one opposing what has certainly become a jungle of the most commercial kind.

The cumulative social, economic and environmental effects of this jarring transformation are largely why, in the spring of 2021, Canmore Town Council turned down two development plans, known formally as the Three Sisters Village Area Structure Plan (ASP) and the Smith Creek Area Structure Plan. These were brought forward by the latest of several iterations of the company that owns the Three Sisters lands, which sit below the photogenic eponymous mountains in the southwest corner of Canmore’s jurisdiction. The main rationale for council’s rejection was that the enormous scale and scope of the developers’ new plans looked nothing like the project that was initially proposed and then approved with conditions by the Natural Resources Conservation Board in 1992, and so all six councillors deemed the plans “not in the community’s best interests.”

The original vision for the property, boldly declaimed in the original company’s name, Three Sisters Golf Resorts Inc., was a grandiose proposal for luxurious hotels and several 18-hole courses, a commercial development that would have provided the owners with fat profits and the town’s residents with jobs and a meaningful commercial tax base, as well as housing for a few thousand new, mostly part-time residents. Three Sisters and the Town worked out an agreement to guide development and, in 2004, council approved the Smith Creek and Resort Centre ASPs, which reflected the commercial golf resort nature of the NRCB approval, along with 2,729 housing units, roughly the same number as in all of the Banff townsite.

Alas, it was not to be. After a decade of financial mismanagement and bankruptcies—when just a few dozen houses, including Three Sisters Golf Resorts owner Blair Richardson’s 11,000-ft², $11-million “European-styled castle,” and two golf courses had been built—the original owners repurchased the company out of receivership for pennies on the dollar and began a years-long campaign to amend the originally approved ASPs. Fast forward to 2021, when Three Sisters Mountain Village, the new company, proposed something wholly different: a largely residential development of up to 7,000 units of mostly trophy homes, basically a second townsite roughly equivalent to the size of three Banffs. The extra 4,000+ homes would be built on an area previously set aside as a “wildlife buffer.”

The Town can’t stop a private landowner from building 7,000 mostly trophy homes.

Shocked at such temerity, a small army of Canmorites, many of whom had lived there for 20 years or more, decided this change was too much. The proposed development would consume the Bow Valley’s last remaining viable wildlife corridor and double the population of Canmore, making it unrecognizable from the already busy and insanely expensive though still somewhat authentic community it is today.

People were also concerned about the economic consequences of the proposed expansion, which presented significant long-term financial risk for the Town of Canmore. Roderick de Leeuw, a current Canmore resident who worked for Three Sisters in the late 1990s and served as the chief financial officer for the Town from 1999 to 2010, said the proposed new ASPs could create “significant net negative fiscal impact for the Town’s finances (that) continue to put pressure on the municipal tax rates.” A big part of the reason why the town had approved the initial Resort Centre ASP was the commercial tax base it would create. Construction and maintenance of residential infrastructure—roads, sewers, water—is expensive, and without the additional revenues from business taxes, the municipal taxes paid by residents, already high, would only increase.

De Leeuw’s comments came as part of a seven-day public hearing where more than 200 very engaged residents provided 110 hours of testimony, 95 per cent of which was critical of, even hostile to, the Three Sisters Mountain Village proposals. So, it’s perhaps not surprising that when the time came, Canmore’s town council overwhelmingly rejected first the Smith Creek ASP, in April 2021, and then, a month later, the Three Sisters Village ASP.

“I have to agree with my fellow councillors; I will not be able to support this,” said Esmé Comfort, a 40-year resident of Canmore and the oldest member of council. “We have to keep our heads clear and set aside our bias and look at the facts…. I tried to do that. I tried to approve this plan in my own mind, because it would get rid of the uncertainty. But it felt like putting on a pair of shoes that were too small. There were too many things that were not addressed.”

The lone supporter was a shocked Mayor John Borrowman, a potter and small businessman who had moved to Canmore in 1974 and who wanted desperately to bring an end to three decades of tumult. “I’m disappointed, of course. I saw this as an opportunity to bring some balance to our community…. The growing imbalance, particularly the social imbalance that we experience today in our community is, in my opinion, going to get worse. But I certainly will support the decision of council. Council’s decision is always right, whether or not I voted the same way as the rest of council.”

Many Canmorites celebrated as if they’d just won the World Cup. Karsten Heuer, a long-time Canmore resident and wildlife biologist for Parks Canada, said he was elated at the development’s rejection. “We were reminded that democracy still works in Canmore,” he told the Calgary Herald. “It was a huge outpouring of concern in the last five months.”

By the time I moved to Canmore in the late 1990s (pop. ~10,500), hoping to settle down and raise my soon-to-be daughter there, the benches above the valley bottom where the old town sits were a sea of brand-new, mostly fancy houses (of which I rented one of the most modest). The infamous Peter Pocklington had built Rundleview Estates on the west side of the valley shortly before the world arrived on Canmore’s doorstep for the 1988 Winter Olympics. Over the next decade, construction continued non-stop on the benches along the northeast side of the valley, with obligatory names reflecting the natural values that were literally being torn up and paved over: Silvertip, Benchlands, Eagle Terrace, Cougar Point (and Creek) and so on.

Meanwhile, the growing population of Canmore—including and especially the concerned environmentalist types, which included me—was spreading out in every direction. Not content with enjoying the views and counting the birds, we experienced the forests and mountains by foot and wheel and ski, running and rolling and gliding on a network of trails that seemed to grow exponentially each time the earth made its way around the sun.

At around the same time as provincial government officials started eradicating trails and closing some areas to recreation to ensure the wildlife corridors remained functional, unknown monkey-wrenchers, armed with more than passing knowledge of the workings of heavy machinery, poured sand into transmissions and hydraulic lines, and corrosive chemicals into fuel tanks. They ruined eight backhoes, loaders and bulldozers on Three Sisters land, and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, slowing (but not stopping) the construction of the next subdivision to be added to Canmore’s ever-expanding waistline.

A big part of the conflict was that the provincial government had never bothered to develop a long-term land-use plan for the Canmore Corridor or conduct a meaningful environmental assessment on any of the developments, except for Three Sisters. The Bow Valley became the same kind of free-for-all that also plagued other areas during Ralph Klein’s tenure as premier, most notably the reckless expansion of the oil sands in the 1990s and 2000s.

For locals such as Ron Casey—who moved to Canmore as a young electrician in 1973 and would eventually become a town councillor, the longest-tenured mayor in the town’s recent history and an MLA of the Progressive Conservative persuasion—the rapidity with which the provincial government sold land to developers made it almost impossible for the local government to keep up with the onslaught of development proposals.

“Certainly, in the late ’80s, early ’90s, there was almost the sense of being under siege. You had people coming in that had way more capacity than anyone locally had ever dreamed would show up on our doorstep,” he said, in a frank interview with Jeremy Klaszus on the Sprawlcast. “And there was a bit of concern in the community that we were being outweighed, that these people were all politically connected… and they had way more capacity to deal with the province, to manipulate some of the outcomes that the community wouldn’t have the same say in.”

Although nothing was ever proven, the fire sale of Bow Valley public land after the 1988 Olympics reeked with the stench of corruption.

It has become the same kind of free-for-all that plagued other areas in Klein’s tenure.

In 1989, the year Ralph Klein was elected as an MLA and became environment minister, the Canmore Alpine Development Company bought “a remarkable piece of [public] land” just north of downtown Canmore, on the lower slopes of Mount Lady Macdonald. The majority owner of CADCO happened to be Hal Walker, a major PC fundraiser and Klein’s political adviser and dear friend, who would later go on to become a key figure in the rise of the Wildrose Party. Klein apparently exempted Walker’s SilverTip golf resort, located right on the boundary of Banff National Park, from an environmental review, even though the Three Sisters golf resort would need to undergo a review by the Natural Resources Conservation Board that Klein had recently created.

Walker, who was the president of Klein’s Calgary-Elbow constituency at the time, denied that his political connections had anything to do with his get-out-of-environmental-review card. In the 1992 Legislature, NDP MLA John McInnis asked the now-premier about this apparent conflict of interest and said “this sort of half-baked, piecemeal approach will result in numerous lawsuits and possibly another federal environmental review at the end of the day.” Klein just shrugged it off. “The hon. Member for Edmonton-Jasper Place is talking about a fine gentleman, one of the finest gentlemen to walk the face of the earth, which is a lot more than I can say for this individual,” Klein said. “With respect to Canmore Alpine Development, that project was initiated in 1986, long before the NRCB was a notion. The proponent played by all the rules of the day. This member would have that proponent go back and be subjected to rules that were put in place long after he received all the permits and the necessary regulatory approvals that were required at that time.”

Klein’s contempt for the injustice of retroactivity, however, was apparently one-sided. Meanwhile, Three Sisters investors, 66 of what the Calgary Herald called “powerful and politically well-connected business people”—including Richard Melchin, whose brother Greg would become a three-time PC MLA and energy minister; one-time mining minister Bill Dickie; and Calgary Olympic Committee president Frank King—had become worried the Town might interfere with their ability to develop the lands. So in 1995 Klein’s government decided to provide some much-needed security for the Three Sisters cabal, amending the Municipal Government Act (MGA) by adding section 619, which gives the province, not the town, jurisdiction over projects that have been approved by the NRCB. Although the NRCB’s Three Sisters decision had been made three years earlier, s. 619, now known as the Canmore Clause, was made to apply retroactively to all NRCB decisions.

Just like that, the Town’s ability to determine its own fate had been neutered.

In rejecting Three Sisters’ 2021 development plans, Canmore’s councillors understood what many of the more strident opponents of the development didn’t: this wasn’t the end of the battle, not by a long shot. The issue was not development or no development. Three Sisters still had approvals from 2004 for the Resort Centre and Smith Creek, and they were well within their rights to bring amended versions back to council again and again until a mutually beneficial compromise was reached. One of the sentiments expressed time and again by the councillors was that they weren’t opposed to development, but the size and scope of the proposal was overwhelming. The development needed to meet the needs not just of the developer but of the community, to make the community, as it saw itself today, better.

Blair Richardson and Don and Dave Taylor, the owners of Three Sisters, didn’t see it that way. Surely aware of their privileged position in Alberta’s oligarchical tradition, they must have decided they’d already made their final offer and were done negotiating. They immediately appealed council’s decision to the Alberta Land and Property Rights Tribunal, a quasi-judicial body much like the NRCB. They also filed a $161-million lawsuit against the Town of Canmore. Named in the suit were all the councillors who voted against the plans—Esmé Comfort, Jeffery Hilstad, Joanna McCallum, Karen Marra, Vi Sandford and Robert Seeley. Even mayor Borrowman made the list, though he was the only one to vote to approve the Three Sisters Village ASP.

The rest was a foregone conclusion. Six months later, in May 2022, the Tribunal reversed Canmore council’s decisions and mandated that the two Three Sisters ASPs be allowed to go ahead. The Town appealed, but the Alberta Court of Appeal eventually concurred with the Tribunal. Canmore could not prevent a private landowner from building a large residential development that would double the size of the town, because, the logic went, the NRCB had assessed and approved a golf resort 30 years ago.

In Canmore, October 24, 2023, will go down in infamy. On this day the newly elected councillors gathered to approve, against their will, the court-ordered Three Sisters ASPs. It was like a scene out of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. First, the members of the previous council who had been re-elected—Joanna McCallum, Karen Marra and Jeff Hilstad—recused themselves and left the room because they are still being sued by Three Sisters Mountain Village, and their lawyers had told them the less said the better.

Sean Krausert, a long-time resident and the new mayor, who, when the ASPs were rejected in 2021, had opined that “the right decision is being made!,” gave a longish speech to, in his words, “reflect on how we got here.” Specifically, Krausert, a lawyer, wanted to express his concern about the locals who were complaining the process had been “undemocratic” and those who suggested the mayor and council should resign rather than approve the ASPs.

That’s “easy for someone to say who has not been elected and [doesn’t have] a fiduciary duty to the municipality to uphold,” said Krausert. “It’s also easy for someone who is not subject to a code of conduct or obligations under the MGA; it’s easy for someone who does not face legal ramifications, whether that be contempt of court or potential civil liability or bolstering lawsuits already against the municipality. And what would be accomplished by such Nothing. The ASPs would still get implemented, but only after Municipal Affairs comes in to handle things, which will serve no one.”

Each of the three remaining councillors said their piece. Two of them, Jeff Mah and Wade Graham, were reluctant to vote yes but knew they had no choice. When it was time to vote, Mayor Krausert suggested they use “a little bit of a different system” this time. Instead of hands or speech, which would be captured forever in the video record, they would use their microphone lights, which would not be visible. “Light on if you’re in favour, leave it off if you’re not.” Lights on won.

Canmore’s inability to fend off unsustainable development is the norm in this province.

Canmore’s giant new development is “the biggest bait and switch ever,” wrote Jacob Herrero in an email to me. Herrero’s family moved to the town in the 1970s, when his father started studying grizzly bears in Banff National Park, and he still lives there today. He’s an environmental scientist and engineer, and has crunched the data in the various ASPs. “It starts out as Three Sisters Golf Resorts Inc. proposing multiple golf courses, conference facilities etc.… and morphs into plain-vanilla urban development, something the NRCB isn’t even supposed to review.”

Last October a group of about 20 Canmorites with Bow Valley Engage, frustrated at the undemocratic nature of the regulatory process that approved Three Sisters Mountain Village’s new plans, drove to Calgary and parked themselves in front of Don Taylor’s Mount Royal mansion with signs reading “Stop TSMV” and “Save Grizz Corridor.” Five police cars soon showed up.

Karsten Heuer was among the demonstrators, and he knew they were well within their rights to protest against the negative impacts of the project. “We’ve been pushed to the extent that we feel it’s time to actually air this thing out for what it is, and who the people behind it are,” he told The Narwhal. There are bronze statues of grizzly bears and elk on the Taylors’ lawn, he pointed out. “Those are the very things they’re putting at risk” by shrinking wildlife corridors, he said. Heuer is backed up by recent research in the Bow Valley, which shows connectivity has already been reduced to 21 per cent for grizzlies.

The Canmorites’ exercise of their Charter right “to participate in peaceful demonstrations and protests,” including on public streets, sent Blair Richardson into a paroxysm of outrage. “It’s essential to ask who these people are and whether they respect the principles of the law and unbiased court decisions,” he wrote in an open letter published in the Rocky Mountain Outlook. “Given the immense contributions of the Taylor family to Alberta and Canada, such treatment appears immoral, unjust and unethical.”

And then Richardson threatened his fellow Canmorites with a reminder of Three Sisters’s $161-million lawsuit that has “the potential to severely impact the financial stability of the town”—above and beyond the residential-heavy, commercial-light development he has foisted upon Canmore—“and residents’ tax obligations. With the benefit of the previous legal decisions in favour of Three Sisters, it is likely that financial damages will be awarded to Three Sisters.”

This sort of rhetoric sounds suspiciously old-fashioned and authoritarian, a frustrated Lord of the Manor chastising his peasant underlings for daring to challenge his wealth and authority. It also reveals a great deal about Richardson’s values and the rationale for the $161-million lawsuit against the Town and its councillors. University of Calgary law professor Shaun Fluker characterized the lawsuit as a SLAPP (or “strategic lawsuit against public participation”). According to the U of C Public Interest Law Clinic, filing a SLAPP is “a common tactic employed by claimants with superior resources or relatively easy access to the courts to force political opponents into a legal battle and intimidate them away from participation in political dialogue.”

“I think it’s noteworthy that the individuals named in the claim abstained from the council deliberations,” Fluker told The Narwhal. “So right there you’re seeing, seemingly, a connection between the litigation and [councillors’] ability to perform their public responsibilities. It’s highly problematic.”

It’s also an illustration of the privileged Conservative political culture that has evolved in Alberta over the last 50+ years, the same period of Canmore’s transformation from small town to billionaire wilderness.

I’ve lived in Canmore and written much about the political and economic machinations of Alberta’s conservative approach to economic development for the last three decades. It comes as absolutely no surprise that a grandiose real-estate mega-development that will largely benefit anonymous rich people, most of whom only spend a few weeks in town in any given year, prevailed over balanced economic development, a healthy landscape and a sustainable community.

Canmorites, especially those nature-lovers who moved to town long ago for the slow, quiet life of a former mining town on the edge of a national park, shouldn’t be ashamed at having lost the battle. They aren’t alone. The Town’s inability to fend off unsustainable development is the norm in this province. Decades of entrenched neoliberal rule has ensured that economic development and corporate interests always trump other aspects of the public interest. It’s the cardinal tenet of the Alberta Advantage.

Just listen to Chris Ollenberger, director of strategy and development for Three Sisters Mountain Village, rationalize the scheme. “This project falls into a category of provincial significance. It was deemed to be a project in the interest of the province, and so it has an order-in-council approval from cabinet that says this project will proceed,” he told Jeremy Klaszus. “The intent behind it was [that] if the entire province kind of thinks it’s good from the provincial government point of view, [then] a more localized subset of individuals wouldn’t be able to say ‘But we still don’t want it.’ ”

Alberta’s entire legal and regulatory regime has been specifically designed to both facilitate expedient development, be it of a subdivision or a coal mine, and provide the façade that it’s being done in a manner that is socially and environmentally responsible. This charade is necessary because, from the provincial government point of view, every major industrial project ever proposed—with the recent exception of much-needed clean-electricity infrastructure—is both “good” and “deemed to be in the interest of the province.” Inevitably “some localized subset of individuals”—a First Nation, say, that doesn’t want toxic leaks of effluent in its water supply, or a federal agency responsible for upholding federal laws, or the residents of a town that wants to salvage the last vestiges of a meaningful wildlife corridor—would prefer that, for once, their government account for the negative externalities of its reckless economic policies, but their concerns almost always fall on deaf ears.

Here are just a few of many examples during the same 30-year period that Three Sisters has been trying to build a golf resort, er, residential housing development, against the wishes of much of Canmore’s local population.

Against fierce opposition by the Piikani Nation and a host of Alberta environmentalists, the provincial government built the Oldman River Dam in the late 1980s and early 1990s to increase irrigation for commercial crops. Like development in Canmore’s Valley of Gold, it did so without an adequate environmental review or sufficient consultation with First Nations. The province also didn’t bother to get the necessary federal permits, and so one of the “localized subset of individuals” that didn’t want the dam because of its enormous adverse environmental impacts called the government’s bluff and took the case all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. And won.

Inconveniently for the provincial government, which fought the case all the way, the SCC ruled that the federal government had to conduct an environmental impact assessment, and when it did, the panel concluded “that the environmental, social and economic costs of the project are not balanced by corresponding benefits and… that, as presently configured, the project is unacceptable.” They recommended the dam be decommissioned “by opening the low-level diversion tunnels to allow unimpeded flow of the river.”

The Alberta government, even without the putative legal might of a Sovereignty Act, refused. Last winter the reservoir behind the dam dropped to its lowest level in 30 years, and, unlike during the pre-dam natural river flows, the MD of Pincher Creek couldn’t pump water from the depleted reservoir, which looked more like a desert than a waterbody.

Here’s another one, from about the same time. Against fierce opposition from First Nations and the residents of Athabasca, the Alberta government approved the construction on the Athabasca River of North America’s largest pulp mill, despite the fact the province’s Environmental Impact Assessment Review Board in 1990 recommended “that the proposed pulp mill should not be approved at this time,” because there already were several other polluting pulp mills on the Peace–Athabasca river system upstream from several First Nations communities. Premier Klein, ever generous to large corporations, also provided a $264-million interest-free loan as part of what he himself referred to as a “sweetheart deal.”

At the announcement of the multi-million-dollar gift, Klein, heckled by protesters over what they perceived as a gross injustice, clenched his left fist and gave them the finger with his right. He was sending the same message that any “localized subset of individuals” receives from the Alberta government when they oppose a damaging industrial project, though generally the message is translated into more genteel language, such as “nonetheless, it’s deemed to be in the interest of the province.”

Dozens of such stories emerge from the Klein era, but he is perhaps most famous for “revamping” Alberta’s environmental regulatory regime while a minister and then, as premier, loosing a largely unplanned and unregulated oil sands industry that turned northeast Alberta into one of the biggest and most polluting industrial sites in the world (though you’d never know it from industry and government propaganda).

Even Alberta’s reluctant mainstream media report on the gargantuan levels of pollution, the unsecured cleanup liabilities, on yet another cover-up of pollution leaking into the Athabasca River and risking the health and well-being of yet another of those pesky “localized subsets of individuals,” this time First Nations, whose constitutionally protected treaty rights have most assuredly been broken.

How was this allowed to happen According to James Heydon in Sustainable Development as Environmental Harm, it’s because Alberta’s regulatory system is designed to maximize economic growth at the expense of all other interests. As part of his research Heydon interviewed 33 current and former senior officials in the provincial bureaucracy and the oil sands industry. He anonymized the interviewees so they could be more open and honest, which allowed for some of the quiet parts—usually hidden behind a smokescreen—to be said out loud.

Participant B, for instance, from the Alberta Energy Regulator, made it very clear that once a major project gets to a hearing, it will be approved. “And none of that… [is] actively transparent. It’s not in the hearing room, we don’t issue notices, we don’t tell people this is going on. It just happens.” Participant F, a senior member of the energy regulator, explained it this way: “We’re a development regulator. We do want development to take place, we believe that’s inherently in the public [interest].”

For anyone who follows these issues in Alberta, Heydon’s book confirms what we already know by now—and helps explain how a proposed coal mine on the Eastern Slopes, which was publicly opposed and rejected by both the federal and the provincial governments, a decision upheld by three different courts, is still alive and well when it should be “legally dead,” as Nigel Bankes, a University of Calgary emeritus professor of resource law, put it. Instead the Danielle Smith government has decided that the mine deserves another hearing—just the latest workaround to ensure “development takes place” no matter the costs.

All of this should sound familiar. The irony for Canmore is that Klein’s philosophy, which created enormous wealth for oil sands companies and a great many of the people who have recently moved to or invested in Canmore, is also at the root of Canmore’s development dilemma.

Klein’s legacy lives on in the likes of Premier Smith, who, at Tucker Carlson’s Calgary event, proudly introduced herself as a defiant libertarian conservative. She was delighted in 2023, the hottest year in the last 125,000 years, to curtail clean wind and solar projects in Alberta while pledging to double production in the oil sands.

Canmore’s fate, I’m afraid, is sealed.

Jeff Gailus grew up in Calgary and now lives in Montana. He is the author of Little Black Lies: Corporate and Political Spin in the Global War for Oil and is now writing a memoir.

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The post Valley of Gold appeared first on Alberta Views.

As someone who spent her childhood in the forest, “I experienced wildfires,” says Cardinal Christianson, who is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta and now works as an Indigenous fire specialist with Parks Canada. “But I never remember what we’re seeing today.”

Last May when wildfires sparked and raged out of control across Alberta, prompting numerous evacuations, Cardinal Christianson found herself on deployment to the Paskwa base near Fox Lake as an Indigenous liaison on a provincial incident command team. Fox Lake is one of three communities on Little Red River Cree Nation, just over an hour’s drive east of High Level. The Paskwa Fire, which was first detected on May 2, prompted the community’s evacuation on May 3.

“The fire completely destroyed the community,” says Crystal McAteer, mayor of High Level, to which many of Fox Lake’s 3,700-residents fled. Out-of-control wildfires on the opposite side of High Level likewise threatened the communities of Chateh and Rainbow Lake, resulting in even more people ordered to evacuate to High Level.

More than 100 homes and 200 structures in Fox Lake were burned by the Paskwa Fire. The land that people depend on for survival, including hunting and gathering, was blackened.

For Indigenous communities, which are disproportionately impacted by wildfire, comprising 42 per cent of evacuation events in Canada, the losses are catastrophic. Even if your house is still standing, “you’ve lost everything that connects you to the landscape,” says Cardinal Christianson. “It can take generations for those forests to grow back.”

The 2023 wildfire season prompted the evacuation of 48 communities and 38,000 people in Alberta. Several communities were evacuated more than once. Choking smoke spread across the province, leading to numerous air-quality warnings and to Edmonton activating its first-ever “extreme weather” response. A record-breaking 2,214,958 hectares burned and several communities were destroyed, including East Prairie Metis Settlement, northwest of Edmonton, which lost 40 homes to a fire on May 5.

But experts have long been anticipating a season like this one. The situation in Alberta last May was “like a freight train coming,” says Mike Flannigan, whose research on wildfire ecology spans 40 years. “The weather forecasters were saying, ‘Look out, a classic situation is coming, batten down the hatches.’ ”

The most destructive and costly wildfires in Alberta’s recent history have ignited and spread in early May, including fires that devastated Slave Lake in 2011 and Fort McMurray in 2016, and threatened High Level in 2019. The risk for wildfires during the “spring window,” a period after the snow melts and before green-up when there’s a lot of dead organic material, occurs well across Canada, but Alberta is the busiest province come May, says Flannigan.

“There’s more people working and recreating in the forest during this time,” he says. “The weather conditions—hot, dry and windy—are very conducive to fire spread.”

What did shock Flannigan in 2023 was the way extreme fire weather persisted through the length of the summer into fall. Blocking ridges—atmospheric patterns that occur when centres of high pressure or low pressure set up over a region and prevent other weather systems from moving through—occurred over large expanses of the country. Hot, dry weather catalyzed fire spread.

“A lot of people will say, ‘Oh it’s our forest management practices or land-use practices that are causing the change in our fire activity,” says Flannigan. “Sorry, but those are really bit players. It’s climate change, climate change, climate change.”

On September 23 the Basset Fire, southwest of High Level—which had ignited in early June—was reawakened by extreme winds. It exploded out of control and destroyed the power supply to Chateh, Rainbow Lake and Zama City. The Dene Tha’ First Nation issued an evacuation order for Chateh, and with the main highway cut off, residents travelled for six hours on a bush road to reach safety. “They arrived at five o’clock in the morning and were just beat,” says McAteer. “This had been their third time [being evacuated] to High Level in a year.”

The Basset Fire’s excursion (when a fire jumps beyond a contained perimeter) on September 23 contributed to a record-breaking day in Canada, says Flannigan, with more area scorched—700,000 hectares—than on any other day in modern record.

Across the country, 18.5 million hectares burned during the 2023 season, obliterating the previous record of seven million in 1995. But according to Flannigan, what’s most eye opening is the impact, including the loss of structures, wildlife and firefighters’ lives, the effects of smoke inhalation, and the evacuation of more than 200,000 Canadians.

What’s certain, he says, is that the wildfire situation here is only going to get worse. “It’s only going to get crazier. Expect more fire and smoke in our future. Expect more community impacts. These fires will continue, and maybe increase in frequency and intensity.”

The uncertainty remains: What are we going to do about it?

Carrol Johnston stands where her house used to be before it burned in a wildfire, May 5, in East Prairie Métis Settlement

In 2021 Alberta cut 247 positions, 57 in wildfire management. “We started 2023 with a big deficit of people power.”

Alberta Wildfire entered the 2023 fire season short-staffed, says Mike Dempsey, vice-president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE). This was because of provincial government cuts to permanent and seasonal staff positions. “In 2021 Agriculture and Forestry cut 247 positions, and 57 of those were in wildfire management,” says Dempsey. “We started this season with a big deficit of people power.”

Alberta’s legislated fire season starts March 1 and ends October 31. Despite this, in 2022 the provincial government shortened seasonal contracts of wildland firefighters—including radio dispatchers, lookout observers, camp bosses and those who work in logistical roles—by three to four weeks. This meant, says Dempsey, that many firefighting members were still in training when the 2023 wildfires broke out.

Alberta Wildfire is also facing serious retention issues with firefighters, many of whom have left the agency to pursue firefighting careers with the British Columbia Wildfire Service, which offers extended hiring seasons and healthcare benefits. The firefighting “brain drain” to other provinces or wildfire agencies has caused seasonal staff to shrink by 30 per cent, says Dempsey. “The pool for this kind of knowledge on the front line of a wildfire is small,” he says. “There’s competition across the country for high-quality firefighters. You can’t just hire people off the street to go into these extreme fire situations.”

After leaving itself short-handed, the Alberta government resorted to importing 4,000 firefighters from other provinces and countries, including the US, Mexico and Australia. In early May, with 88 wildfires burning across the province, Alberta called in the Canadian military—although, says Dempsey, the premier delayed five days before requesting support from the federal government.

Mayor McAteer, who remembers how the Chuckegg Creek Fire came dangerously close to High Level in 2019, says she saw the impacts of government cuts on wildfire response in 2023. “By the end of August the pay periods for seasonal firefighters were done,” she says. “They broke apart the camp and took the [water] bombers and helicopters, even though a wildfire was coming at us.”

In mid-September, when the Bassett Fire exploded, McAteer says she had to phone the Minister of Forestry and Parks, Todd Loewen, to request resources. “Our communities are in danger,” she told him.

When major wildfires threaten communities in Alberta, the government deploys an “incident command team” made up of highly trained and experienced permanent staff to manage wildfires. Previously the province had four of these teams. In 2023 they were cut down to two. This meant permanent staff were working double time, upwards of seven deployments. Says Dempsey: “Fatigue and burnout start to happen.”

The Alberta government needs to invest more in its wildfire management program to recruit and retain firefighters. “You can’t do more with less, so we need to spend more money on this,” Flannigan says. He argues spending now will save more money later, not just from having to constantly recruit and train firefighters but from having to import firefighters from across the world and pay staff overtime.

This doesn’t necessarily mean putting money into aircraft or sustained action efforts. According to Flannigan, we simply need “boots on the ground to put the fire out.” “You can kill any wildfire small,” he says. “We need extra resources in initial attack.”

He points to the public misconception that aircraft dropping loads of clay retardant is an effective means of extinguishing a wildfire. “If the fire is really small, it may be helping,” he says. “But if a wildfire is large, it’s like spitting on a campfire.”

A fire near Drayton Valley, May 10

The most significant cause of big wildfires is lightning. Of the 2,211,900 hectares that burned in Alberta in 2023, 1,750,867 burned because of lightning. Still, the number of human-caused wildfires is a concern. In 2023 the province responded to 659 human-caused wildfires. (The cause of 48 fires remains under investigation.) “We can do better,” says Flannigan. “People-caused fires are preventable.” The province needs to implement fire bans and forest closures before critical burning days, he says, particularly in early May after the snow melts but before the forest leafs out, or when periods of extreme fire weather—heat and drought—are forecasted. “Forest closures are very unpopular with the public and industry,” Flannigan adds, “but extremely effective at preventing wildfires.”

These closures are exactly what they sound like: halting industrial activity such as logging or oil extraction and prohibiting recreational activities such as hiking, camping or driving ATVs. The province of Nova Scotia implemented a forest closure last May after its wildfire situation escalated and had consumed 200 homes.

The wildfire scientist is also urging the government of Alberta to implement mandatory “fire smarting” around homes. Fire-smarting refers to vegetation management to reduce the fuels that can easily catch flame. Fire is “opportunistic,” says Flannigan. It’s always looking for a place to burn and spread. Out-of-control wildfires can cast burning embers—bits of needles and twigs—and ignite additional “spot fires.” In 2011, spot fires were starting in Slave Lake despite the wildfire front being more than two kilometres from town.

“When the rain of burning embers hits a home that didn’t ‘fire smart,’ it catches fire and spreads structure to structure,” Flannigan says. “It’s like a breach in a dam. Once it goes, it’s gone.” He advocates that people in Alberta’s fire-prone communities be required to remove flammable fuels within 1.5 m of their homes. California—another jurisdiction all too familiar with wildfire—already requires the removal of flammable material within five feet, or the equivalent of 1.5 m.

But this isn’t all that’s needed, argues Werner Kurz, a senior research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service of Natural Resources Canada. He says Alberta and other provinces need to readdress their forest management practices to prevent fires.

For decades, Alberta has predominantly managed the boreal forest for timber production, harvesting and replanting plots with coniferous species only, including pine and spruce. These trees are highly flammable and contribute to the rapid spread of fires, says Kurz, whereas broadleaf species such as aspen typically slow down or stop the flames: “Aspen, birch and maple, any of the trees that have leaves rather than needles, hold a lot of moisture.”

The forestry industry, however, has historically suppressed the growth of aspens through broad application of herbicides or through mechanical clearing (cutting down saplings). Kurz says provinces must take a design approach and determine “ignition points” on the landscape—places where fires tend to start, due to people or lightning—and plant tree species accordingly. “It wouldn’t be a checkerboard,” says Kurz. “It would be a design where we could, say, have a strip of broadleaf species that would reduce the fire risk and become a natural firebreak.”

Alberta needs to readdress the spatial arrangement of our forests and encourage more open forest, with conifers interspersed with broadleaf species. Says Kurz: “It’s about making it more difficult for fires to spread from one fuel to the next.”

It’s far less costly to prevent forest fires than to extinguish them.

As climate change creates more wildfires, more smoke and more community evacuations, our communities need to be ready and our government needs to provide them support. “Every community should have an emergency management plan that focuses on prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery,” says Flannigan. It’s far less costly to invest in preventing wildfires from exploding out of control than it is to extinguish them or rebuild infrastructure afterwards, he says, with “every dollar spent saving us $5 to $15 down the road.”

One of the most critical aspects of preparedness, says Flannigan, is being able to efficiently and safely evacuate people from their homes and communities. People need to consider escape routes, including roads in and out of neighbourhoods or communities, and green spaces, including golf courses and football fields that can serve as fire breaks.

He references a situation that occurred in Kamloops, BC, in 2021 when a wildfire threatened a neighbourhood with hundreds of homes but only one access road. “It was a complete bottleneck—a disaster waiting to happen,” he says. “Fortunately, a rainstorm came along. They were exceedingly lucky. It could have been much worse.”

In July 2023 Ron Bellerose, chair of the East Prairie Metis Settlement, spoke out about the community’s decade-long struggles to obtain provincial support to build a second road out of the community. “There’s only one escape route in East Prairie, and that’s the scary part,” he told CBC News.

When wildfires enter a community, one of the first things to be impacted is power, followed by water pressure. In addition to escape routes, residents could benefit from an investment in wildfire evacuation centres, says Flannigan, where people can seek safe refuge while accessing essential services. High Level is proposing to build such a centre with the capacity to house upwards of 2,000 people. Mayor McAteer says the town signed a friendship agreement with the Dene Tha’ First Nation to move forward with the idea, which was generated following the Chuckegg Creek wildfire in 2019.

“We recognize that more and more people are coming here,” says McAteer. “It’s easier to have people in one facility, where they can get the same information and they’re looked after.” The centre would provide food, water and medical and interpretive services to evacuees, many from nearby Indigenous communities.

And while High Level serves a regional population of 30,000, it also provides services to communities in the Northwest Territories. “NWT evacuees came through town this past summer,” says McAteer, referring to the wildfires that evacuated multiple communities, including the city of Yellowknife. “Many of them travelled for 17 hours through wildfires. They were so traumatized.”

Some of the NWT evacuees stayed in High Level and slept in the town’s arena. Others camped out in local farmers’ fields and pastures. The town and the Dene Tha’ First Nation are lobbying for provincial and federal support to build the centre, says McAteer, although it’s been a struggle to rally the funds—upwards of $40-million. But McAteer points out that over the long term it’s cheaper to build an evacuation centre to house people locally than to pay for food and housing for evacuees in larger cities, including Peace River, Grande Prairie and Edmonton. “We can do it right here for less,” she says.

Edmonton, May 20; the city issued numerous air-quality warnings in 2023

In light of the disproportionate impact of wildfire on First Nations communities in the province, Amy Cardinal Christianson wants to see more Indigenous people involved in higher-level decision making. She’s advocating for a fire guardian program, which would employ Indigenous peoples on their traditional territories, year-round, monitoring and responding to wildfire in culturally relevant ways.

She says the legacy of wildfire suppression in Alberta has contributed to the crisis we’re seeing today. By attempting to extinguish all fire on the landscape, we’ve in turn created highly flammable stands of forest. Combined with the effects of climate change, fires explode into infernos.

“For me, the answer isn’t only investing in larger firefighting forces, because [suppression] perpetuates the problem we’re already seeing from the colonial regulation of fire,” Cardinal Christianson says. “A Fire Guardian movement is about building a better relationship with fire. Having fire on the ground when it’s safer, and doing mitigation work around communities and by communities that directly benefit from it.”

Cardinal Christianson wants people to understand that her fires are not the same as prescribed burns. The practice depends on close observation of the land and weather, as opposed to Western concepts such as the Fire Weather Index, used by agencies across Canada. “An elder once told me that he knew when it was time to burn based on the plumpness of spruce needles,” says Cardinal Christianson. “Now Western scientists have a term for that; they call it the ‘foliar moisture content.’ ”

She’s advocating for year-round investment to support Indigenous-led fire stewardship in Alberta. “When there’s an extreme fire event, the floodgates open in terms of funding. It’s unlimited how much money you can throw at a fire,” says Cardinal Christianson. “But there’s never the kind of funding during the off-season for communities to mitigate fire risk or to carry out fire practices.”

She points to the success of Indigenous Fire Guardian programs in other countries, including Australia and the US, which are seeing the positive results of supporting communities year-round to monitor and mitigate for wildfires on their traditional lands.

Cardinal Christianson and her colleagues are trying to educate people about the importance of Indigenous-led cultural burning on the landscape, a technology that was never lost, despite the fact that it was banned in the early 1900s in Alberta.

This past fall when the conditions were cool and damp, she and her family implemented a small burn on her property in northern Alberta. “My kids were playing in a leaf pile right next to where we were putting fire on the ground,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be a scary thing—fire can be good.”

Trina Moyles’s Lookout: Love, Solitude and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest (Penguin, 2021) is about
her time working at a fire tower in northern Alberta.

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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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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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