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Off the beaten path? Ski mountaineering and the weight of tradition in the Canadian Rockies, 1909–1940
Abstract
This article presents a case study of the early development of ski mountaineering in the Rocky Mountains of Canada. It combines an emphasis on the early adaptation of skiing as part of a larger process of economic and cultural production during the early decades of the twentieth century, with parallel attention to the form in which ski mountaineering was both constrained and, later, suddenly generated throughout the 1930s by the Alpine Club of Canada. Their writings played a strategic role in the location of skiing within the wider discourses of Victorian mountaineering, and served to confirm and legitimate Anglo-Canadian hegemony. Examining the processes and struggles of this shift, this article is informed to a great extent by the accounts written in the Canadian Alpine Journal, the club's official organ, during a period loosely framed by the ending of the era now celebrated as the ‘Glory Days of Canadian Mountaineering’ and Canada's entry in the Second World War.
An interdisciplinary approach that incorporates tourism/recreation management and conflict resolution strategies has been used to analyze sources of conflict between cross-country skiers and fat bikers in Alberta (AB) and British Columbia (BC), Canada. This research defines applicable solutions for cross-country ski facility managers to reduce conflict while integrating the use of fat bikes into their trail systems. A community based participatory framework was used to develop interview questions for facility managers at three unique facilities in Western Canada. Feedback from the interviews was integrated into the creation of two trail user surveys, one for cross-country skiers and another for fat bikers. The surveys were sent out via social media to fat bike and cross-country ski clubs in Western Canada. In total there were 233 survey respondents. It was found that fat biking can be integrated successfully into cross-country ski facilities while maintaining and providing exceptional experiences for both users. This can be achieved by implementing certain managerial strategies that include effective communication and education of the trail users, designing and building user specific trails, and maximising the capacity of the facility and the available resources.
This essay explores the complex struggles over the reinvention of mountaineering practices and ethics during the postwar period in the Rocky Mountains of Canada between competing interest groups of disparate climbers. Specifically, we focus on the increased challenges to the hegemony of the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC) by a wave of young, working-class emigrants, who contentiously broadened the limits and operative goals/meanings of the sport in the range. In doing so, this paper examines the controversy that erupted within the climbing community over first ascent of Brussels Peak in 1948, followed by a discussion of the arrival of renowned climber Hans Gmoser (1932–2006), whose early activities in the Rockies' eastern front irrevocably challenged local tradition and the hegemony of the ACC.
Through the 1920s, hydro development proposals for irrigation and power dams impinged on Canada's national parks in the Rockies. The Alpine Club of Canada — a mountaineering organization formed in 1906 — rallied opposition to dams and insisted that national parks were an inviolable public domain. National Parks Commissioner J.B. Harkin and ACC Director A.O. Wheeler created an alliance that highlighted the club's role as a key interest group and recreational stakeholder with a shared vision of the mountain parks. Conflicts over dams in Rocky Mountains and Waterton Lakes national parks were politically and philosophically compared to the great battle of the “Hetch Hetchy” aqueduct in California.
This article critically contextualizes the drama and controversy surrounding the first ascent of Mount Robson within its wider historical and cultural context, in order to show how larger social and historical trends have, in numerous regards, shaped the ways in which climbers engaged and elaborated mountain sport. Despite its British Victorian heritage, early mountaineering in the Canadian ranges was not merely an offshoot of older traditions, but, rather, a complex mixture of individual motivations and cultural contexts that were specific to the construction of the western Canadian frontier.