Zac Robinson’s research while affiliated with University of Alberta and other places

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.

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.

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.