Canmore couple co-author book on Rockies’ early travel routes
by
Rob Alexander
Today the Trans-Canada Highway is the busiest route through the Rocky Mountains, guiding millions of cars east and west every year in the span of hours.
But it wasn’t always that fast.
Two hundred years ago, European explorers and fur traders viewed the Rockies as an unknown. The mountains were a barrier to trade and travel, even though western Canada’s aboriginal people regularly journeyed through the mountain valleys hunting and trading.
As adventuresome souls like David Thompson, Sir George Simpson, Captain John Palliser and Mary Schäffer, explored the region, the passes became the highways of the day. But with progress and the coming of the railway, most of the passes were abandoned. The wilderness reclaimed these passes, leaving little behind, other than ghosts, to remind the modern traveller of an earlier time.
They are, according to Canmore authors Nicky Brink and Stephen R. Bown, the forgotten highways.
Forgotten Highways: Wilderness Journeys Down the Historic Trails of the Canadian Rockies is part history documenting the people who explored these passes and part adventure story chronicling a summer’s worth of backpacking following the footsteps of Thompson, Simpson, Palliser and Schäffer.
Taken together it is a well-crafted mix of history and story about a part of our immediate world that was once well travelled but is now seldom visited and essentially frozen in time.
“(Athabasca Pass) was way more busy in the mid-19th century than it is now. Hundreds of people used to go there, hauling tons of goods back and forth. Now you have to bushwhack to get to it. It is just incredible,” said Bown.
“It’s like up to a certain point of time we had a historical development, but it was arrested when the parks were created. So there’s a couple hundred years of a window of interesting stories of people, but it was stopped and it was sort of preserved.
“The history doesn’t continue beyond on it,” said Bown, also the author of A Most Damnable Invention and Scurvy.
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Forgotten Highways, published by Alberta-based Brindle & Glass, had its start with a simple question: “I wonder where it leads?” asked during a January 2001 ski trip in Howse Valley. Brinks, a research lawyer and writer, responded by saying, “Let’s check the guidebooks and plan a real trip.”
That response led the married couple to this project and eventually this book.
Rather than hit every pass, they decided to be more strategic and look at the passes that were most representative of the historic stages or themes in the Rockies.
“The themes historically in the Rocky Mountains are the fur trade, the railway and tourism. So we spread those hikes over the 200 years and we followed in the footsteps of each of those people,” Brinks said.
“With the railway came the visitors, and so Mary Schäffer, for two reasons, became a classic choice; one because she was one of the early explorers and one of the last to pioneer routes through the mountains. But we also wanted a woman in the book and not just a token woman, but someone who really did do something,” Brinks said.
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