Kevin Van Tighem

Park Warden Service Alumni Society of Alberta
Oral History Project Phase 14 – 2024-2025

In Person Interview with Kevin Van Tighem
December 9th, 2024.
Interviewed by Laura Hunt 

Laura: I’m here with Kevin Van Tighem and it’s Saturday December the 9th 2024.
What was the place and year of your birth?

Kevin: Dec. 12, 1952. It was a chinook that day. I checked that in the Calgary Herald archives. I was born in Calgary at the Holy Cross Hospital.

Laura: Well, it’s almost your birthday. Happy Birthday! And did you grow up in Calgary?

Kevin: Yes, I did

Laura: What neighbourhood?

Kevin: Scarboro, in the southwest. Our street was the dividing line between the rich neighbourhood up the hill from us and the working-class neighbourhoods closer to downtown. There were ten kids in our family, so there were no luxuries. Not even a tv.

Laura: And is there anything in your growing up that led you to want to join Parks Canada?

Kevin: I never intended to join Parks Canada, actually, because we spent our time in the forest reserve areas. I grew up in a hunting and fishing family. In that generation those were things the males in the family did. So, dad would take us out on camping and fishing trips in the summer or hunting pheasants in the fall. That got me interested in nature. I became a birdwatcher at a very early age. Unfortunately, dads have to go to work, but we kids still had an urge to get out there so that’s what got me into birding. Eventually, that led to a degree in Botany at the University Of Calgary.

Laura: That’s my alma mater

Kevin: How I got to Parks Canada was, I was sitting in the Students Union Building one day and there were two guys sitting in the next booth and one (Jim Mulchinock) was talking about his summer job in Kootenay. The more I listened, the more I thought oh, this would be kinda neat. I had never thought about working in a national park. As a kid, we rarely went to national parks because there were too many rules and tourists! Anyway, I picked up from their conversation that they were going to be park naturalists. I looked up at the job board, and sure enough, there was an ad for a Park Naturalist for Parks Canada, so I applied and got a job offer after an interview in an office building downtown. So, I began my career with Parks in Kootenay National Park in the summers of 1975, 76, and ‘77.

The wardens in those days were Byron Irons, and a young warden named Terry Gibbons who died of lung cancer when I was there. It was quite sad; he was only in his late twenties or early thirties. Brian Sheehan was there, and Ron Davies. Those are the ones I remember at the time. Those were really good summers and a good bunch to work with. It was like a big family – the wardens and park naturalists. There was a bit of conflict between wardens and interpreters in Banff and Jasper where it seemed like there was a little more of an elitist thing going on but Kootenay was much more-low key.

Kevin’s first bosses:  Ian Jack and Larry Halverson
Kootenay National Park circa 1977.
Photo credit: Larry Halvorson

Laura: What different parks did you work in? How did they compare? Do you have a favorite?

Kevin: I worked in Kootenay those three summers.

I graduated in 1977 and got some contract work with Parks Canada that fall in Banff writing interpretive texts for Johnson’s Canyon and Bow Summit. (They were upgrading interpretive signs at the time.) I did that work with David Zieroth. My contract supervisor was Liz Hollroyd, assistant park naturalist in Banff. She invited me home one day for dinner with her husband, Geoff Hollroyd. Geoff and I got talking over dinner and he told me he was going to be hiring for a job in Jasper. They were working on a biophysical inventory in the mountain parks. Geoff was in charge of it and since he was based in Banff and had a crew to manage there, he needed a right-hand man to take care of Jasper. I ended up applying for that job and I got it.

That was really when I first got most connected to the warden service because working on that project, we liaised with wardens all the time and we used the backcountry cabins, we shared the helicopter hours, so we ended up doing a lot of work together in Jasper. So, Jasper was the spring of 1978 to 1981. Looking back, it feels like half my life, yet it was only 3-4 years. Incredibly good years.

From there I moved on to work on other wildlife inventories (part of the biophysical inventory), this time in Glacier and Mt. Revelstoke National Parks. When those projects finished in about 1983 the powers-that-be were tired of Geoff and I not being in the office where all the other CWS (Canadian Wildlife Service) staff were based, so they dragged us to Edmonton. I was married to Gail by then, so we bought our first house in Edmonton and I worked for the CWS out of their Edmonton office starting with a bird inventory project in Elk Island, liaising with Chuck Blyth (who I already knew from university) and Rob Kaye. Wes Olson was there too but we didn’t connect much as he was working on bison and so forth. This took me to 1984.

‘The Crew’, the historic Canadian Wildlife Banff/Jasper Biophysical Inventory crew, pictured here in 1978 at our camp (assorted trailers), at the Jasper National Park Warden Compound (the old fish hatchery). Folks are: Standing shoulder to shoulder at back: Jim (volunteer from England) and Katrina Cederlund (volunteer from Sweden). Leaning on the trailer, L to R, Keith McDougall, Geoff Holroyd. Seated Back row: Kevin Van Tighem.  Seated Front row, L to R: Howard Coneybeare, Doug Haddow, Linda Cole, Evelyn Annand, Margaret Skeel, Mary Gartshore, Mike Dyer.
Photo credit: Keith McDougall.