SH: Year-round or seasonal?
BW: No, I was seasonal. I was on one winter when we were writing the Resource Description and Analysis (RD and A). I stuck around in Waterton one winter and did that. It was a pretty long winter. I think there were 31 people in town, 15 couples and me. But I got a schedule where I worked ten and four so I could go skiing or do a ski trip or do something on my time off. I got into the old history there. Writing the RD and A land use portion. There were a whole bunch of files that had been stored in the old Superintendent’s house, and they had survived two floods and they went all the way back to the implementation of Waterton Park. I found some correspondence that dated back to J.B. Harkin era, the first new Superintendent of Waterton that had taken over. Kootenai Brown was still on the payroll and there was a letter to Parks branch in Ottawa about him saying “This guy is addicted to intoxicants and he’s a discredit to the Parks. The other day he rode his horse right into the office and tried to berate me. We have to do something about him.” I wish I’d made a copy of that letter.
There was some interesting old history there. There was an oil well prior to oil wells in Turner Valley and there was oil seeping out of the ground. So, there was early oil exploration in Alberta and the remains of the Old “Oil City”. Lots of cattle ranching history, lots of native history. My friend Earl Wilson and I rode that old south Kootenay Pass trail that Blakiston had been on, and then circled back up onto the Divide. The trail we were on was worn into this side hill, 30 or 40 centimeters deep and if you looked downhill you could see several previous trails that had forest growing out of them that were worn in even deeper and had been there prior to the turn of the century. There were some old outfitting trails from Burt Riggall and Andy Russell days; trails that went all through the Castle and along the Divide. It was actually a pretty nice place to get to ride horses.
SH: Yes, it’s a really nice park, especially right now in spring.
BW: Yes, it’s quiet and you got to be involved in everything. You were involved in bear studies, bear attacks, climbing and water rescue and water related stuff with the lake. Lots of wildlife, cougars. I shot a cougar while I was there. I was just a new warden and a young cougar had attacked a kid on the Bertha Lake Trail. Several days later I was working as the duty warden and we’d tried to catch this cougar previously with no luck. I got this call that a cougar had jumped through the window of a picnic shelter at Crandell Campground and landed right on a table where a bunch of kids were playing a board game. He scattered the board pieces everywhere, and the kids went running, but the cougar never managed to get one of them. He was just a young cougar. After the first attack, we had found it and had tried to free roam it, with a dart, I remember that. I can’t remember who hit it, but they shot it but the cougar got away. At any rate you can imagine that the picnic shelter event created some excitement, and the senior wardens all came up. Keith Brady said, “You just go a little ways up the creek there, you just watch the creek.” He kind of wanted me to get out of the senior wardens’ hair was what I got from that, but anyways I did that. So, I was sitting there and about half an hour later, I was sitting very quietly with my rifle and I could see this cat coming up the creek. I looked and I thought I’m sure that’s it, it was a young cat, not very big. Anyway, I had a good shot at it. After the shot there was a bunch of excitement. What’s going on? Who shot? Luckily it was a good shot and I managed to kill it and we found the wound from the dart when we necropsied it, so it was the right one.
Dave McDonough at Pipestone Pass. Photo by J. Bradford White
SH: Wow. Did you learn to shoot growing up?
BW: My dad had taught me a little bit with a .22, and a handgun that he had, but I wasn’t a hunter. We’d done some shooting in the park, every year we’d qualify with our firearms.
There is one story in Waterton. We had a bear attack at Crypt Lake while I was there. It was just a really bad thing. Actually, it was Kevin Van Tighem’s sister. She and her …. I’m not sure if they were married, but her partner was a doctor I believe, and she was a nurse. They were just hiking down from Crypt Lake. That trail has hundreds of people hiking on it all the time. But it was early fall, and there’d been a little bit of snow and it was a bit chilly, and it was just a sad thing where the bear attacked him first without warning and she ran away and ran away up the trail and climbed a tree. She was a long way up, 17 feet, I can actually tell you that because I measured it later. Then the sow hauled her out of the tree and mauled her. Both of them were mauled quite badly and so we went up after the rescue and then set some snares for this bear. The next morning, a bunch of us wardens went up there including Dave Hamer, who was Steve Herrero’s partner. He was researching bear attacks for Steve’s book. It was a really ugly day; the snowflakes were falling and everybody’s got these …. they cut the fingers out of their rubber gloves and stuck them on the end of their rifles, so the snowflakes aren’t falling in the barrel of the rifles. So, we look at the two mauling sites, and Dave and I were working on the upper site, where the girl had climbed the tree. It was a couple of hundred meters away around a corner, and we were going to measure how far she’d been up the tree and check the site. So, everybody else decided they’d go back to the first site. All of a sudden there was a gunshot BOOM, and a few seconds later there were multiple gun shots, boom, boom, boom and Dave and I went running down there to see what was up and we went running around the corner and the bear had charged the group. Basically, Keith Brady was a very good shot, and luckily, he had his rifle at his hip. He basically raised his gun (a .338 magnum) and got the safety off, and got one shot off at the charging sow who fell five meters from the edge of them. All the other gun shots that came much later, when people realized what was going on and got their own guns raised up and shot too, but I’m pretty sure Keith saved their lives. It turned out she was an old sow, and she had a couple of cubs. There was a kill there that she was protecting. The whole thing was sad. The doctor though, he was fixed up and he came back to talk to us a year or so later. I was still there. I could not credit that it was the same guy. I couldn’t believe it. He had been bitten on the face and basically half his jaw was gone. One side of his face was pretty much gone, and his eye was just loose. But they put a rib, a spare rib, was grafted in to replace the jaw, and they did a whole bunch of delicate reconstruction surgery. If you didn’t know, you’d think he’d had a little bit of a stroke or something but his face was pretty much normal looking. It was amazing, the great job they’d done fixing him up. (Tape 28:43)
I put in for a transfer to Banff/Lake Louise after a couple of years in Waterton just because I wanted to be a little more in the mountains, maybe get involved more in the avalanche and rescue programs. John Steele was in Lake Louise then and he said, “This is probably the only time in your career that people will fight over you, but Max wants you to stay in Waterton.” So, I ended up staying another six months before I went up to Lake Louise.
SH: So, you went to Lake Louise and started at the ski hill?
Lisa Paulson at Badger Pass on backcountry patrol. Photo by J. Bradford White.
BW: No, Dale Loewen was the backcountry boss and I started working for him as a backcountry warden. So, I started backcountry the first spring and it was like, “Can you ride?” “Well, yes, I have some experience riding”. I had learned a little bit about packing. I had done a couple of pack trips with my Dad as a kid, and Frank Coggins had taught me a little bit more about packing while I was there in Waterton. He had me pack a couple of compressors, paint jugs and a bunch of other stuff in to one of the backcountry shelters the Park wanted to paint. Those aren’t like packing normal boxes, and he helped me out with how to pack the unusual stuff. He showed me a few tricks; it was good to learn from Frank. At any rate I knew just a little bit about packing, and I knew how to ride so Dale said “Well that’s good, because I want to give you this horse Elaine but nobody has ridden her for two years since she bucked off Will Devlin. We never did find the saddle and everything, but we found her with a wrecked leg, and she’s been on sick leave for two years.”
So, “Oh great,” but that’s kind of the way it was in those days. You were all by yourself and I think Dale watched me pack up once in the corral and said, “Well you better get out on the trail.”
I liked that mare in some respects. She could walk very fast, but she bucked every time you got on her, just a little bit.
SH: Did she buck you off?
BW: No, she wasn’t too bad. But I recall leaving the corral there one morning and I had a nice new down vest with snaps on the front. I just stepped on her after I closed the gate, out the back of the Lake Louise barns. There’s a little bit of a bog there, and that was fine. You kind of expected that of her. You definitely learned how to get on ready with that horse, and after she got the hump out of her back, she would just walk and walk like five miles an hour. She was a great horse to travel the country because she could go really fast, but hard on pack horses. But anyways, that morning she bucked a little and that nice new vest with the snaps, goes over the saddle horn on the first buck and then we straightened out. It ripped out both sides of the snaps and all this down flew out right in front of her eyes. Then the buck was on and every time she jumped another big puff of white down would go flying out above her head. We went across that little boggy area, and by the time I got to the other side I was still on, but I had no down left in my vest.
SH: Good morning. Oh man.
Nikki LePage at Elkhorn Pass. Photo by J. Bradford White
BW: Anyway, I was in the backcountry there in Cyclone and Scotch Camp/Indianhead just for a few years. I had some good partners out there, Dave Norcross and Glen Peers and Al McDonald and Charlie Pacas. We used to, every year when hunting season and boundary patrols started, we’d work out of the east so in those days you would drive to Scotch Camp and we pastured the horses there. There would be a shift of two people who would come back to Scotch at the end of their shift and there would be two people who would drive in with supplies. You’d have a good party at Scotch Camp on the overnight at Scotch. There was lots of elk there in those days. Later when the Scotch Camp Road closed, we kept the horses at Indianhead and we flew back and forth but there were no more shift change parties.
There were lots of big days, often by yourself. Some shifts I would go and maybe see somebody when you are leaving on your first day and maybe not see anybody again for maybe ten days when until the day you were coming back. Lots of game. The game is gone now. In those days there was lots, probably too much because there were no wolves, but maybe 1800 elk in the Red Deer and you’d go up into Indianhead Creek, and I remember counting 110 rams in Indianhead Creek in one day, plus seeing bear and elk. It was kind of like the Serengeti of Banff out there and now, well the last time I was out there, I didn’t see one sheep, not one on Indianhead Creek, and there were a few little bands of elk up in the Red Deer. It’s very different in total numbers of game that’s for sure.
SH: That’s really odd, especially that many rams to disappear.
BW: Yes, wolves are the big difference obviously and maybe a little bit of habitat change.
SH: So, you were backcountry for summer and then were you in Visitor Safety in winter.
BW: No, I started ski guiding full time in 1984 so I had a pretty good gig. I would ski guide in the winter and then I was seasonal backcountry in the summer, but I was also trying to get through my full Mountain Guide exams in those days. I had passed my ski guide’s exam and I needed my summer guide’s exam, so it was a little bit tricky being in the backcountry and getting enough climbing in.
The last summer before my last exam I worked in Lake Louise in Public Safety with Clair Israelson. That was a good summer for that. There were lots of warden training schools over the years too with Willi Pfisterer and Peter Fuhrmann and Tim Auger and Clair Israelson and others. It was a great time to work with those folks who really had a lot of skills and were keen to pass on their knowledge to you and also keen to just let you go and do it. It was pretty good.
SH: And then there was the J Park.
BW: Yes, basically I had left the Warden Service altogether. About that time there was not many full-time jobs and I thought I had made an arrangement to finally my last guide’s course paid for by Parks. Bob Haney was behind me for that. In the end it wasn’t to be, so just about that time CMH (Canadian Mountain Holidays) heli skiing was really expanding so there was lots of work there and CMH offered me a full-time job in a management position and said, “But first thing we’ll just send you off to Europe to learn to speak German for a couple of months if that’s okay.” So, it really wasn’t that much of an option. I decided to go with CMH. I really enjoyed working with them as a company. Hans was a great mentor and a great boss. He gave me a job in management, and he was basically one of those guys who wanted to make sure you got it done and if you needed a hand, he would be one of the first ones there to help you.
SH: What year would that have been Brad?
BW: I think ’89. It was three years of backcountry and one year of visitor safety in Lake Louise after I came from Waterton. I remember ’89 because it was the year Donna and I were married. We went to Greece for our honeymoon, and I stayed in Europe to go to German language school.
SH: So, you worked for CMH until?
BW: The spring of 1993 I’m thinking. It was the winter that Pat Sheehan had been killed ice climbing in Jasper. So, Gerry (Israelson) was up there in charge of the Visitor Safety program and also Willi (Pfisterer). Willi was still the Alpine Specialist based out of Jasper, but he was just retiring when I got there. At any rate they wanted to hire a full guide and there weren’t any coming up through the ranks. Pat had been going through his guide courses when he was killed, so it turned out that I was the very first person hired in Public Safety on an external competition. I had worked for the Warden Service for a few years, and they wanted to know if I would apply for that job, a full-time position, specialist under Gerry. So, I applied, and I got that job and ruffled a few feathers I think, being an outside competition but that turned out to be the way of the future. Instead of trying to train guys from within, it was easier to go out and hire a guide and then train them to do some of the other park tasks.
SH: Which you were already exceptional at. You were an amazing horse person, Mr. All Round, one of those super skilled people in multiple things as I recall.
BW: It was a lot of smoke and mirrors.
SH: I want to tell a quick story and it was when we were bringing computers into the avalanche world, and I was working for Clair, and it was my job to hire the contractors. You were my champion once you embraced that, and I just remember that because I was thankful. Do you remember that?
BW: Yes, the software guy, he was a typical contractor. Every time it didn’t work it was a huge cost to have him come out and come fix it and bill a bunch of more hours.
SH: Yes, but I liked the way you knew this was going to be a good thing for us.
