BW: So when we were switching from having a local park dispatch, who knew everybody and everybody involved, and where all the places are, to having it go to 911, which of course 911 dispatchers had no idea about the park or who was responsible for what and where, so there was quite a few times when we got a call from either EMS or the fire department saying “Hey do you guys know anything about this incident, because it’s kind of your bailiwick?” Anyways, this is how that worked. I got a call from Jay Anderson. I can’t recall who was all there, but he was the EMS guy on site. It might have been Smudger who was the fire department, but anyways he says “You should really be here. There’s a person laying on the edge of Bow Falls and they’ve got this full-on rescue going on here. They’re about to send a policeman down on a rope from a fire truck from the edge of the cliff.” So, I said “Ya, I’ll definitely come.” So, I get there and sure enough they’ve got lots of vehicles and flashing lights and a bunch of ropes and they’re going to go off the cliff and down to where this woman is lying, kind of sprawled out but not really, but on a rock right above Bow Falls.
So, I said “Has anybody gone down to see if she’s okay?” and it’s like “No because we can’t get down the cliff to her.” And I said, “There’s a trail right there, you can walk there.” So, it’s “No, we didn’t know that”. So, I bring Jay along with me, because Jay has been on a few calls with me over the years, and we walked down the trail. You just go a little bit upstream to where the trail starts and so we walk a little closer and there’s no blood or anything. This girl is kind of laying out on this rock, so I go out to her and I shake her. She wakes up and says, “What’s going on”. I said, “People are concerned about you, that you have fallen and hurt yourself”. She says “No, no, I was just having a nap.” She was a ballet dancer from the Banff Centre, and she’d walked down there to a nice flat rock in the sun, and she was napping but because she was very limber her limbs were not straight out like you might expect.
I said, “You probably should come up now because a lot of people are about to make fools of themselves.”
There were a few times like that when it was like there’s fire and police and a bunch of people milling about. Once they phoned to ask “Where’s the trail that goes to Tunnel Mountain. Apparently, somebody is hurt there.” I thought maybe someone had fallen down on the trail, but the guy was actually halfway up the Shoe climbing route, in the middle of the cliff and had a severe head injury from a lead fall. We slung him directly from there to the Banff hospital. I think the only time I actually landed with a patient at Emergency on the long line.
But over time dispatch got better, and they moved to Black Diamond …. 911 …. and we went and visited them in Black Diamond and showed them maps of the park and talked to their staff. Once people understand, they know who to call. At any rate where are we now?
SH: Let’s talk about what did you like best about being a Warden.
BW: I really liked the fact in the early days that we did it all basically, right? So, when you were in your district you were responsible for rescue, you were responsible for doing wildlife monitoring, you were responsible for looking after the cabins, and the trails and your horses and basically you were expected to do all that stuff. Nobody thought anything of heading off with a chainsaw with a packhorse and cutting trail by yourself. Nowadays it wouldn’t fly. So, no matter what you were interested in you could pursue that, but you also got a pretty well-rounded background. Every other aspect of what wardens looked after. The fact was you were a big team, and everybody was expected to pull their weight. If you had a fire or you had a big search or a rescue, or a wildlife incident, everybody got involved in everything, so your level of training was maybe not at the expertise level, but everybody was expected to be competent in a bunch of stuff. So, you knew everybody and it was a big club, I guess you’d call it. That was probably our demise. We were looked at as being too successful, too much with ourselves but …… So that was certainly the best.
SH: What did you like the least?
BW: During the days when that all changed, was …. where the colors of the bureaucracy … and what was expected to be done at the field level obviously showed a disconnect there. I didn’t necessarily agree with the way things were going, whether we needed side arms or not, but it was obvious that the future was going to be people that did specialized things and were going to have to be more trained. So the Warden Service that wanted to be specialized in law enforcement were going to have to have more specific training. It was the way of the world. At any rate the result was to ostracise the people that wanted that, there were some lawsuits that only in recent history were sorted out, and still hang over us from those days. It was sad, basically it was us versus them kind of thing.
I was there in the office the day they said, “Okay we are no longer in the law enforcement business”. I have a photograph where we were told to go out and cover the red and blue lights on our trucks with black plastic garbage bags. So, Julie Timmins and somebody else around there were duct taping black plastic garbage bags on top of the Warden trucks and we had to tear the flashes off our shirts because we were no longer to be wardens anymore. That was probably one of the darkest times.
In the end it was probably inevitable for things to become more siloed and more specialized, but it was the end of the era and I think probably would be the equivalent of what the early wardens talked about when they ended the district system.
SH: What are some memorable events from your Warden career, and I know you have so many? I’ll get you another beer and you can tell stories for hours.
BW: I was really lucky to have spent my career with a lot of really talented individuals. We had fun together; we had all kinds of fun trips. To be able to have spent time with guys like Willi Pfisterer and Tim Auger and on the Alberta Parks side, Kiwi Gallagher. Those guys were legends in the world of public safety and the fact that they were keen to see me develop my career and help me along was pretty special.
Marc Ledwidge and I started at the same time. We went through our guides courses together, so we had a very parallel career. We were good friends in the public safety world and worked together right until our retirement. Steve Blake was a great guy to have come on the team in Jasper. He and Garth Lemke worked with our small team in Jasper and there was a great group at Sunwapta.
SH: So, give me a memorable event. Best day in the Warden Service or one of your top ten days.
BW: We had a lot of good field days. I guess some of our Warden Service climbing trips where you’ve got some people who had not necessarily done lots of mountaineering or climbing before … I think we had, Rupert Wedgwood and I, I think we got 10 people on the top of Mt Forbes on one trip. On another trip, I can’t remember who was all on that trip, but I’m pretty sure it was Garth Lemke and a few others, but we ended up getting about a dozen people on the summit of Mount Columbia on a trip to commemorate the International Year of the Mountains organized by Gord Irwin and Bob Sanford.
I remember a trip with Willi to celebrate the Park Centennial in Jasper. Evan Manners and I drove up there, I think he had an old Camaro or something. Anyways we had a bottle of rum in the back and the rum froze. It was colder than hell. We were all sitting around in the Astoria, having coffee in the restaurant in the morning before leaving and it’s freezing cold outside. It was just before New Years and the plan was to climb Edith Cavell. So, Willi Pfisterer had got a helicopter and dropped some firewood and some fireworks on the summit of Edith Cavell and the idea was we were all going to climb up there and spend New Years Eve on the summit of Edith Cavell and set these fireworks off so that everybody could see them to celebrate the Centennial. Unfortunately, it had turned bitterly cold. I can’t remember 40, or 45 below at the East Gate of Jasper, like bitter cold. So, we’re sitting there looking around at Willi and I said “So is anybody going to say this isn’t a good idea?” And Willi said “No”, so off we went. Bob Barker and some others had skidoos and they towed us up the road to the youth hostel, a little bit past the youth hostel to the Verdant junction and we could ski in. At any rate we got to the youth hostel and there were some people that had been trying the east ridge in winter. They got stuck overnight and this guy froze his feet and they were just getting ready to come down to town and get somebody to rescue them. So, they are like “Oh good you’re here to rescue us.” Well, this poor guy had frozen is feet on the ridge and they thawed them out in a little snow cave, and then he froze them again on the way down because it was really cold. So, his feet weren’t in very good shape.
So, Willi said “These guys will give you a ride out as soon as they drop us down at the junction.”
They said “You’re not going to rescue us now?” Willi said “Anything you have done up until now has fucked them up more than waiting an hour or two is going to do.” which was true. So, there was Gerry Israelson, and Pat Sheehan and Evan and Willi and Suzie Pfisterer and Jeff Weir I think and Frank Staples.
So, we get to the summit and it’s bitterly cold, and there’s giant outflow winds blowing, so we are in the freezing cold with winds blowing from the north, so trying to build shelters up there … it wasn’t very good snow. I had been recently teaching people how to build igloos so I said “I’ll build an igloo” so Pat Sheehan, Evan and I were in an igloo, but you couldn’t really chink it because it was all facets. But the bottom held together, and it was actually not too a bad shelter. Gerry built a good snow fort with square walls, with a tarp on the top, and Willi built a trench with an A frame over it.
So, we are ready to get into warm sleeping bags but in the meantime, Gerry’s brought this bottle of champagne out and said “We’re going to drink this champagne.” So, he takes it out of his coat, and he’d managed to hide it in his coat all the way up there without it getting frozen but as soon as he took it out it froze solid in the bottle, as soon as he took the top off, the pressure off. Basically, we all had a few little nibbles of this champagne icicle that was pushing out of the bottle. Then we had these fireworks, and we were going to set them off so Willi calls to town and everybody is in the Community Centre for New Year’s. So, Willi says “Okay we’re going to set these fireworks off now.” But it was so cold that nobody wanted to go stand outside and see if they could see any fireworks on Edith Cavell anyways, so we set one off and it goes a little bit out and a little bit down. Somebody said, “It’s coming back!”, in the wind blowing straight up the face. So, we’re all standing there by this little fire we had built, but it was lovely that we had any kind of heat. But the fireworks come straight back up the face and BOOM, it blows up, so the fireworks are zooming by our heads and people are getting their jackets burned and stuff. Everybody went inside their shelters. The fireworks didn’t really work out. “Let’s go to bed!”
SH: Oh man, that’s good.
BW: So off we went trying to sleep and Gerry had put a tarp over his fort, but the winds were so strong that in the middle of the night his tarp blew away. So, they were like all freezing cold because the wind was blowing in there so we got up and got dressed. Willi had an open end on his trench and all this dry snow was eddying around on all their feet and were filled with snow but nobody froze. But just to get down the ridge … I remember I was trying to walk and I thought, “I can’t walk.” It was hard ice and I was crawling and I looked back and said “I guess I’m not the only one” because we were all literally crawling with our ice axes down the ridge because the wind could have blown you off. Anyways, we all got down there and got back to town. It was a memorable New Years Eve.
SH: I remember you were also the guy for jokes on schools and trips.
BW: I’m not allowed to tell jokes on schools anymore … it’s not politically correct and you are bound to offend somebody, but I had a fair repertoire from my heli-ski days.
SH: Can you tell me about any rescue/wildlife stories that stick out in your memory?
BW: I have told you a few rescue stories already. Unfortunately, over the years we had to respond to some pretty nasty stuff. That was in the days when we all believed that you could just handle it and carry on, but I think now the whole mental health thing is better in that field. So I think now there’d be a little bit more support for people. I remember Tim saying, “Well you just have a vessel, and you can only put so much bad stuff in it and eventually it overflows”. The upside of that part of the work was when you did save somebody or even being able to work with the families and trying to help them work through what the circumstances were. I never minded going to an accident site with the families or the survivors to talk about how things had happened so they could put a little more closure on it. And all that took was really being empathetic to their circumstances and being willing to speak honestly and openly about the circumstances without being judgmental about maybe some of the mistakes that had been made. Tim was awesome at that.
SH: Ya Tim was really good.
BW: I think if you could help other people, it was quite helpful for the stress of having to deal with it yourself.
SH: Those critical incident stress sessions kind of started when you and I were both there.
BW: There are more pieces to it than one post incident session. Obviously when we lost guys like Pat (Sheehan) and Mike (Wynn) and Simon Parboosing …. those cut close to home, those things where you realize a lot of what we do, you don’t think it’s that risky day to day but the consequences of being wrong are pretty serious.
But not every response resulted in a fatality…. we had some people that lived that maybe should not have survived. I remember one… I recall a guy comes into the Warden Office one morning, and he said “The last time I saw my partner was yesterday.” He’d managed to get down by himself off the East Ridge of Mount Temple. He and his partner had kind of gotten a little bit off route into the Black Towers which is not that unusual, but they had to rappel off one of the Black Towers. And then they got off the ropes, and his buddy had just coiled the ropes around his neck and was walking but tripped. I don’t know if he tripped on a coiled rope or whatever, but the reporting person said “The last time I saw my partner, he was cartwheeling at high speed out of sight, over the cliff heading towards the valley”. So okay. Well, this is not good. So, it was Marc Ledwidge and I that went out.
SH: So, this has happened the day before?
BW: Yes, it took him all night to get down, and he came in the morning because this is prior to cell phones, or he didn’t have a cell phone. But anyway, we go up fully expecting that we are going to have a fatality to pick up at the bottom of Temple. Quite a few people end up at the bottom of Temple. But we start at the bottom, below the last seen point, and say “We’ll start here”. So, nothing, nothing, nothing so we go up. So, we know where they were on this tower and then we’ll start working down, and then right in the very last spot where you’d have tumbled right into the abyss, there’s this guy laying on a little rock ledge right above a big cliff. So, we go “Well, he’s right there.” So, we get a little closer, maybe circle around and he lifts his head and waves his hand. So, “Oh, he’s alive! Great!”
So, Marc and I both slung in there together and I can’t remember who the pilot was, maybe Paul Maloney or Todd Cooper, but it’s early morning and the sun has already been shining on the face above and this guy has taken a big tumble. He’s smacked his face and he’s got a broken leg, and he is not in a good way. So, Marc asks “We are not going to package him right here?” We asked, “Can you move at all?” and he said, “Ya a little bit”. So, I said, “No you are right, just throw him in the bag and we’ll get him off here because we aren’t hanging around.” There are rocks whizzing by.
Normally, when we delivered a patient to the EMTs, usually paramedics, Banff Ambulance, they were well packaged. We straightened them out, splinted their broken stuff, patched up the leaks and that sort of stuff. That’s what we could do. I remember bringing him, flew him right onto the gurney of the ambulance, and the guys open the bag and look and him, and are expecting the normally packaged patient. The poor guy had lost some teeth, and his face was not in good shape. He had a fully broken leg that wasn’t splinted and was all crumpled. No C-Collar or backboard. So, Doug McKown says “So a little dangerous where you got him from, eh?”
The guy walked into the Warden Office literally two weeks later, with a cast on his leg, on crutches. He had lost some teeth, but he was okay. But basically, what happened, he had his ice ax tied to his harness with some kind of a sling, and when he tripped, he started tumbling. The ropes were just loosely coiled around him, they weren’t tied to him. As he started tumbling, the rope started falling off him and the ice ax wrapped around one strand of rope. Then basically, there was a pile of rope that was all dragging around behind him, while he was headed for a certain death. And just before he went over the edge, one nubbin of rope had caught over a tiny little piece of rock, and his ice ax, because it was wrapped around the rope, slowed him down enough that he didn’t go off the edge. Then he said “Ya I was lying there all night and I’d kind of wake up a little bit and I’d jump because I felt I was sliding, but every time I pulled on the rope, it just kept pulling so I didn’t want to touch it anymore”. So, there’s some people where you just go …. Wow.
SH: Wow, that’s crazy. The one I remember where you saved someone’s life, and on one interview somebody else talks about this, but remember the guy who got lost near the Bonnet Glacier with the dogs. The dogs showed up at Windy Cabin. But you told people where to look …. Syme talks about that. Because you knew the area as a backcountry warden and said, “Try searching this area” and they found him. Do you remember that one?
BW: Well, I do. It was a big search and went on for several days. We had searched quite a bit and had very good information. We had pictures of him on the trail and his dogs, and we had his boot prints in places, but the one place we hadn’t been able to get to was the Bonnet Glacier because it had been cloudy. I remember we went out that next morning. I think Gord Irwin who was the search leader was with me and he said, “Well let’s look over here on the way” and I said “No, it’s clear skies, we should probably go straight to the Bonnet while we can. We’ve looked everywhere else so he’s gotta be up there.” And he was, but he really didn’t want to be rescued. He’d given up on life. I don’t think he’d gone out there to end his life, but he’d been out there by himself long enough where he’d already made his peace where that was going to be his final place. Often people have their own demons, but the poor guy had lost all but one of his dogs and all he had left was a five-pound bag of prunes. That’s all he had been eating for three days but he’d just finally given up and laid in his sleeping bag after eating three pounds of prunes. I was holding my nose in the backseat with him on the way home. (Tape 11:17)
SH: How did the Warden Service change over the years?
BW: Well, the biggest change was when we went from being all wardens to being resource conservationists and specialists in other fields and that really gutted the entire Warden Service. It was never the same since and it was sad to see that because it had a lot of effects on the places that I really loved, like the backcountry, but there were positive things too, I think.
One of the things that happened with us in Public Safety was we hired a bunch of guides from outside, so you had a bunch of talented individuals like Aaron Beardmore, Steve Holeczi and Brian Webster that made the team better. But we were no longer doing training with everybody like we used to. We no longer had that team mentality where everybody got together, and we were part of a crew trying to pull on the same wagon. So that was really unfortunate.
But I was lucky in Banff Park because having a bunch of new guides probably improved our rescue capability, the technical capabilities of the rescue team because we had to get more specialized team members because we couldn’t go down the hall and call on some other guys and gals that were handy. So, in some cases it made it better, but if I think about the backcountry I think about that whole idea of being a backcountry warden was that you were responsible for everything and you took that responsibility seriously. You would never let your trails or cabins, or your infrastructure get in bad shape …. You would fix them. If it could be fixed with a handsaw and chainsaw and a hammer, we were pretty good at it.
I was lucky on the last year I worked. I managed to do bunch of trips out in the park, and I was on the LLYK side and then I was on the Banff side. The last time I’d been through Clearwater Lakes previously, nobody had cleared the trail from Devon Pass for several years, and it was giant deadfall, and big trees. The cabins were really in terrible shape. A flood had come through the back of Clearwater cabin, and nobody was looking after the infrastructure. It was falling apart. Now luckily in Banff Park Don Gorrie, particularly said, “No that’s our responsibility,” and he even got a horse trail crew going again.
One of the last trips I did, I went out with the Banff Superintendent, so that was nice …. with Dave McDonough. So we started out in Isabella on the LLYK side so we came up the Siffleur River and nobody had been there. We had to go out and cut the trail ahead of time. I’d also been there earlier in the year on another trip and cut some trail. So, I’m talking to Dave, and said “How could it be that there’s just nobody looking after this stuff?” And he said, “Well there’s not that many visitors out here”. There were spruce trees 15 years old growing up in the middle of the trail, and you’re still taking money from these folks. About fifteen or twenty bucks a night to come out here for the privilege of not even being able to walk the trail. I said, “I get it that there might not be any bridges in the wilderness, but Parks should spend some money on the trail.” Which Dave understood but he was only responsible for the Banff side. Then we got to the Banff side and the trail was good because Don Gorrie was taking responsibility and Dave and Banff understood the importance of it. I understand, and I haven’t been there, but Jasper is even worse off now. In fact, I think they gave a bunch of cabins to the Alpine Club because they just said we can’t afford to look after them anymore.
SH: I remember trying to find Adolphus cabin from Robson and my son and I probably spent four hours …. No horse prints, no nothing, and I kind of knew where it was.
BW: When were you there?
SH: Just before the big fires.
