Probably the thing I felt was most significant of all the things I worked on was I worked with a group of people in Waterton, from the Waterton community itself and representatives from the park, and tourism folks, trying to come up with or place limits on growth or development in Waterton Townsite. Everybody was thinking they didn’t want Waterton to keep growing and growing, perhaps like Banff and Jasper had been doing. At that time Gaby Fortin headed up that project, and I was involved in it. Not in a major way but in a very meaningful way for me. With the agreement of the people in the community we were able to establish limits to growth and development in the Townsite. I think that was extremely important. It’s one of the things I am very proud to have been involved in.
There were some other things too. Earlier on in my career things were happening and we didn’t have a good tracking system, so we set up the very earliest occurrence reporting tracking system here. I think other parks were just getting going on that kind of work too at the same time. So the one we set up in Waterton pretty soon evolved and was combined with what was going on with other parks in the Western Region. Of course, it all went national after that. It was a challenge and an achievement to be involved in helping to get that set up initially.
Another key thing that I felt very proud to have participated in was when our entrance highway had to be redeveloped, around 1990 or 91. The engineers at the time wanted the highway built to the same standard that the Trans Canada was built to. That was two lanes into Waterton townsite and two lanes out, with shoulders on the side. There was a group of us that felt that was way too much, just overkill, so we spent a lot of time combating the degree of that project. We said this is just an entrance parkway, not a highway. We were able to get that tamed right down to just a two lane parkway which it is to this day. I think that was a very significant achievement. I can’t imagine having four lanes coming into Waterton from the park gate to the Townsite.
Another effort that I was involved in, and I felt very proud working with the Superintendent at the time, Merv Syroteuk, and with Bill Dolan. There were a lot of seadoos or personal watercraft showing up on the lake. They were out ripping around, creating lots of noise and disturbance, so we thought it was not an appropriate use in the park here. So, we undertook to ban seadoos. Geez, did that ever turn out to be a production! We had MLA’s and Members of Parliament inquiring about what we were doing and meetings with large groups of angry people but, nevertheless, in the end and because of the process we used to do this, which was very collaborative, involving a lot of people in the community, and people outside of the park, we were able to get them banned. Afterwards, Seadoo threatened to sue us for doing this but when they saw the process we used to get this accomplished they backed off. That ban has stayed in place to this day and I’m still happy that we don’t have jet skis or seadoos ripping about.
Another one that was really significant I felt, when I first arrived in Waterton, there was open garbage available in a lot of places. Everybody put their garbage in garbage cans and of course they weren’t bear proof. Even the parks garbage handling system … there were open dumps out there. So we got really involved, worked for a few years on that with the staff in the General Works department. We changed up the whole garbage handling system. A lot of this stuff, I think I’d like to mention, in those days a lot of this…. the wardens were really out and about, in the front country and in the backcountry. They really saw what was going on and were aware of the issues. Very often we would try to push and try to drive things forward from the bottom up. I think that’s maybe a little different now. I don’t want to be judgmental, but I do sometimes perceive from things I hear that things are a little bit more or maybe quite a bit more top driven now. I don’t know but maybe Ottawa is more involved now.
Another event that meant a lot to me and that had a big effect on other wardens happened around the mid 80s, if I recall correctly. A lot of wardens were not really happy with our classification level at that time, which was GT02. We all heard stories of folks in other federal government departments who were classified a level or two above us and we grumbled about it. We heard stories of people in Ottawa who were classified a level or two higher who had to climb up tall ladders to put up lights, or paint walls and such. It didn’t seem fair to many of us, compared to what we were doing. I decided to file a Classification Grievance with the support of my Chief Warden, Max Winkler, who I always had a lot of respect for … a big bear of a man that stood his ground. Anyway, I had to prepare the grievance, detailing our various roles and responsibilities and outlining the risks, knowledge, responsibilities and all that stuff. Max went to Ottawa and presented the grievance. Lo and behold, we won! And the good news is that it rippled right through the Warden Service in that many positions were all bumped up. That was rewarding and I received a lot of positive feedback from wardens for the effort.
SH: That’s a great summary of some events that went on there Derek.
Derek: Yes, it was really interesting to be involved and participate in them.
SH: Can you tell me about any rescue/wildlife/enforcement stories that stick out in your memory?
Derek: There’s a list about a mile long. Well, I’m probably overstating it. I’ve probably been involved in immobilizing dozens of bears and have been on many rescues or recoveries.. I’ll start with a rescue..
We’ve carried out a lot of rescues in Waterton, a lot of incidents. I suppose probably one of the big rescues that comes to mind, earlier on in my career was when a young fellow was climbing up a steep couloir up at Goat Lake. It happened to be late in the evening and he took a bad fall in an area high up on the mountain and ended up getting wedged between some frozen ice and snow and the rock wall. He was very badly injured, both in the head and the rest of his body. It was rainy and cloudy and socked in weather. There’s no way we were going to be able to use the helicopter to get our team in to do it. So we had to climb up in very difficult conditions with all our equipment … mountain rescue stretchers and our gear in the middle of the night, wet, and spending a lot of time. We really had to improvise to be able to get him out of the ice… we had to dig and chip because he was wedged up against the rock wall. Then we had to use our ropes and everything else, to lower him off the side of the mountain. That basically took us almost all night, and we were working in the dark, bringing him out finally in the early morning. That was one rescue I remember as being very long and very difficult, but he did survive. He had physical impairments for the rest of his life but he survived. That was a really difficult one.
Another one that comes to mind is probably the most difficult recovery I recall. We had a young man who was down in Waterton on the weekend that he was to be married. I think two days before his wedding he was down in Cameron Creek but above Cameron Falls in the Waterton townsite. There was a log that had washed across the upper falls because of high water earlier on in the season. He decided he was going to try and cross it. He slipped and fell into Cameron Falls which is a pretty significant waterfall. He went over the falls and his body wedged into a crevice at the very side and bottom of the waterfall and did not come out. A lot of people saw this happen because it was right in summertime. They witnessed him going over the falls and tumbling through the water where he wedged in. We got on the scene very fast and people were diving down into the big pool at the base of the falls, but they couldn’t see him anywhere. We managed to get some very tall ladders and place them up against the base of the falls and we were probing into this crevasse area. We were able to determine that his body was down in there. Now the problem was how to you get him out of there. So we spent a whole night coming up with a plan of what we were going to do. We built a special pole … a long pike pole with some really long, sharp hooks that we took off our lake drag bar and we set up our team. It happened to be me that got lowered down into the waterfall, towards the bottom. With this long pole with hooks I managed to hook that body way back in the crevice. We couldn’t see it at all because it’s full of running water, but you could feel there was a body in there. It was the most amazingly lucky catch because he was hooked between the radius and ulnar bone by the wrist. The hook was not going to come out. Using a rope winch system we were able to pull that body out of the crevice and it shot across the pool in a giant arc. We did this very early in the morning because we didn’t want this happening when people were around. So we did retrieve his body, and I remember being with the parents and they were so thankful to our team for working so hard to retrieve their son’s body. That was a very memorable endeavor. I hope I don’t leave anyone out but I think the key players in that were Brent Kozachenko, Randall Schwanke, Bill Thorpe, Rob Watt, Mary Coleman, Edwin Knox and Bruce McGinnis. I think Keith McDougall was involved too. That was a tough job.
Another one, I wouldn’t call it a rescue but a retrieval ….one day, when Vice President Al Gore was up visiting Glacier Park in the States, and all the American Rangers were busy providing security and what not, an older man took a fall off Mount Cleveland, which I believe is the highest peak in Glacier. It’s about 10,300 feet. He took a bad fall off the backside and they asked us if we could help so Brent Kozachenko and myself got involved in that one. We were able to go in and retrieve his body from high up on the mountain and we were thanked by Al Gore for helping out the American Rangers with that. I thought that was very considerate of him to thank the Canadian wardens. We used to collaborate with the American Rangers a lot, in different things, not just search and rescue. Things like fires and law enforcement and resource protection issues … we worked collaboratively with the Rangers in Glacier. It was interesting to see how they managed things and we were often able benefit from their experience and hopefully vice versa.
SH: Interesting. When was that made into an international peace park?
Derek: You know I can’t recall exactly when that was but I believe it was in the early 1930s.
(In 1932 Canada’s Waterton National Park and the U.S. Glacier National Park in Montana were combined to form the World’s first International Peace Park.)
SH: Those are wild stories.
Derek: Those are sad stories because they were fatalities, but I’ve been involved pulling three bodies out of Blackiston Falls and two bodies out of Cameron Falls and then a lot of other rescues of people in other situations, just through illness or accidents in backcountry areas. Most of those have happier outcomes, because it’s injured people being helped out and they get to the hospital and they recover. But not always.
And we also operated the ambulance service in Waterton for about two thirds of my career. I felt relieved when that role was removed from our responsibilities. There are lots of incidents to recall here too but the one I recall most was when I was driving the ambulance very early in the morning with my neighbour and his pregnant wife, who was having contractions about 2 minutes apart. We had a 35 minute drive to the hospital. Anyway, an adult cow elk jumped right up in front of the ambulance from a long steep downslope. I hit and killed that elk instantly and totally smashed up the front of the ambulance. Here we were, way out in the middle of nowhere, trying to wake up anyone else using the park radio to get help. We had no formal dispatch back then and had to rely on in house radios to alert any other warden that might be listening. It sounds funny now a days. Anyway, that all worked out but ambulance work was often very stressful.
I’ve got some interesting law enforcement stories as well. One of the earlier ones I was involved in was quite significant. We’ve got a big international herd of elk here in Waterton, numbering beyond a thousand animals. In the winter, when we get deep snow and the cold north winds come in, they band up in a big herd out on the northeast end of the park. One time I was the duty warden and there was this fellow walking with a camera towards this huge herd of elk and the elk all took off running, in one herd, towards the park boundary. Lo and behold if there wasn’t a couple of his partners waiting just on the other side of the boundary with their guns, ready to start shooting at them. They were licensed but now had about a thousand elk coming at them. That was a very terrible situation because that herd ran right out of the park in great numbers so now all the hunters in southern Alberta started flooding down to hunt the elk. The elk were severely stressed and they stayed out of the park for a couple of days before they looped around and came back into Waterton. In the meantime, many of them were shot and/or injured. That created quite a stir. This was on the National News, and both CBC and CTV were running it. The public at large was so upset about this incident. Anyway, the fellow that had the camera who had herded the animals said he was just trying to get pictures. I ended up charging them and they went to court up in Calgary. There was quite a trial but they were found guilty. But the sad thing was that the maximum fine they could get was $500 so the hunters lost their guns and got fined $500 but that was it. Nevertheless, that was an interesting thing to be involved in. (Part 1: Tape 36:23)
Another fun one, if you will… I shouldn’t use the word fun, I should say an interesting one …. a park warden observed a vehicle parked on the side of the road and wrote down the license plate. He saw tracks heading over the prairie grassland. So a couple of guys followed these tracks and came across this big trophy buck mule deer. Well it was only a carcass because the cape and the head had been taken. I think Bill Thorpe did the necropsy on the deer and he found a small .22 short bullet lodged right in the heart tissue. Larry Harbidge was the warden who wrote the license plate down. He and I got involved and we went and got search warrants and then went out to a nearby acreage where this individual was living. It happened to be Grey Cup day and he had a Grey Cup party going on. So we knocked on the door and the guy asked if we could come back later because he had this big party going on, and he didn’t want to deal with us right then. But no, of course we weren’t about to leave, so we started searching, to his consternation. We walked down to one of his out buildings, which was full of bales of hay. As soon as we opened the door we could smell that musky, mule deer buck odor. We knew something was in there so we started throwing bales of hay around and sure enough there was this great big skinned out head with the big eyeballs staring up at us, and this big rack, so we knew we had him cold. Then we went up to the house and he really didn’t want us to come into the house. But we had warrants and went into the house, conducting our search in spite of the party and all the people. We went down to his freezer and dug around and sure enough there’s the cape in the bottom of the freezer. So we were able to retrieve that as well, and we laid charges. He went to court and pleaded guilty.
SH: Did he get fined more than $500.00?
Derek: At that time the maximum fine was still $500.00. He lost his rifle which was just a perfect little beat up poaching rifle and was fined $500.00. He really knew what he was doing. The judge said if he could have fined him thousands of dollars he would have, and he thought the (National Parks) Act needed to be re-examined. I think perhaps partly because of these two incidents I just related, because word bumps up the system, through our law enforcement program, that the fines were really inadequate and we were hearing this from judges, and I believe this is part of the reason over time that fines were increased. Not just from Waterton but from other parks as well. Judges were telling us we needed to increase them.
Another one … one of our seasonal wardens took a call that people had observed a fisherman with many fish, way beyond the catch limit. We went down to investigate and found the guy but couldn’t find any extra fish. So the other warden and I were scouting around this little pond area, where this guy had been fishing. If I remember correctly I think we found about 22 or 23 trout that he had caught. He was trying to hide them in the tall grass so nobody would see him trying to get away with the fish. We got him too and he paid his fine, pleading guilty.
One more quick interesting one, enforcement related. Some people like to try and poach or take dropped antlers from Waterton. It was quite common. It’s against the law and one time myself and another warden, Keith Brady, were driving over Knights Hill by the Lower Waterton Lake. Its grassland on the other side of the lake and it leads into timber. We saw an individual sort of scouting along the margins of the timber and he had elk antlers in his hands. We figured he was trying to steal or poach the antlers so we decided to split up and one went to one end where his vehicle might be parked and the other went to the other end and we played a waiting game. It turns out he decided to come out where I was waiting … there was a vehicle there, and this person had come from somewhere in Crowsnest Pass in British Columbia. Anyhow, I ducked down in the trees to see what he was going to do because he had a fairly deep river to cross. Finally, he did come out and he had an old trapper nelson backpack just loaded with antlers, as many as you could tie on there, a big load of antlers. So, he left them on the other side of the river and he jumped in and kind of swam across and started walking where he was able to. He came out all soaking wet and I stepped out of the bush and greeted him and arrested him. He had all his stuff in his vehicle, on this side of the river, prepared to go back, like a big inner tube, prepared to float and get these antlers back across this side. That was another interesting one I was involved in. He plead guilty as well and paid his fine. You really feel you are contributing when you are involved in very exciting and interesting cases like that.
SH: Do you want to tell any wildlife stories? (Part 1: Tape 42:03)
Derek: One of the biggest events I can remember related to wildlife was on an Easter weekend some years back. On Easter weekend in the Waterton townsite all the cabin owners come out with their families and of course there’s lots of little kids. It just happened that this Easter weekend we had three cougars in our community. It’s not uncommon for cougars to be in Waterton townsite, they are frequently there, and we always have to be on guard for that. We had a Large Carnivore Management Plan to help us deal with that, but we had three of them and they killed five large ungulates, sheep and deer, just within a few days. This is going on right in the streets in Waterton townsite, one in Waterton Campground and another right in front of the Kilmore Hotel. The cats were bold and they were on the hunt. I was very involved in that one. We ended up having dogs come down and we were tracking these cats. We were finally able to get one of them treed and we were able to get them out of town. Unfortunately, we had to destroy one of those cougars but that was a tense few days over the Easter holidays.
Another one related to grizzly bears… we got a call that at a backcountry campground down the lake, Bertha Bay, that a big grizzly bear had just walked in and basically invaded the communal kitchen area and chased everybody right out of the cooking area and put the run on a few of them. He then scattered all the stuff around. I went whipping down there with another warden and sure enough there were a lot of people standing on the beach and just hailing us to get them out of there because they were rightfully very worried about that grizzly bear. So, we loaded them on our boat and scooted them back to town and turned around and went right back because now we are going to have to see about this grizzly bear and pick up belongings and everything else left on site.
When we got there, there was no sign of the bear but at the same time the radio starts crackling and there’s a big grizzly bear now walking through Waterton townsite. Turns out it was the grizzly bear that had been at Bertha Bay and in the time when we did this quick run with people back and forth, the bear had moved all the way to Waterton townsite (about 2 km). So now we had to go whipping back to Waterton townsite to help manage the bear there. He ended up in Emerald Bay, just below the Prince of Wales Hotel. Several of us wardens were there late in the evening, keeping people away and getting that bear out of the area. Those are just examples of things we had to deal with. There were lots of those things that happened over the course of my career. I’d have to wade into my old diaries to refresh my memory about things. But again, it was the team approach that sealed the deal.
SH: I was in Waterton in June a couple of years ago and I couldn’t believe how many bears you had down there. Bears were everywhere.
Derek: That’s one of the things I’ve enjoyed the most about being in Waterton …the abundance, diversity and visibility of the wildlife. We’ve got it all. We’ve got grizzly bears, black bears, wolves, cougars, we’ve got all the large ungulates. There was one year we even had a herd of antelope for three or four months which was unheard of, but we’ve got abundant wildlife and you get to see them because there’s a lot of open terrain in Waterton. One of my favorite animals, if not my favourite, is bears. I’ve worked with bears a lot and managed the bear management program for many years. I’ve been involved in immobilizing many bears and have helped instigate changes to the bear management program over the years. It has just gotten better, and better. As I mentioned earlier, when I left at the end of my career we rarely had to immobilize or destroy a bear. It became a rare event and that was progress.
Another funny bear related story just popped into my mind. Our kids were all born and raised here in Waterton. In our back yard, because we were in the back side of the townsite, we always had bears and bighorn sheep and deer right behind our house or in our yard. It just seemed normal. My older son worked with the International Shoreline Cruise Company and would go up and down the lake on a large tour boat with hundreds of visitors. He would either be piloting the boat or providing the interpretive dialogue. Anyhow, one time we had the Bertha Bay campground closed and you could see the bear closure signs from the boat. It was closed to camping because there was a bear in the area and we didn’t want to have any issues. My son was telling the folks about this and the question that always comes up is “How do they know when to take the signs down and let you go back in?” So my son is telling this to the people on the boat and he says “Folks I’m not feeling so good about this today because those closure signs are all still there and maybe they’re a little worried about people bumping into the bear. They’ve got a Bear Management Plan and there’s conditions in there that they look at to help decide when they can re-open an area after a closure. But my dad always says to me “I really feel comfortable opening up an area that’s been closed because of bears when I’d be willing to send one of my own kids right into that area themselves. When I feel that it’s safe enough to do that, then I can open it to the public.” Then my son says, “And you know what? It’s my turn to go in next!” That kind of brought the house down on the boat. He could deliver a good line.
SH: That’s hilarious.
Derek: Another interesting law enforcement situation I was involved in … I got a call one afternoon when I was duty warden that there was somebody who had a bike off road, and of course you cannot be riding motorcycles or motor bikes off the highways at all. When I first got the call, I thought it might just be a pedal bike or something, so I was driving out there, not too alarmed about anything. I thought I’d just have to see what’s going on. But then when I got out there, the fellow who reported this, he’s waiting for me at the top of the hill and he says, “There’s two people … well first of all you should know it’s a motorcycle, not just a bike, it’s a big motorcycle, and those people are kind of ‘in flagrante delicto’ Do you know what that means?
SH: No
