• I drove over there to check out the job. Meanwhile, because Keith had left (Roger’s Pass) and was working at Banff, I put in for his job with Peter Schaerer. I had sent a letter, maybe your dad told me that they were looking for someone. I went over and stayed with my cousin Ted and visited Noel. l would have taken the job, but when I got back to Lake Louise there was a letter from Peter offering me a job at Rogers Pass and it paid more money so I went there for that winter.
• (0:37:09) Don – In 1971 Grace and I got engaged…She was going to University of Calgary and on my days off I would drive to Calgary.
• (0:37:35) Grace – I was studying fine arts and junior and senior high school education.
• (0:37:51) Don – Mom and dad were still at Lake Louise running Temple and Skoki. Grace used to go up and visit them, even when she wasn’t working there…So sometimes we met up at Lake Louise. I made a lot of trips to Calgary that winter! We got engaged in February on Valentine day! We were out at Minnewanka. There was a full moon I remember. We got married in April at Lake Louise at Patty and Dale Loewen’s house. Grace’s dad was a Presbyterian minister and Grace’s mom and dad came out and married us. After spending a couple of days at Num-Ti-Jah we skied into Skoki for our honeymoon for a few days.
• (0:38:49) Don – I was still working for Peter Schaerer and Paul Anhorn. Your dad would probably remember the field trips. We use to measure snow all over high areas in BC for the Division of Building Research. We would go to all the passes and ski areas to measure the snow from different levels. Most of it was from ski areas because you could go up on a lift and measure them on the way down. We were at Red Mountain, Fernie, Lake Louise, Kimberley and some old mines where you could take a skidoo part way up. The Salmo – Creston highway too… Grace was able to join us. Paul and Grace and I did one of these trips. I think we were finished around the end of April. Then Grace and I went down east to Ontario to meet Grace’s family. I was into horse shoeing then and I was looking for an anvil. One of Grace’s uncles had this big machine shed by an old farm with tons of machinery. “There’s one around here somewhere.” He gave me this great big anvil; it was 150 pounds! I put it in the back of the car along with a bunch of stuff that all the relatives had given us. The anvil mixed with brooms and linens! We had a 1969 Toyota car and we had her loaded right up, all the way back to Alberta.
• (0:40:32) Don – The summer of 1972 we separated our outfitting business. My sister and brother in law took over the Lake Louise end and we took Emerald Lake. We had the horse stables there. Our first summer we lived at a little cabin at Emerald Lake. It’s gone now, where the stables were, but it was just up from the canoe docks. It was a nice little spot. We had a cabin there and a barn and about 12 horses. Andy Anderson was the chief warden at Yoho then and that was when I first met Tim Auger. He was a seasonal warden at Lake O’Hara. I remember we had a contract to pack the Seattle Mountaineers into Linda Lake which was only about a mile off the O’Hara road. They had big camps…We packed in all their supplies. There were huge big tents, propane tanks and stoves, all sorts of stuff, including fresh food each day from a refrigerated truck at the O’Hara parking lot.…I used to pack in Fran Drummond at that time too, into Twin Falls…Sometimes Grace and I would take the horses from Emerald over Yoho Pass to Takkakaw Falls. Linda and Darro Stinson went with us different times, he was a seasonal warden. I would pack supplies for Fran Drummond in and then bring the horses all the way back. Sometimes I would truck them around. But I just had a pickup. It would only take two horses, so if I trucked them, I’d walk in and pack her supplies on the two horses.
• (0:42:42) Grace – Very little (in response to the question, “Did you have an experience with horses?”) Don gave me a horse called Freckles for our engagement!
• (0:42:54) Don – She flew off him a couple of times. Once we were loping around Emerald Lake in the evening and we turned around a corner too fast. Grace was knocked out that time. I had to carry her back partway, but she came too. It was pretty scary…Another time we were riding down by Ottertail Flats and we hit a hornet’s nest or something and Freckles bucked Grace off. She was knocked out then too and we were quite a way from a phone. I had to leave her, which I really didn’t want to do. I left the dog with her. I galloped back and called someone in Field and we got a flatcar. It was right beside the railway track by Ottertail Flats. We got the flatcar with a CPR maintenance driving it and put her on that and then took her to the hospital in Banff. You hurt your back, plus a concussion. It was pretty scary. There was nothing that I could do. I couldn’t stay there…I galloped back pretty fast.
• (0:44:19) Don – We were two years at Emerald Lake…running the pony stand and packing. We went back to Rogers Pass in the fall of 1971. Grace was pregnant with Flora then. It was the worst winter that they had had in years, 1971/72. We lived in the apartments.
• (0:45:11) Grace – There was snow up to the second floor.
• (0:45:13) Don – It was amazing! It was like a tunnel to get into the second floor. It was the biggest avalanche cycle for decades. I was working with Paul Anhorn then and we worked nine-and five-day shifts. Meanwhile that fall, in October 1971 we bought a little house in Field…We had never thought about Field for a place to live, but I knew Glen Brooks (a Yoho warden), introduced by Slim Haugen. I knew Slim Haugen when he used to be the ranch boss at Yoho. He ran the Ya-Ha-Tinda after that …He was a friend of dads. I ran into him at Golden once when I was at Rogers Pass and he said, “Well drive down with me.” I was on the bus. We stopped at Glen Brook’s house. He (Slim) said, “I’ve got to get a shampoo and a haircut.” Glen gave haircuts and the shampoo was rum! Slim got a haircut and was getting pretty tipsy. He looked at me and said “He could use a haircut too! This is the only haircut that you will get for no cost and with a shampoo too!” So that’s how I met Glen. One day Grace and I drove by this little house near the tracks and we liked the looks of it. Grace thought that is a cute little house. We went to see Glen to see if he knew if there was anything for sale. And he said, Cookson’s (house)…He worked for the CPR and he had lost an arm. He was retired and they lived in this little house that we liked. So, we bought it. I can’t remember what the down payment was, but our mortgage was $50 a month! We paid $5000 for the house. We went up to Rogers Pass that fall and on our days off we came down to Field. All we had in the house was a bed and a little television and a couple of chairs. The rest of our furniture was at Rogers Pass.
• (47:37) Grace – That was also the fall when they had all the grizzly bear problems up at Rogers Pass. That fellow was attacked. There was a story in the Readers Digest about him.
• (0:47:48) Don – He had his face clawed off! Gordie Peyto was first to him. He was up at Balu Pass. A guy and girl were hiking up there and the bear attacked him. It was a Reader Digest type thing. He tried to save the girl and he attacked the bear with a knife. The girl escaped and the bear took his face off! He was really lucky. The wardens got there and they took him to Revelstoke and there happened to be an internationally known plastic surgeon visiting in Revelstoke. They sewed him back up and I think that he was okay in the end.
• (0:48:30) Grace – He was just a young guy. Right at the building where we lived (in Rogers Pass) a grizzly came and took all the groceries from a car…It was a convertible.
• (0:48:43) Don – They had quite a problem with bears there.
• (0:48:50) Grace – That winter you couldn’t walk down the highway; you couldn’t walk anywhere because of the avalanche hazard. Knit and read (was how Grace passed the time being pregnant at Rogers Pass).
• (0:49:00) Don – Paul and Inga Anhorn lived in the apartments too, so we got to be good friends.
• (0:49:06) Grace – Gordie Peyto was also up there.
• (0:49:08) Don – Yeah, he was in the little A-Frame warden house. It was quite a time. That winter was amazing. I remember one day; Paul and I went out and measured a water gauge at Cougar Creek. Just after the 90-degree corner by Ross Peak, Cougar Creek crosses the highway. That is where you go up to Nakimu Caves. The next day after we had been working at the site that whole valley avalanched and took out hundreds of huge big trees. It went right across the highway and right across the railway…The road was totally closed and people were all stuck at the Northlander, the hotel on Roger Pass summit. I can remember going to the avalanche with Gordie Peyto and there was a cat driver trying to work on the slide. The CPR were down working on the tracks too, trying to clear them. We had the old magnetometer, Gordie and I…we didn’t know if there were any cars in the slide or anything. It was a big metal detector we were working with. All of a sudden, we started to hear trees crack and another slide came off the other side of the valley! We were on top of the slide. It felt like we were 40 feet up on the avalanche debris. We ran over to the cat and got in it… it was like sitting in a dinky toy…Then the slide came down. It just went straight across the valley, but the dust came down and the dust covered us in the cat. We ran out and Gordie closed the whole thing. He kicked the guys out of the railroad and said, “There is no one working in here until this is safe!” I can still remember we went back to the Northlander and Gordie had his Park uniform on and people were yelling at us. When are we going to open the road? Meanwhile another slide had come over a snow shed and there were trucks trapped in the shed. It was crazy! Grace and I just made it out for our days back to Field off before the East sheds were cut off. It took three or four days anyway before they could get it clear.
• (0:51:40) Grace – That was the winter too, when they had many slides that came down for the first time, including the one between Lake Louise and Field. That was a major one.
• (0:51:52) Don -The one off of Bosworth (in Yoho national park).
• (0:51:56) Grace – It pinned us in for five days.
• (0:51:59) Don – They bombed it with the helicopter. Andy (Anderson) was the chief warden. I can still remember Andy saying, ‘Yeah, that bomb was so loud they heard it all the way to Ottawa!” We went to Lake Louise to visit mom and dad and we couldn’t get back to Field, let alone Rogers Pass! So, we were five days late back to work.
