• (1:12:16) Don – I was a seasonal for a year and a half and then they had a permanent warden competition. I was interviewed by Mac Elder and Jimmy Simes again. I think I was fifth on the list. The next opening was in Jasper…we were waiting, kind of hoping to go to Jasper. Then Jim Purdy quit in Yoho. I ended up stepping into his job…and meanwhile I think it was Murray Hindle next on the list and he was already in Jasper. He ended up staying in Jasper and we ended up staying in Yoho. We were happy to get a permanent job!
• (1:13:41) Grace – But we ended up in the spring of 1977 at the West Gate. We were there for two years. Johanna was two and Flora was four…
• (1:13:59) Don – It was a strange place. It was the last warden station in Yoho. They kept it going I think because the gate was there and the power plant was already there to run the gate. The information booth was just down the road. It was a really nice house, but it was right next to the highway. We were 30 kilometers from Field and 30 kilometers from Golden right at the edge of the park, yet everyone in Canada went right by our door. It was noisy, in the summer you couldn’t open the window because of the traffic. The trucks coming down with their air brakes on. It was the weirdest place and I was away a lot. There was a lot of training at that particular time, so Grace and the girls were by themselves there. Grace ended up helping tourists and other travelers – much like warden’s wives in earlier times. It was a different situation. We liked it in a lot of ways…
• (1:15:02) Grace – Yes, (it was hard when Don was away) especially when it was ten days at a time or something and you were just there with two little ones…There was a robbery across at the visitor center while we were there too.
• (1:15:24) Don – Vi Sanford was at the visitor center and this guy robbed her at knife point.
• (1:15:30) Grace – They had to chase him…
• (1:15:34) Don – He pulled the wires off the phone, but he didn’t see the radio. So, she radioed ahead. She had the presence of mind to get his license plate and they nailed him up a logging road.
• (1:15:46) Grace – You never knew who was going to come to the door.
• (1:16:02) Don – We were lucky, we had our first dog Gem. Some questionable people are afraid of dogs. I remember a couple of times this one guy was weird and she barked and he took off. Once in the middle of winter there was a tap at the door and there was a lady and she was just frozen. I think that she might have been drinking before, I don’t know. But she went off the bank just out of the gate and she couldn’t get out of her car. She looked up at the road and saw lights going by from the cars. She finally crawled out of her window and she was almost hypothermic by the time she came to our place. We got her warmed up. Grace gave her a housecoat and then we called and got help for her. We had a few things like that. One guy’s semi (truck) tires were on fire. I just happened to be home. I ran down with the water hose from the house and put his tires out! We had a guy with a motorcycle come by. It was in the late fall of the year. He had an old motorcycle that he was bringing from the Okanagan and heading east. There was snow on the road and he wiped out. He came stumbling up to the house, he was all scared and bruised up, but he was okay. He said, “I’ll give you that damn motorcycle if you give me a ride to the nearest bus station!” I pulled the motorcycle into the garage and gave him a ride to Lake Louise to catch the bus! There were a lot of different things like that. We were there for two years.
• (1:17:49) Don – Then we moved into town.
• (1:17:51) Grace – Flora was in grade one and I had to drive her back and forth to school (in Field) every day.
• (1:17:56) Don – Meanwhile we were having trouble with the superintendent. It’s a long story, but he didn’t like me very much…
• (1:18:24) Grace – Don was not allowed to drive Flora to school, so I had to. Nothing was open there (in Field) There was no store or anything. So, I had to drive back I made four trips a day.
• (1:18:37) Don – It was bad because of the roads. When you had snow storms all the equipment went to the (Big) hill. The west part of the park was the last to get plowed. I couldn’t bring the kids into school with the warden truck and it got to be a big issue to bring Flora in. I did it anyways sometimes. It got to be really stupid and really stressful. Grace drove in and a lot of times I would follow behind her in the warden truck to make sure that she made it. She had a close call twice. One day a guy had a blowout and hit the guard rail and went right around her and hit the guard rail again and (Grace) was driving Johanna back to the West gate
• (1:19:33) Grace – All his tires had just blown out – ‘Bang! Bang!” When he was trying to pass me. He was just a young kid from Lethbridge.
• (1:19:41) Don – There were all sorts of bad car accidents that I was dealing with all the time. I kind of got into trouble because this one day I just said, “To hell with it” I was in the warden truck and I parked right in front of the school. The superintendent’s wife, I knew that she would be watching out the window. She hated me, so I just went like that to her (gave the finger). I never even got across the tracks and the superintendent was on the radio to Hal Shepherd, “That problem has not been solved!’ I was at the warden office waiting for Hal to come in and I just lit into him! I was just such a nervous wreck. I was so pissed off that I was ready to quit. Meanwhile in other parks like Jasper, people were driving their kids in from Athabasca Falls, 20 miles into school, no problem at all.
• (1:20:34) Grace – And they got a monetary allowance to do it.
• (1:20:41) Don – Then the Superintendent started charging us power out there. They had to run the power plant anyway. They put a meter on our house and started charging us…it was expensive. He did everything they could to make life miserable.
• (1:21:00) Don – We moved into town and we lived in a government house for a year and then we built our own house there in 1979.
• (1:21:11) Grace – That was the same year your dad passed. Just as we were getting ready to build.
• (1:21:18) Don – We almost didn’t build…Dale and Kathy were building at the same time. Anyway, we built the house.
• (1:21:29) Grace – In Field they had opened up lots for the first time in many decades and there were draws on them. Kathy and Dale, Don and I each got a lot.
• (1:21:40) Don – It looked like they were going to keep the school open. That was a decision-making part of it. It went to grade six. As we were there it went down to grade two or three.
• (1:21:57) Grace – Then I taught the girls grades 2 and 4 for a year.
• (1:21:59) Don – Grace taught them correspondence. Grace’s brother Wally and his family had come to work out in the park. Grace taught their little girl Angela correspondence too.
• (1:22:16) Don – We built the house and we lived there but we realized that the kids were going to have to go to school in Golden. We didn’t want them to go down that highway every day on the bus. We put in for a
transfer to Banff. If I hadn’t got it, we would have probably moved to Golden and I would have commuted rather than the kids. But as it turned out I was transferred to Lake Louise. The first winter that was 1983, Grace lived in Ian Symes basement in Banff. He had a suite…Grace and the girls came there and I was still working in Yoho.
• (1:23:08) Grace – By that time Flora was going into grade six and Johanna was going into grade four.
• (1:23:25) Don – I was still working in Yoho and on my days off I would come into Banff or we would go back to Yoho, depending on the situation.
• (1:23:36) Grace – When did you start at Lake Louise?
• (1:23:39) Don – In the spring of 1984. I was in the backcountry at Cyclone, which was kind of neat, being back in my old stomping grounds! That fall I was in Scotch Camp.
• Grace lost her Mom that fall and we went to Ontario for her funeral.
• .…We moved to Banff then. We were already in Banff, but we got in a government house, one of the squirrel cages beside the seniors building on Squirrel street. They were little wartime houses. It was handy to school though. They weren’t bad little houses, just pretty small. We lived there for four or five years…Then we moved up to Park Avenue in 1989…I was still working at Lake Louse 1984/85. Marc Ledwidge was too and we would commute. I got on in Banff in 1986, working for Perry Jacobson and Keith Everts. Perry was the front country manager and Keith was the assistant chief.
• (1:25:16) Grace – That is why we left too; we ran out of grades at school in Field. We’d done grade four and Flora went back for grade five.
• (1:25:28) Don – She was taking correspondence, but the teacher was teaching her.
• (1:25:30) Grace – For grade six we moved to Banff.
• (1:25:36) Don – It was great. The kids got into cross-country skiing and had lots of friends. We had the Ski Runners and Grace was the president actually. She worked at the library and Parks after that.
• (1:25:56) Grace – I was at the visitor center downtown.
Mickle Family early 1980s
• (1:26:01) Don – I did environmental assessment for about three years and different jobs. I still got into the backcountry lots.
• (1:26:15) Don – In Yoho a warden was in charge of the north side of the highway and another warden was in charge of the south side. You also had other duties, like you took turns being duty warden, front country. But I also did vegetation management for a couple of years and wildlife. Then someone else had wildlife. Somebody had public safety and somebody had law enforcement. It switched around every few years.
• (1:26:49) Grace – Yoho was famous for being good training ground for wardens to go elsewhere because they got exposed to everything.
• (1:26:56) Don – There were so many highway accidents. We had the volunteer ambulance and Grace was the dispatcher for it.
• (1:27:11) Grace – It was kind of like a mini paid volunteer job, I got an honorarium.
• (1:27:12) Don – If we went out on an accident, we got paid like $30 or something. You were either on an accident with the ambulance or as the duty warden. If you had a call at 10:00 at night, “Oh hell…”
• (1:27:30) Grace – I was not very popular!
