Eric Langshaw

(26:41) They did get even with me eventually just by making (my) life really tough. I moved to Yoho to try to get away from it because the chief warden there really thought what I had done was good. So I started working on some wildlife project there and I knew that sooner or later they were going to twin the highway through there so I…went to regional office and I got the money and the proper way of doing a study and set up an elk study. An elk and ungulates study in Yoho park to find out where they were moving and when. We were working on that program for almost five years and we had lots of good data and it was going to show where elk moved in the summers and in the winters and whatnot. Six months before the study was to be published, they withdrew all the funding for it. I wasn’t going to allow that, so I went to a couple of the local environmental groups and they found the money to finish the study.

(30:30) So anyway the funds for that, I got enough to finish the study and Parks took it and built a new washroom with it. And that’s when I decided to quit. They went out to a place called Fader Lake and took the money to build a new washroom and I knew the handwriting was on the wall.

What year would that have been?”

That would have been 1986

(30:57) So my wife and I, well I don’t think she was my wife at the time, we hopped onto a plane and went to India! That in a nutshell is a few highlights…

“Would it have been 1972, (when you started?”

(31:28) 1972 is when I started) Or was it late 1971? Let me think about this, when I was I actually hired? I think I was hired in 1971 and I got my posting in 1972. Something like that!

“Had you always been interested in wildlife?”)
(31: 46) Oh yeah, very much so. Mind you, at university, I was studying math and physics. But, I was taking courses in these other things because I was really interested in them and that got me the best job of my life. You know, I don’t regret anything…Life changes pretty quickly sometimes not always for the best, but generally in my life it’s been for the best.

“I think it was in Kathy Calvert and Dale Portman’s book, (Guardians of the Peaks) that I read about a plane landing..”

(32:29) Oh right! Up at the Crossing, Saskatchewan River Crossing.) That was the chief park warden in Yoho, (he had) one eye…an unbelievable character! I’m trying to think of his name…Shepard! Hal Shepard. I was at the Crossing all by myself. I heard a plane go over and didn’t think much of it. A few minutes later, I get a knock on the door. I don’t think I had ever met Hal Shepard and there is this guy, a big guy! “I’m Hal Shepard, Chief Warden of Yoho. I need some gas.” “I’m sorry Hal, we only have bronze gas.” “Well, that will do.” I thought, “How can I do this without breaking the rules?” So, I gave Hal (the gas). “Oh, I will make it right somehow.” He says. I drive him out to his plane. There it is sitting on the side of the road. We fuel up his plane and away he goes. Good old Hal! He was unbelievable! There is a story is about Hal, it was during the Second World War when the Japanese invaded Hong Kong, I think it was, there was this black pit that has become infamous that they threw all kinds of British and Canadian soldiers into. It was this huge building that was airless and most of them died, because there was no air, no water, nothing and Hal survived that. And that is why after (the war) that he was given priority in doing things in his life with the government…I wished I had served under Hal, like Dale did. But I never did get to work under him. He was quite the guy. He would strap a gun on many days and strutted around with a big sidepiece on.

(34:47) Oh the characters that we met you know! Jim Rimmer (was also a character)…He had the dog, what was the dog’s name now…anyways it was an ugly little English terrier, the ugliest little dog you’ve ever seen! (Jim Rimmer’s dog’s name was Spook). He wouldn’t obey anything Jim said. “Here Spook! Here Spook!” And the dog would go the other direction! One day, we would take turns at the Crossing one year and Rimmer was up there with his dog and the dog disappeared. And he never saw the dog again. Well, he said, he never saw the dog again except for once, “I was out there on my horse and I saw this pack of wolves go by and there was my dog leading the pack of wolves!”
“The dog left to run with the wolves?”
The wolves ate the dog! I inherited Jim’s horses, when Jim stopped doing backcountry patrols, and you wouldn’t believe the places (his horses took me). You know how horses are? They know the trails and they go where they have been. I was on my way to Isabella Lake, going up over Helen Lake, and I got up over Catherine and I thought, “I don’t know the trail very well. I will let the horses do it.” What the hell? If these horses didn’t go right to the edge of this cliff and start down the edge of this cliff! There’s no way! And I thought, “Jim must have taken the horses down there!” So I managed to get them stopped and I went and found the trail and got down, but the places my horses would take me that Jim had been! Jim was always losing his horses! I don’t know why? He was always out going down the trail in either his stocking feet because he’d been bucked off or something. He (wouldn’t) say he was bucked off, but he probably was. And then he’d be out looking for his horses and the radio calls would be flying everywhere and everybody would be looking for Jim’s horses. They would usually work their way back to Lake Louise. One was (named) Bog, Bog was the one I rode and Cinders was the pack horse…
(37:38) We were in the office at Lake Louise one day, the old office and Jim was there and Mike McKnight was there, and Jay Morton was there. I was always playing with words and having fun with words and Jim was always incredibly serious. Especially about watching the sheep up on Mount Wilson all the time. “I counted the sheep here…and I counted the sheep there…” There was no sheep! Anyways just to play a little joke one day I said, “Jim, I was up near Ball Lake yesterday and I was counting the sheep on Jimmy Simpson.” (Jim replied) “Oh, I know how many sheep are up there.” I said, “The peak next to it is Little Bow Peak, isn’t it?” “And yes?” I said, “Well, there is no sheep there anymore is there?” (Jim replied) “Oh, there’s lots of sheep, but maybe they’ve gone?” I said, “In that case, Little Bow Peak has lost her sheep!” Morton, just darted out the door! He thought I was going to get shot on the spot! Little Bow Peak has lost her sheep!

“It sounded like there were lots of characters.”

(38:56) Characters, yes! Morton, what a character! (Jay Morton was a warden in Lake Louise during the 1970s.) Did you get anything about him?

“Not a lot, but I know his name.”

Yes, Jay (When I started in Lake Louise, they weren’t giving single wardens housing. They would only give married wardens housing. So there was a space at the old Arrowhead Motel, which is gone now. And there was this tiny little closet at the back of Morton’s (room). Morton had been living at the Arrowhead for a couple of years at that point and that is what they gave me to live in! It was literally Morton’s closet! And Jay was a little heavy on the booze. Friday nights, he would have a few too many and then he would recover Saturday and Sunday. He would lay in his living room drinking chocolate milk and eating sunflower seeds and that was his cure for a hangover! He was a great guitarist. He played really well and sang. The story about Jay that I love, and you’ve got to get this story down right, is when were practicing heli-slinging. Putting slings on and flying back and forth and everybody thought they had it down right. The next day there was a rescue. I think it was up on Castle Mountain. I wasn’t on the rescue, I was just at the scene. So everybody straps in that’s going to go up on the rescue under the sling and the helicopter takes off. Right away, Jay flips upside down in his sling…the pilot is saying to him, “Do you want me to land? Do you want me to land?” “No, I can do this!” They come into the rescue scene and here’s this warden coming to rescue you, hanging upside down! So everybody said, the guy had three broken bones and a broken leg and he got up and ran home! That’s not true, but that’s what everybody said was probably going to happen! After that, everybody made sure they had that thing on right! It must have been terrifying, hanging upside down! It was impossible to come out of them I know that, but you could flip upside down if you didn’t do it right.

(41:38) I loved my time in Yoho! Yoho was just a wonderful little park…You could get to know so much of it and yet there are places in Yoho that you can’t even get to. You know up the Porcupine and places like that. There’s really no trails up there anymore. When I was doing the elk study, I had helicopter time and I could go into all these places looking for the elk because a lot of them were radio collared. I saw places in Yoho, I’m sure that very few other people have ever seen. It’s beautiful country, very different some of it. Different colored rock, like recently glaciated, just bare rock and a few little tundra plants growing which is really unusual. And of course (there is) Lake O’Hara and I had Lake O’Hara for a while and that was wonderful! Al Knowles was (there) before me. I got to know Al Knowles as well as anybody could get to know Al Knowles! He was a very quiet guy. I went to see him in Vancouver a couple of times after I was out of the warden service and I don’t know what happened to him after that. He just sort of disappeared. But he was quite the story. He took the environment very seriously and I think that a lot of the protections that went in Lake O’Hara were because of Al.

“His name is familiar, was he a warden?”

He was a warden. He walked every trail at Lake O’Hara pretty well every day. If you think about that, that is a lot of trails! People would be doing things, they weren’t supposed to up on the Opabin Plateau and all of sudden out of the bush would come Al. Like somebody one day was in at the crystal cave thinking of taking some crystals and out of nowhere Al turns up! “Oh, you are enjoying looking at the crystals are you?”

(43:44) If you ever have any lack of (information) on some of these other people, you know like Jay Morton and maybe Rimmer and would like to know more about them, I would be happy to give you something about them because I got to know them quite well.

“Did Jay end up on the east coast?”

Yes, he ended up on the east coast, in Kejimkujik. That is where he died. He married Andy Anderson’s (wife’s) sister…

“Is there anything about the warden service as you knew it, that you would want people to know?”

(44:50) It was very interesting when us guys with university degrees started with the fellas who didn’t have any (academic) training. It was a very interesting interface. They were really unsure of us and we were really unsure of them! I really commend Larry Gilmar because he took me and he taught me everything he could about horses and he never held anything back. He was really good to me about that. They always made fun of us being educated and stuff like that, but eventually I think they understood why that had to be. We had to bring the warden service into the 21st century. It was quite difficult dealing with some of these older fellows, like Rimmer and some of the older backcountry guys that had been out there forever, because they really didn’t want to have anything to do with us. Some of them were great like Larry and some of them like Rimmer, were not as easy at assimilating us. That I think is really important. It was an important step for Parks Canada to go that route. If you look now, they’ve got people with masters (degrees) and PhDs working. I regret where the warden service has gone because you go out any busy day now and people are getting away with murder everywhere because there are no wardens anywhere. My wife guides a lot of these trips, these multi-day trips and I go to Jasper with her when she does it and there are people camping everywhere and fires everywhere and driving their ATVs. You know, sure they got a bunch of PhDs working on vegetation studies, but those guys can’t do anything because they don’t have any (law enforcement power). Rosemary, my wife ,and I figure that they should just do back to the old system and just hire patrolman who could issue tickets, but they couldn’t arrest people or anything, but they could issue tickets. I think they really need to do that because you know what tourists are like, they will get away with whatever they can, sometimes to their own detriment.

(47:30) Other than that, there was a wonderful camaraderie as you have probably heard. No matter whether you liked that person or not, in a pinch you had to put your life in their hands or vice versa. Therefore that created a bond.

“Once you left the warden service, then you became an author?”

(48:01) An author and I have my own video production company and those things did really well for usAbout 2001, (September 11th) 9-11, was basically the end of tourism in the rockies for quite a while and that was sort of the end of my business too. I can’t regret it because I didn’t want to work all my life. My wife Rosemary still likes to guide, she likes getting out and taking people. She is a naturalist. That is how I met her actually…she was a park naturalist in Yoho. A little hanky panky there! But one of the other naturalists thought she and I would make a good pair. They suggested I go and help her out with her bear program one night! So that is how I found my wife.

“It sounds like you continue to be very active in retirement.”
(49:09) Oh yeah, as much as I can be. I’ve got two new knees, two new hips and an artificial ankle. So I can’t hike as much as I’d like, but I sure can bike a lot. I did 45 kilometers yesterday. I kayak a lot too. We are hoping to do a kayak trip up in the Broken Group this fall. So I’d get back to where I worked for a while. I’ve done a couple of kayak trips there. It’s either going to be the Broken Group or Desolation Sound…I loved working at Pacific Rim. It was so different! It’s never been gazetted, so it is still a very strange place for Parks to be and try to enforce rules, as you can imagine it was for us…

“I’m trying to think who else I spoke to about people camping on the beach, would it have been Jack.,.”Jack Holroyd, it was.

He was…the Superintendent when I moved out there. Fred Bamber was the Chief Park Warden. That was my first year in the warden service…it was pretty wild and wooly. Us chasing them off one end of the beach and them coming back on the other…

“Is there anything else that you would like to add? Or any lasting memories of a favorite cabin or place?”
(51:03) Well, Cyclone cabin. If I’ve had a particularly hard day and I need to calm myself down, I think about being at Cyclone cabin. There is a story here, that I’ve got to tell you. This is a great story! So Jerry Potts and I, that was our area for the summer. We were at Cyclone cabin and we went in one afternoon and got in fairly late and I was unpacking and there was a bottle of rum in my pack. I didn’t want to have any problem giving Jerry booze, but you know I wasn’t going to withhold it. So I said to Jerry as I am taking it out and I’m putting it under my sleeping bag…”Jerry, this is for emergencies only.” So I shoved it under there. I think I had to go back to Lake Louise for something. That night, the girls from Skoki cabin came over to visit at Cyclone. Of course they had a really good time! I got there the next morning and Jerry meets me at the door with this bottle saying, “It was an emergency!”
“Thank you very much, I really enjoyed hearing some of your stories and meeting you again. I worked for Don Mickle as a CO-OP student…”
(53:08) I think I met you then once I’m just amazed at how much you look like your dad (former warden Keith Everts) …he was a great guy! I don’t think I have too many stories, other than skiing out with Keith out on the Wapta and getting pictures of him. Someday, I should get you a copy of one just after he face planted and he was absolutely covered head to foot in snow. Coming down roped up, that was the worst part, everybody was going different directions! You get to the end of the rope and you get (yanked) back!

“He grew up in southern Ontario and I think he went to Rogers Pass first and when they asked if he could ski, he said yes! But obviously he couldn’t!”

Well, I guess there are varying degrees of yes, right?