Was the dog okay?

Yeah, it lived. It was about three thousand dollars worth of surgery! It was one of those Siberian husky’s, it was just running along, they were cross-country skiing. The dog was running along and he ran up the snow bank on the edge of the bridge railing and he jumped. Seventy feet later he hit the ice down below. I can’t believe that he lived! But that was the last one (rescue) that was in early March and I retired at the end of March.

“Do you have any wildlife stories?”

(58:22) We’ve got thousands of them! We’ve got thousands of bear stories, Athabasca Falls is where most of them happened, I guess the ones that we remember…At the time we were there they went into this dumpster sort of situation where they had these big bins where the bears could open the door and crawl in. We had all kinds of stories around that with bears. Again, we had some serious maulings and whatnot, but I managed not to be involved in any of them. The fatality they had here in what was that, 1992 at Portal Creek. That was sort of a good story too I guess. We were in the backcountry, we did a little fall trip into the Brazeau. At radio schedule time everybody came up with the news about what had happened…There was a grizzly that had been in the area all summer long. They kind of assumed that I guess because I don’t think that they had any real proof, but it was late in the fall and this British couple had hiked up and they were just setting up camp at Portal Creek…it was a backcountry campsite. This bear came wandering into the camp and they went up the tree. It started picking around through their pack and they decided this wasn’t going to work, sitting in the tree. He talked her into jumping out of the tree and making a run for it and she did. The bear started towards her, so he jumped out of the tree and the bear attacked him. That was basically the end of the story there as far as he was concerned, but she managed to make it part way down the trail and then there was a hiker in the campground sleeping while all this was going on and he heard a bit of a kerfuffle. He managed to get out of there and he went all the way out and reported it.

(1:00:46) Sharon – Was that the Tonquin situation?

(1:00:48) Gord – Yeah, it was the Tonquin, Portal Creek. Then the wardens got involved. That is sort of a brief summary of what the story was. We were in the backcountry and we heard this on radio schedule at 8:00. We heard the story and of course when something like that happens, you get pretty primed up eh? We were sitting there and I don’t know if the radio schedule was still on, or it was shortly after, we hear this noise on the deck. We look out through the window and here is this bear looking in at us! A sow black bear and two cubs, so that got us all spooked up. So I loaded a shell into the rifle and I went onto the porch and let off a shot. I don’t know what happened because it was darker than the inside of a cow. I don’t know where she went. All we had was a little flashlight. So that was sort of our memory from that incident.

(1:02:00) Sharon – I think that the best story…I wasn’t there, but I think the best story is when you were riding and you rode through that mom (and her cubs).

(1:02:13) Gord – That was late in my career. I don’t know how many thousands of miles I rode and I never had much to do with grizzlies…I mean running into them on the trail you know. Lots of guys had hair raising experiences. But this was mid 1990s.

(1:02:33) Sharon – Kubian went in after you.

(1:02:35) Gord – Glen Kubian was the district warden then, he was assigned to the Rocky River district that summer.

(1:02:41) Sharon – You were coordinator.

(1:02:42) Gord – Anyways I was riding through the Rocky. I had gone around the south boundary and I was coming down and I ran into a sow and cubs up in Cairn Pass, up in the alpine. That kind of made me a little nervous because it was right on the trail. I could see her, I had a real good view of her and they were just cubs of the year. You want to watch out for them. So I gave her a wide berth with the horses, we went off the trail and away up around them. I kept on going and we passed them and I looked back as I am going and here she is coming behind me. I get over the pass and I get down just about into the trees again and I looked back and she is still coming! I was looking over my shoulder there for about six kilometers or so…I get down to Rocky Forks and spend the night there or maybe two nights and then I go down towards Jacques Lake from Rocky Forks there. I get past Grizzly cabin and this appropriately named Grizzly Campsite, which is three or four kilometers down river from the cabin. I am just riding along and I got this packhorse behind me. My two horses didn’t walk the same speed. This packhorse was about 100 feet behind me or more. I came through this area where there is quite a bad slump and there is a little creek which is making some noise and the river…so there is lots of noise. I am riding along, kind of day dreaming like people tend to do when they are riding by themselves and Grizzly Campsite is coming up and then all of a sudden, the horse swaps ends 180 degrees and is gone! As he is going around I see this hair, just hair that is all I could make out and he is down the trail. By the time I got him reined in he had just about run over the pack horse. I get him stopped and I look around and there is nothing there, so we turn around and the packhorse, she doesn’t even know what was going on. I turned my saddle horse around and carried on. The horses settled down pretty good, so I thought, “If they are okay, I am okay.” So we just kept going. I get around a couple of bends in the trail and I can see this pile of fur coming up there. She is lying on her back nursing her cubs. They are cubs from the year before, they are yearlings. She sees me coming and she makes a noise, something like a pissed off cat! It wasn’t quite like a bear sounds like in my experience, but she let out this kind of yowl, up she gets and takes off down the trail ahead of me, thank goodness! The horses are just riding along, no problem. They just see the bear, “That’s a bear, okay.” We just kept going and we get around a couple more bends and then I can hear her. You’ve probably heard bears that are a little mad, they are clacking their teeth and they are moaning and a little bit of huffing and snuffling you know. The horses weren’t concerned, so I thought, “If they are not concerned I guess we will just keep going.” I started talking to her as I went by and she is in this thicket of scrub spruce, the tallest tree was probably 15 or 20 feet tall. It was so thick that I couldn’t see her in there. There was a bit of a bank that came down and then a bit of a flat and she is in there somewhere. I kept riding and looking over my shoulder for about another five or six kilometers to see if she was following me. She wasn’t so I got to the cabin and wrote the story in the log book. Then about ten days or two weeks later, I went back up country through there and when I got to that spot I had a close look and I thought, “God, she was probably not much more than 40/50 feet away maybe, if that. Three jumps and she would have been on us!” After that in 2003, that whole valley burnt out. It so happened that our kids and I, we made a trip up there, Rundi and Travis and I. That whole area had burnt right out of there, so we had a really good look at that spot where she was and it was just this length of this house. She had to be that close. All those little trees were burnt right out of there. That was probably my most potentially dangerous encounter with grizzlies, but I had some incidents with the study that were pretty scary, but the bear had a cable attached to its leg luckily!

“Did you ever worry about him when he was working on the bear study?”

(1:08:18) Sharon – And you actually knew that that potential was there. I mean you kind of know when you are in the backcountry that potential is there, but when you are dealing with bears, you are kind of (more aware). Well, you know what? I really liked the men that he was working with and I really trusted them You know what? I worried more about the flying, the helicopter. Then I got to know Garry (the helicopter pilot) quite well so I really trusted his flying and I trusted his intuition and smarts and the men he worked with. I think it is the people that you are with as much as yourself. I shouldn’t say I never worried, but I didn’t really worry that much…And I didn’t worry living out (of town) I worried more actually about people, than I ever worried about animals.

(1:09:18) Sharon – We’ve had a few things like motorcycle gangs at Athabasca Falls! When he was on the bear study, he was gone for 21 days so I was there by myself on the highway. I had a few interesting situations happen there and it was with people. Of course part of it was falling asleep on the chesterfield and having people show up in your living room…They would step over our vicious Airedale to get in! There were a few times that were a little hair raising, but you get through it. It is interesting, the more things that you have going on in your life that you get an opportunity to experience, the easier it is to face some of these other things right?

(1:10:23) Gord – Tell Christine, the story about the dog and the bear…That wasn’t really frowned upon, but it was stuff that was done. You know we had this Airedale dog that was really good with bears. He didn’t fight with them, but he was really good at harassing them. He had all kinds of practice at Athabasca Falls when the bears would come to visit our garbage can. But one night when I was in the backcountry, Sharon had this knock on the door. People had a problem at Kerkeslin Campground.

(1:11:01) Sharon – The bear was sitting on their cooler and they wanted to leave. I said, “Well I will come with you, as long as this is just between you and I.” Because I didn’t want it to be known that I sicced my dog on the bear. So we went in their car and took our dog. We opened the car door, the dog got out and chased the bear away and that was it.

(1:11:29) Gord – That was the end of the story.

(1:11:32) Sharon – Then there was the time with the motorcycle gang. It had been on the radio…that they were coming through town, the Hells Angels or something like that…It was a warden/RCMP alert that these guys were coming through right. They weren’t coming through from Banff on that road.

(1:11:54) Gord – Probably Highway 16.

(1:11:58) Sharon – But it just happened that at the same time there was a guy coming for gas and he was riding a motorcycle. So he stopped the motorcycle at our door. He was knocking at my door and I heard it and thought, “I wonder if there are some more bikes?” I was sort of standing there waiting for a little while and he was knocking insistently and I am listening to see if more bikes are coming. My storyline was getting better and better as I was waiting for these bikes to come! So finally, I didn’t go to the door, I went up to the kid’s bedroom that faced out over top of the stoop where he was knocking and I said, “There is nobody home!” I meant no warden…He looked up at me and he said, “I just need gas.” And I said, “Okay, give me a few minutes.” Then I said, “Would you slide your driver’s license under the door please?”…So I radioed in his driver’s license. I said, “I am going outside to a guy on a motorcycle to give him gas and this is his driver’s license.” Then I went out and pumped him some gas. I thought, “If I get killed, they are going to know who did it!”

Sharon, did you say there was a bear story with Ed Carleton? (Ed Carleton was a park warden in Banff National Park for 31 years.)

(1:13:39) Sharon – It was just cute actually.

(1:13:45) Gord – They had him in the office for I don’t know how many years. Then in 1970 they took him out of the office and said, “Ed you are a field warden again.” This guy, what the heck was his name? He was an outfitter from Canmore, Floyd Smith… He had an outfitting business in the Bryant Creek country. He took mules up there and he had clients and what not. He had a camp just before you get to the Bryant Creek warden cabin…and a grizzly came into his camp one night. So he had a gun and I can’t remember whether he had approval, he must have had approval because I don’t think that there was a charge…This is in 1970 eh? Anyway he took a shot at the bear and he winged it and the bear took off on him…He reported it the next morning, so the experts… Billy Vroom, Jimmy Robertson and me went in to look for this bear. When we got in there it was raining, it was one of those rainy periods. It rained all day long and we rode miles looking for this damn bear… Billy and Jim spent the night at the Bryant Creek cabin and the next day they had to go back to town. They were needed in town for whatever. I went out with them to the trailhead and they shipped…Randy (Chisholm) out…So the two of us went roaring around there for three days looking for this bear. We rode over to Assiniboine down to Leman Lake, I forget now the names of some of those places we went. Then finally after about three days they said, “You guys have got to come back to town. We are going to ship Ed out.” That was when the rain let up, when we were riding out to the trailhead. We met Ed…and he needed help getting his horse packed…We didn’t know much about packing either, but between the three of us we managed to get him packed up. And we sent him on his way. I guess as he was riding in the sun came out. He rode up Bryant Creek, he was riding along the trail and he got close to this campsite and he could smell this god awful smell, so he went over and Ed found the bear…

(1:16:41) Sharon –All these other guys had been in there checking it out for days, but Ed went in and found it (right away). So it was kind of a cute story because it was hooray for him!

(1:16:49) Gord – It was this high scrub willow…and this bear was lying underneath all that in a bit of a creek bed, a dry creek bed. I know that we rode within 20 feet of that bear probably. The horses didn’t smell it and we didn’t see it because Billy, Jimmy and I, that first day we rode all through that…It was within a half a mile of the campsite…I felt pretty good for old Ed at the time because it was hard on him.

(1:17:56) Sharon – This was near the end of his career.

(1:17:58) Gord – He (Ed) had a big influence on me wanting to be a warden. You would go up to the office…he was the office warden at the Kremlin there. (The Parks Administration building in Banff was locally known as The Kremlin.) He was always just immaculately dressed. He was handsome.

(1:18:21) Sharon – He had beautiful white hair, he was a good looking man with a beautiful build…

(1:18:28) Gord – He was always wearing a tunic. He was a perfect example of what a warden should look like. He was the first impression as to what people met when they came to see the chief warden because he was the guy who greeted them.

(1:18:44) Sharon – And he was so personable.

(1:18:46) Gord – Yeah, we loved Ed, and Dorothy is our heroine. (Dorothy Carleton is a war bride from England who came to Canada in 1946. For many years she and Ed and their three boys lived in the backcountry districts of Banff National Park. At age 93 she is a very well loved and active member of the Banff community.)

(1:18:58) Sharon – She is beautiful. I got to be part of that discussion at Num-Ti-Jah with her. (In 2004, Num-Ti-Jah Lodge hosted a series of Fireside Chats, one of which focused on women who were part of the mountain park warden service.) And I thought man, how does anyone tell a story after her, she is just so incredible!

“How did the warden service change over the years that you worked?”

(1:19:30) Gord – Dating back to 1958, that was the old fashioned warden service that I was first introduced to. The changes started in the 1960s, you’ve heard these guys talk about the Sime-Schuler Report and the MUST team and all that? (In the 1960s, Jim Sime and Don Schuler began a national study of the warden service. “The Park Warden Function in the National Parks Service” was approved in 1968. The report introduced the term “resource management” and stressed that the concept had been a reality Parks for many years, but without long term planning. The document also stressed that the warden, “as a manager of multiple resources…must be a generalist rather than a specialist.” The report stated the warden service has four general roles: natural resource management, public relations, public safety and law enforcement. In terms of law enforcement, Sime and Schuler, suggested “laws which are designed to protect the resources from people, or people from resources, should be the responsibility of the warden service. Burns, R.J. and Schintz M. Guardians of the Wild (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2000, 262).

Banff was probably the first park that started introducing some of these theories, by centralizing. That process was underway when we started.

(1:20:02) Sharon – Jasper was slower.

(1:20:05) Gord – Jasper was slower. A lot of that had to do with the chief here at the time Mickey McGuire. He really dragged his feet.

(1:20:13) Sharon – And kept the districts.

(1:20:15) Gord – As long as he was chief, it really didn’t change much. Although they did have what they called the area system. Max Winkler (was in charge) of the town and he looked after the Athabasca Valley. He took the position that used to be for the assistant chief…that was in 1969/1970. That area system carried on, now I can’t remember what the years were now, but they changed it to a function system then and Banff went the same way. In the area system you were still a generalist, in the function system you were assigned to a specific function like law enforcement, public safety or resource conservation. I guess that happened in 1975, 1974/75, that was when Haney became the resource conservation manager. Toni Klettl was always…in public safety, right from then to his retirement.