Gordon Rutherford

(1:02:16) Yoho decided to have their own gymkhana from about the late 1970s, right through until I retired. I don’t know if they continued after that or not. It was a fun time and it was open to anyone actually. We would quite often have members from other Parks join us. It was a real good time. That was in September, before we took the horses back to the ranch.

(1:03:48) We’d truck the horses back to the ranch. Sometimes they would go to Lake Louise and do that trip over the Skoki area. They did that a few years and I always wanted to go on that trip but I never got around to it. I trucked them back a few times. They would take all the horses to Lake Louise and then they would head out from Lake Louise. When I first started working there must have been a good (almost) 30 horses because each district had at least two to four horses. Then there was quite a company of horses right at the ranch for backpacking into the backcountry and trail crews…Then it just slowly dwindled down to around 15 horses. They were all at the ranch there.

(1:06:54) We also, just before Christmas, down at the ranch where we served chili, soup, eggnog and that sort of thing. It was neat getting together like that.

(1:08:03) And being in a small community of course you had the Volunteer Fire Department. Wardens in town were quite often involved, so I was a member. I became the Fire Chief the last few years before my retirement. Some of us wardens also got involved with the Ambulance Service.

(1:11:33) That was another one (technology changes). When I first got on with the wardens they were just starting to use the two way radio system (VHF).. They were big awkward things. They took up quite a bit of space in the vehicles. The first portables were big and awkward as well, but I guess you have to start somewhere and they served there purpose well enough. We still had a few forestry phone lines but we eventually went totally to using radio. And that certainly changed over time again. They got smaller and smaller. I don’t know what they are using now, GPS and that sort of thing.

(1:13:46) Then the Partridge Slide! I don’t know if you remember that? That was back in the early CPR history. Part of Mount Cathedral there it slid down. There were section houses in its path, and a man by the name of Seth Partridge, a steam locomotive engineer , happened by chance to see the start of the rock slide. He was able to alert the occupants before the slide reached their location.

(1:14:33) In fact I’ve have a picture of two old wardens Dick Langford and Joe Burkit. They were one of the first park wardens, well not the first. But (they were) some of the earlier (wardens in Yoho) like in the 1930s and 40s.

Yoho National Park Wardens
Joe Burkit and Dick Langford 1939