(1:34:48) When I was born, my father was the district warden in Pass Creek or Red Rock, I guess you’d call it. When I was about five years old…he was promoted to Chief Park Warden. From that time forward he was Chief Park Warden until he retired in Waterton. We moved from the Pass Creek cabin to a house on Knight’s Lake which was designated as the Chief Warden’s house at that time. After we left they built a new house in town. The Chief Warden had that. But we were four miles out of town, that’s why we had to ride to school all those years.
(1:35:53) Yes, quite a bit (Jack would go out in the backcountry with his dad). As a Chief Warden, he was certainly more of an outdoors person than he was an office person. I don’t think he relished the office work that was involved, but it wasn’t a whole lot in those days. I can remember going out with my dad. He just about always had a trail crew working somewhere in the summer in the park. One of my first recollections of going with him, is when…they had some rock to work with and they were blasting. I can remember being very impressed by that. They had to drill holes with a sledge hammer and a drill bit that they simply kept hitting until they had a hole deep enough to get down to the level they wanted to get and then they would put a stick of dynamite in the hole, or whatever was required and touch this dynamite off. I can remember, so distinctly, my dad made me go way down the trail. Further than I really needed to be I think, and I was to get behind a big tree there and I wasn’t to move. When this dynamite went off I can remember banging my head against the tree it startled me so much. I was pretty young then, certainly single digits as far as age, probably six or seven.
(1:38:04) Another great adventure that I had with my Dad, was when they were doing some work on the Crypt Lake trail in Waterton. ..To access the Crypt Lake trail you have to cross the Upper Waterton Lake one way or another, either on a boat, or across the narrows on horseback which meant swimming horses. Crypt Lake was a very pretty little alpine lake. But one of the features that really got me was that you had to go through a tunnel in the rock to get to it. I guess this tunnel was originally partly natural and because it meant either going through this tunnel or blasting a trail around a cliff face, it was easier to enlarge the tunnel a little bit. You couldn’t walk through you had to crawl through it. Again as a youngster, my older brother and sister were with us. When we crawled through that tunnel and I had visions of meeting a bear halfway or something terribly scary! But we got through it and at that time the enlargement was pretty minimal. In subsequent years they kept chipping away at it, making it a little bigger.
(1:39:54) I can also remember – I think it was the same trip – It was a hot, hot day and my dad got us up to the lake which was about a quarter of a mile or half mile past the tunnel and the lake was all ringed with snow banks melting into it. It was so hot and my dad suggested that we go swimming. So my brother, sister and I all peeled down to our underwear and jumped in the lake and “Oh, my God, was it cold!” I think it was about 32 and a half degrees Fahrenheit. But we cooled off very suddenly!
(1:40:52) I think of it sometimes being a warden. But no, I don’t miss it. I had my shot at it. I wasn’t actually a warden nearly as long as a lot of them. I sort of moved on to Chief Warden and Superintendent and then I was regional Chief of Resource Conservation…that was the title they allotted. So my years in the warden service proper were limited. I’d have liked to have been a warden in a district much longer, but we go back to the education thing. You couldn’t always indulge your preferences because you had to look towards what your family’s needs were. Quite frankly, I would not want to be a warden today. I think one way or another – and that’s another story all together – they’ve brutalized the system to the point where, although I am not very close to it out here, I don’t think it is even recognizable. And it has been brutalized a lot since your dad’s time. When I look back on it, I am glad I was a warden when I was and not today. I think it was probably even better in my dad’s time, going back that far. I certainly can’t remember when he started but I can remember the latter part of his career as a warden. It seemed like he was always snowshoeing someplace or going someplace with the saddle horses. It seemed like he was outdoors a great deal of the time. It looked like a pretty good life.
(1:43:38) There were times of frustration and there was good times. Back in my early days some of the warden service parties were legend. They were kind of restricted to wardens and their families. We had some great old parties, drank a lot of beer, had a lot of fun. Nothing too reckless by today’s standards!
(1:44:23) I can remember that lad was killed up at the head of the Red Deer in Banff. If I knew him, I didn’t know him well. Neil Colgan. But I can remember meeting with his parents. Like parents naturally would be, they were very concerned that he died in circumstances where he was by himself and couldn’t get help. At that time, in that area, I am not even sure if we had a phone line into that cabin. At one time we put in single side band radio systems, but of course that functioned only if you were at the radio. We were starting to get portable radios, which were great big clumsy things by today’s standards, but they had them. But you had to be in an area where they functioned and in a lot of the park they didn’t function. They (Neil Colgan’s parents) came to my office I think two or three times to discuss the death of their son, and I am sure they were in Banff and they discussed it there too with the Chief Warden and other wardens that were well known to Neil. But, since I was the senior man in the region at that time, they came to me and really were insistent. They wanted to know why we didn’t have better communication. I tried to explain to them, although we weren’t always on the cutting edge of technology, we functioned for a great many years with very little communication. We hadn’t reached the stage where we had communication that we could use from a saddle horse…They felt everybody who went into the backcountry should have some sort of a radio. I said, “If and when we ever reach that stage, what about the tourists who use the backcountry and get into trouble…” I said, “You carry it to the extreme end and you no longer have any backcountry.” I didn’t put it in those terms, but I tried to get it across to them that part of the mystique of those backcountry areas was their isolation. In those days there wasn’t nearly as many tourists using the backcountry as there are now. I didn’t tell them that, but I for one didn’t want to see the day when everybody had instant communication. Relate it to today, I go for a walk here and half the people I meet have got a phone in their ear. I think, “My God, why can’t they leave those things at home?” I went for a five kilometre walk this morning before you came and several people I met were on their phones. I don’t have one, but I wouldn’t carry it if I did because I want to see the morning, I want to see the sun on the water…Back in those days I didn’t want to see the same sort of thing in the backcountry of Banff or Jasper. You know you go into the backcountry because it is quasi wilderness. I don’t want to be able to plug in things and have all the bells and whistles of the technical age at your finger tips. It would ruin it.
(1:49:58) Don (Mickle) came from a horse family. I remember Bert Mickle. He was a character, I didn’t know him terribly well but he looked like a character too. He looked the part, kind of the old school cowboy type that wrangled horses for a living. What was Donny’s sister’s name? (Faye) I didn’t know her all that well, but she seemed like a good kid…His mother was a nice lady too…
