(0:57:37) John – There was the woman who was run over down there one time in the campground. Vehicles were going by and her horse started acting up. Something happened and she just had to step back and she happened to step between a truck and a trailer and the trailer ran over her. The lady who was driving the truck, didn’t even know that she had done this. Well, it was in a really bumpy area and she just thought it was the holes or the bumps on the ground. So she didn’t know. This other lady is quite a tiny lady, so it appeared that she was very badly injured. When we got the call, these people came up and told us about it, they said that there was a group of about four emergency doctors from the Foothills (hospital). They were just pulling out and they stopped them. The doctors looked after her. They had her on a piece of plywood, backboard and everything. They also determined what kind of trauma she was in. We were lucky. Lance (Cooper, a helicopter pilot) landed there and STARS came from Edmonton because STARS in Calgary were at another call. They didn’t want to land because they didn’t know the area. So anyway Lance was there and he told them how to get here and where is was level to land.
(0:58:57) Marie – He could communicate with them. It’s this kind of terrain. You are safe to land here or whatever. Then the ground ambulance somebody had called them too…These doctors said to me, because I had the ranch truck down there, “We are going to put her in the back of the truck and you are going to have to drive over to the helicopter.” That was the STARS EMT’s. And I thought, “Oh no!” Because of the potholes and stuff, I was really not looking forward to that at all.” What saved me was in came the ground ambulance. So they loaded her in the ground ambulance and transported her to the helicopter and all was well. I saw her a couple of years later up there. She told me that she had been in a body cast for a year.
(1:00:25) Marie – A lot of people, they sent you the nicest notes afterwards you know when you have helped them.
(1:00:32) John – Another thing that happened when we were out there, there was that meteorite. It went across the sky and there was this “BOOM!” like thunder. The contractor was there, putting tin on the Quonset roof when that happened. We were looking with binoculars, down at a grizzly sow and cubs that were on the flats. Then all of a sudden, “BOOM!”
(1:00:58) Marie – That was October 11, a month after the September 11 tragedy…We heard the sound and I thought it was a big rock fall or a jet crashing. So I waited about an hour and then I phoned dispatch. Well dispatch had their hands full with callers!
(1:01:25) John – One warden saw it. They happened to see it, Randy and the Kootenay guys. They were riding through. They saw the streak of light.
(1:01:35) Marie – A lot of people hadn’t and of course people were so nervous after 911. Whoever I talked to said, “Well we think it is a meteorite, but we don’t have any confirmation at this point. But we are pretty sure it is.” They had their hands full with calls. Some people in the Bow Valley actually saw it here in Canmore.
(1:01:56) John – They thought it landed up by Fort McMurray or somewhere up in the Northwest Territories. Somewhere up there.
(1:02:08) Marie – So that was exciting!
(1:02:09) Marie – I recall another incident of interest…it was about 6:30 in the morning and Perry (Jacobson) and Don Mickle and John were over in the bunkhouse and I think Bob Haney too. They had stayed the night. I was sitting in the living room watching the news and I heard this low rumbling noise and felt a tremor rattle the house. The windows rattled on the porch of our home. I thought, “Oh my gosh, something happened to the generator.” So I went out and looked out the door and those guys were all just standing on the porch of the bunkhouse talking. Nothing was going on? So I never thought anything of it. A week or so later, I receive the Crag and Canyon (newspaper) in the mail and it has this little write up about an earthquake. (August 19, 1998 Crag & Canyon – an earthquake measuring 3.6 on the Richter Scale located 30 kms northeast of Lake Louise occurred at 5:38 am.)
Do you have any lasting memories of the Ya Ha Tinda?
(1:03:48) Marie – For me it is just the scenery. You can’t get enough of it. I’d laugh at myself. I’d go out there with my camera and I am sure I took photos of the same scene over and over!
Gathering the patrol horses in May of 2002. Photo by Marie Nylund
(1:04:00) John – They did a movie out there for oh what’s his name?
(1:04:06) Marie – It was a music video for Robbie Williams.
(1:04:14) John – Daryl Hannah was the star.
(1:04:19) Marie – It was a romantic type one. I forget the name of the song – I may have been “Feel”. I have a copy of the DVD. They brought horses up there. He wanted it to be sort of a cowboy thing. They brought horses in with guys like the Thompsons. They came in and rode the broncs. Doug Richards brought some rodeo stock up there. The Pengelly’s brought horses. They set up the bronc chutes and everything and this bathtub outside which was really rustic.
(1:04:54) John – They made it (the stand for the bathtub) out of barn board slabs and they filled it with water. So that guy was having a bath in the video. But anyway the day before they filled it with water and that night one of the colts took a dump in it! The guys were cleaning it out and the one guy there said, “Don’t tell anyone about it or that guy (Robbie Williams) won’t go in the tub.”
(1:05:28) Marie – In the video he goes under the water in the tub! Oh, I was laughing!
(1:05:31) John – The film crew had cleaned it out well, but they said if he knew, he wouldn’t have done it.
(1:05:39) Marie – They had these big long Cadillac’s up there. Part of the song goes into this love scene with the Cadillac. Actually, they lucked out. They had this beautiful sunset. But the video is in black and white for some reason? I don’t know why, but it was quite interesting.
(1:06:35) John – In one of the shots, they have four guys riding and they had to race up towards the house from down by the gate. They did that about how many times? About ten times, doing retakes until they had it right.
(1:06:25) Marie – It was like a major movie. They whole yard was just full of trailers. There were people doing the food services and the cleaning crew and the film crew. Darryl Hannah had a great big fifth wheel. That was like her dressing room and she could sleep in it. He had his own. They filmed some of it in the barn and some of it outside. It was quite a production.
(1:07:19) John – The whole yard was full of tents and trailers.
(1:07:34) Marie – It was done in about 2002. It’s pretty neat.
(1:07:45) John – Then we had John Scott out there filming for a story on the Ya Ha Tinda.
(1:07:55) Marie – Yeah, that was for the World of Horses. He did a segment on the World of Horses. That was basically on Parks Canada horse operation, like how the ranch raises its patrol horses and prepares them for the wardens and on the Ya Ha Tinda as a functional ranch and how it related to the park. It was quite interesting.
(1:08:12) John – We had Ian Tyson out there too overnight. He was nice to us, he was good to us.
(1:08:17) Marie – We really enjoyed his visit. He stayed the night in the bunkhouse with, do you know, Stephen Legault? Stephen actually brought him out there.
(1:08:32) John – He (Ian) wanted to do a picture (music video) of all the old time ranches along the foothills from the Ya Ha Tinda right to Mexico.
(1:08:44) Marie – But he could never get the funding to actually do the music video. He did a show before, like a one hour, half hour show on the Gang Ranch. He wanted to do a similar one, like on the old ranches, but he couldn’t get the funding for it. We really enjoyed him. He had supper with us and he rode a couple of days with us.
(1:09:09) John – We went for a ride and we were looking into the Big Horn canyon on the east side. The horses were fighting flies and his horse bit at a fly on his chest and in the process he caught the breast collar in his mouth and the horse went flying backwards. It was luck that he wasn’t towards the canyon. That was scary! If it had been the other way, he would have probably went over.
(1:09:48) Marie – He said, “Oh I would have just stepped off.” I thought, “In time?”
(1:10:01) Marie – He was very nice and very interesting. He really bonded with Johnny…
Do you ever miss the ranch?
(1:10:40) Marie – Oh yeah!
Do you go back there often?
(1:10:48) John – We go up there once in a while. Not this year much, but other years we went two or three times riding.
(1:11:01) Marie – We would meet other people up there, like friends from different places and we would camp for two or three days and ride…It’s kind of neat camping in the campground because we used to always tell people, “You know we want you guys to follow the rules that we’ve set up here because I want to come back here someday and it still be here, so that I can use it.” They would say “Oh okay.” Now I see some of those people up there. Quite often we will just pack a lunch and go up there for the day. Take the camera and take pictures, it is really nice. And we will visit whoever is up there. We’ll pop in and say hello. If I go to the yard, I have to go to the museum. Do the little tour and see what they’ve added.
(1:11:59) John – It was kind of hard to leave there. You look after that place like it is your own and then somebody else takes over.
(1:12:13) Marie – And the funding thing you know. They don’t have money to carry on with the brood herd so they cut it out and things get changed. As long as they keep hanging on to it, that’s the main thing.
Is there anything else that you would like to add?
(1:12:46) Marie – With the museum I really got into that. “When I first went to the Ya Ha Tinda, I sort of thought “Am I going to like it here?” And it took me about a month before I absolutely got into it and I really enjoyed it! There was already a process in place for giving tours, usually to people who were staying at Frontier Town, which was a little set up near the gate to the ranch. They would bring their tourists up and I would give a little building tour, really. But then as I started reading more history, especially Nellie Murphy’s background and her experiences at the ranch, I got quite interested in it. So then I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a little interpretive display.” This is when Johnny bought the granary and they moved all the grain out of that particular building and built a new granary. I cleaned all that out and we made a nice little display. There was a lot of stuff that Don (Mickle, Cultural Resource Manager of Banff National Park) donated that were pictures from some of the exhibits that we had done at the Whyte Museum, you know for Back to Banff Day. He gave me those and Frank Burstrom found an old stove and a chainsaw and different things. The old telephone equipment, some of that was still at the ranch. I even found an intact telephone pole lying out at West Lakes and I went out there with a quad one day to haul it back! Out of some of the stuff that Mike Schintz wrote and Nellie wrote, especially Nellie’s, like her grocery list was in her memoirs, what she would order for groceries. So I just excerpt it. I put that all up for the written stuff and then I copied all the pictures myself, just on the photocopier and dry mounted them. Deb Hornsby a friend of mine who worked at the Banff town office, she used to do a lot of displays using that foam board. She would give me all the old stuff, so I would just flip it over or else just use it and cut it to size and put the pictures on. It was fun! I really enjoyed it. Now Jasper has given them a couple of really beautiful glass and wood, mahogany display cases. So some of the stuff that has got to be protected they put in that. I am glad to see that it is still part of it and that the tours are more of a function at the ranch. Actually, I think they are part of Jean’s job description now. A certain amount of her pay is to do the tours. So obviously they are taking it more seriously.
