(0:06:57) So Elaine was living in that little 17 foot trailer with two kids. Then she went to work at Boyles Store at Lake Louise. She worked there when she could. But I was never home much then due to the training. They really put a lot of emphasis into training…through the summer they sent us on climbing courses and we started to get into the law enforcement training in those days too. But most of the emphasis at that time was on public safety. Resource management was to come a little later too. You were away from home more than you were there, that was for sure with the training. We did a lot of it up at the (Jasper) Palisades at that time. It was too bad that that didn’t keep up because that was a national program. You got to share a lot of ideas and meet a lot of different people. You started to realize what a big family the warden service really is.
(0:08:00) Elaine was just super about that you know (about Perry going away for training). She gave up her career because she had been a teacher… She was the one who convinced me to go back to school and get an education. It was her that really got me started in that direction.
(0:08:30) When I went back to school I actually had in mind to be a veterinarian. This (the biological sciences) was going to be a pre course into that kind of stuff. But that was where I met wardens Ray Frey and Bob Wood and they were the ones who convinced me to try the warden service.
(0:08:47) The thing that was so interesting about Lake Louise that I didn’t know before getting there was the grizzlies. See the open dumps had been shut down in 1968/69, so this wasn’t very long after that when you think about it (1972). It was unbelievable how many grizzlies were in Lake Louise at that time. Over the two years we trapped 27 different grizzlies! I remember one night for instance there were seven different grizzlies in the Lake Louise campground! I was the only warden on shift that night. I didn’t really know what to do at that time so much, except just keep these bears moving around as best I could! There was a sow with a couple of cubs. There were seven all together, I remember that anyways! The thing about it was I can’t imagine why we didn’t have more people hurt. It was amazing when you think about it.
(0:09:50) We lived in the trailer court in Lake Louise and at 10:00 or 11:00 at night there would be grizzlies wandering up and down the street. I worked a lot with Monty Rose at that time. We were immobilizing these bears and flying them out which really we were to learn wasn’t much use. We were fighting the symptoms instead of the real cause. We knew it was the garbage and all that type of stuff. That comes later…It came to a head in the 1980s…
(0:10:20) So that was a real eye opener, dealing with the bears in Lake Louise. Then I was assigned to Larry Gilmar as a seasonal warden. Larry of course had been in every district in Banff. He was really well traveled. Larry was just a wonderful guy to travel with. He was one of the best packers that I ever dealt with. He could pack anything! We spent a lot of time in the backcountry that first summer…Wally McPhee was the area manager then and with all the bears running around Wally wasn’t too keen on losing any of the wardens to the backcountry! So you usually had to go in and kind of beg a trip. It still wasn’t really organized like it got later on with centralization. But we always managed to escape for a trip or two.
(0: 11: 15) After I had been in Lake Louise for a couple of years, Jim Rimmer finally decided to leave Saskatchewan River Crossing. Well, he didn’t decide, it was decided for him! Andy Anderson had come in as chief then. Andy had a pretty good vision of where he wanted to go, I’ll have to say that about Andy. Well anyway, Jim moved into Lake Louise so we could run Saskatchewan Crossing on a rotation basis. You would be there ten days. I really enjoyed that because basically it was just like the old district system. Once you were there you had everything … car accidents, bears…It didn’t matter what it was. I did that for two years off and on. I gained a tremendous amount of experience there. You had nobody else there, but yourself to make those decisions. I mean you had radio calls and stuff like that…Kim had started school then and they were bused to Banff from Lake Louise. Elaine and the kids would come up on the weekends. She got to fit in real easy. She used the radio and stuff like that when things were going on and I wasn’t there.
0:12:21) There were a lot of serious accidents, but there were sure some funny things that happened out of there. I can remember this one time a car came steaming into the gate and I was just having something to eat. Two young guys jumped out of their car and ran into the house. “We trapped a bear for you! The bear is trapped!” I said, “Where?” They said, “At Cirrus Mountain! Can you come right away?” And away they went. I sat there for a minute and I thought I don’t have a trap at Cirrus Mountain! It was at the other campground. So I jumped in the truck and went roaring up there and sure enough they trapped a bear all right. It was in one of those big garbage bins with the big lid on. A bear climbed in there and they slammed on the lid! They must have had a ton of rocks piled up on this thing. So I said, “What have you got there? Is it a black bear or a grizzly?” “Well we don’t know?” There had been a grizzly there so I wasn’t sure what was in the bin, except there was a hell of a racket coming out! So anyway, when things are going on like that, people gather around because they smell trouble, you know. With any luck at all they might see some bloodshed, well “tongue in cheek”! These guys were trying to drift off before they caught hell from me for what they did. I said, “Now hold on there. You are going to help me get this bear out of there. We took all the rocks off and we pushed the bin over. This great big black bear came rolling out. He left the country in a hurry. Things like that went on all the time!
(0:13:55) The military was there at that time too, the British army. They were out at the David Thompson highway. They went on a canoe expedition. They came to see me about it. A lot of people canoed from the ridge down, but they went up above the falls where the Mistaya and North Saskatchewan come together. The falls are up the way about 20 feet. There were 13 of them I remember that in the expedition and they went over top and they were missing eight soldiers. Wardens came down from Lake Louise to do the search…
(0:14:37) Those are just some examples of what was going on at Saskatchewan Crossing. We had numerous black bears bumming around on the highway in those days. I didn’t get into the backcountry much there. We did go up to Howe’s River several times a year. One trip we used to go on was up to Watchman and Cinnamon Lake and that was up on the Castleguard Meadows. That was a real wilderness trip. I was at the Crossing on a rotational basis for two years.
(0:15:12) Into my fourth year at Lake Louise, Andy Anderson, moved me into Banff. Like I said before, Andy had a vision of where he wanted the warden service to go and he knew that resource management was going to be one of the priorities. So we moved. Elaine and I hated to leave Lake Louise at that time. We really liked it there. It was a real good community. Like the trailer court community, if there was a party you didn’t have to be invited, you just went. I loved working with the wardens in Lake Louise…We didn’t really want to go, but in those days when the chief said “Move”, you said, “When?” So we moved into Banff, Elaine and I and the kids. One thing was it was an advantage for the kids because they didn’t have to take the bus. Kim was in school then and Travis was to start soon after so that was an advantage.
(0:16:36) The first year I worked for Joe Halstenson. When Andy came to Banff, he got this schedule called the ten and four going. You would work ten days in the backcountry and then you would come out for four days off and then you would work a week in the front country and then you would go on your backcountry shift again. I don’t know how effective it was, but it sure was a lot of fun! I was with Joe Halstenson and he was a pleasure to travel with. I traveled with him that first year that I was in Banff. I knew some of the Banff people, but working in Lake Louise you didn’t have that much interchange, other than the training … When I came to Banff, it was the same caliber of people. Another thing that Andy Anderson recognized (was the need for a strong public safety team) and he really brought in people that could handle it. Tim Auger came soon after that and Clair Israelson. He started to build a really good core of public safety people and boy they certainly built a great program.
