This is the eleventh (and final) post in the Winter in Canada series edited by M. Blake Butler and Ben Bradley.

---

Parks Canada has been operating the Trans-Canada Highway through Rogers Pass since 1962. It has developed considerable expertise over the past sixty years in how to do that. This blog post explores the history of how and why the route was chosen.

“You better get a snow shovel” was the advice from Howard Green, Member of Parliament for Vancouver Quadra, to the Minister of Northern Affairs and National Resources, Jean Lesage, in August 1956 after the announcement of the selection of Rogers Pass for the route of the Trans-Canada highway through the Selkirk Mountains in British Columbia.¹ By the time Green offered his advice, the challenges posed by winter in the pass including avalanches and prodigious amounts of snow were well known. Indigenous peoples brought them to the attention of nineteenth century non-Indigenous travellers.² And, in the 1880s, when Rogers Pass was selected as the route for the Canadian Pacific Railway the winter hazards and costs of operating in the Pass were studied and mitigated.³

In popular histories the CPR’s decision to build the Connaught Tunnel (1913-1916) under Rogers Pass is represented as a response to winter hazards and related costs.⁴ Close study has disproved this, but the idea of Rogers Pass as a wintry battleground has shaped the public’s understanding of the place.⁵ But why, if the challenges and costs of managing snow were considered significant by many people, did the highway end up in Rogers Pass? How did winter, and ideas about it, play into decisions about where to put a highway?

This post explores how planners and government officials incorporated winter as a factor in ultimately choosing Rogers Pass for the Trans-Canada Highway in 1956, after previously rejecting it as a highway route at least twice.

In the 1920s, when both Golden and Revelstoke were integrated into regional road networks, it was widely anticipated that the road-builders would continue across Rogers Pass.⁶ Letters and telegrams flowed into the Department of the Interior and the Prime Minister’s office requesting an immediate survey of the route and its rapid adoption. These entreaties to build were rebuffed by federal officials with pragmatic explanations regarding heavy snow, expensive maintenance, and a short operating season. The costs and feasibility of operating in the winter at Rogers Pass certainly informed the conversation in the 1920s, but more sentimental reasons also played a role.⁷ An internal memo, written by national parks Commissioner J.B. Harkin in 1927, explained that:

it would appear desirable for us to preserve at least one of our National (sic) parks from access by motor cars. Glacier is the only park we have into which motor cars cannot now get. There is no park we have in which the scenic beauty is more spectacular and in which the appeal of solitude and immensity is greater. … I think it is most important in planning for our national parks, both from a business standpoint as well as from an aesthetic standpoint, that we should keep one park free from motor cars.⁸

The government at the time did not reject the need for a road linking Golden and Revelstoke, but it preferred the longer route around the Selkirks via the “Big Bend” of the Columbia River. By the spring of 1928, the federal government’s commitment to the Big Bend route was clear and an agreement (of sorts) was in place with British Columbia regarding funding. In choosing the Big Bend route, it seems winter-related challenges were used to help explain a decision that was actually about a combination of sentiment and practical considerations. Invoking the destructive power of winter in Rogers Pass, in effect, became a way of saying no. This was possible at the time because the federal government controlled the financial and administrative levers needed to build the highway. The Big Bend Highway opened in 1940.

In 1949, Canada’s provincial and federal governments agreed to collaborate on an improved national highway: the Trans-Canada Highway. Route selection was driven by practical concerns, with preference given to “the shortest practical east-west route.”⁹ An important difference between this project and previous road-building in the mountain parks was that the road was to serve commercial traffic and operate year round.

Just as in the 1920s, national park officials expressed disquiet about the possibility of routing the highway through Rogers Pass. A senior official wrote that “ . . . if it can be avoided we are not going to be put in the position where we have to consent to the construction of [the] Trans-Canada highway through Glacier Park.”¹⁰ However, under the agreement between the provinces and the federal government that formed the basis of the Trans-Canada Highway Act (1949) the provinces were responsible for overall route selection. This is the context in which in 1950, aptly named Robert Winters, the federal Minister of Resources and Development, who was responsible for the highway, wrote to E.C. Carson, British Columbia’s Minister of Public Works, urging him to think about possible alternates to the Big Bend Highway, as a dam being considered for Mica Creek, just south of Boat Encampment on the Columbia River, would flood parts of the existing highway.¹¹ This marked the beginning of a lengthy dialogue between the federal and provincial governments regarding possible routes through (or around) the Selkirks.

Initially, in 1951, the province committed to using the Big Bend Highway and it began to expend funds on its improvement.¹² This work carried on even as the province studied alternatives. In 1952, the British Columbia government examined three possible routes in the Selkirk Mountains.¹³ It would later also examine a fourth route, Jumbo Pass. In the fall of 1952, the province also sent location engineer C.A. Scarborough, to Rogers Pass on a reconnaissance survey. Scarborough’s report was not favourable. He wrote that “in my opinion it is utterly ridiculous to consider a Trans-Canada Highway through this country. It could not be built without tremendous expense for sheds and bridges and at the same time alignment and grade of a reasonable nature could not be followed.”¹⁴

At the political level this seemed to resolve the issue: the province wrote to the federal government in October 1952 confirming its choice of the Big Bend route.¹⁵ However, at the technical level discussions continued. R.A. Campbell, the federal engineer in charge of the Trans-Canada Highway, wanted a systematic survey with comparative costs including detailed reports on the snow slides and costs of mitigation. For Campbell, the issue was finding the shortest and most economic route. He was not convinced that the 180-mile Big Bend made sense even if the Mica Dam was not built; the relative shortness of the 88-miles across Rogers Pass might cancel out the higher construction and maintenance costs. Rather than using winter to say “no” again, Campbell wondered if modern snow removal methods might make operating the road year-round feasible. He also thought that the convenience of the shorter route had considerable appeal, especially to truckers.¹⁶

Campbell assigned federal surveyors to complete a full reconnaissance survey and economic study in the summer of 1953. In the field they were joined by Noel Gardner, a warden from Yoho, who helped them with understanding the pattern of snow slides.¹⁷ This work involved direct observation in the field (Gardner skied most of the route) and collecting local and comparable information–this meant measuring how much and when snow fell and establishing where snow and topography led to avalanches. Snow, it was reported, often fell every month except July. The average annual snowfall over 45 years near the summit was reported to be 390.2 inches per year.¹⁸ In this way, winter at Rogers Pass was transformed into a statistic that could be related to other places. In these reports winter becomes snow; Noel Gardner, in a separate report attached to the reconnaissance report, parses this in his own way by referring both to “avalanche season” and to “winter” as separate, yet related, periods.¹⁹ His report, which uses graphs, charts, and photographs, is an outstanding example of how skilled technicians have engaged with and represented local environments to support engineering projects.²⁰

The surveyors observed that “snowfall, avalanche conditions and snow removal will be major problems for any all-weather road built from Golden to Revelstoke.”²¹ Constructing winter as a practical problem to be “solved” by modern technologies, they wrote that “there is the strong possibility that some such method of snow treatment will be perfected before many years have passed and it might be wise to build the cheaper type of shed with that probability in mind.”²² The surveyors transformed winter into a cost and concluded that building a new highway through Rogers Pass would not be excessive compared to rebuilding the Big Bend to higher standards; in fact, it would produce significant savings in construction and maintenance costs and in travel time.²³ In 1953, the province completed a location survey of the Big Bend Highway route, which was an important step as it made it possible to make detailed comparison of the relative costs of the routes under consideration.24

From the province’s perspective, the cost savings of the Rogers Pass route extended beyond the overall lengths of each route. Not only was the Rogers Pass route shorter, but 40% of the route crossed through national parks, where the federal government would pay 100% of the cost of construction and maintenance.²⁵ Moreover, the risk of having to pay to relocate sections of highway if the Columbia River was dammed were not as high with the Rogers Pass route.²⁶ In the end, British Columbia decided to use Rogers Pass at the route for the Trans-Canada Highway. This was announced in the newspapers in July 1956.²⁷

Did winter matter as a factor in the decisions regarding building the Trans-Canada Highway through Rogers Pass? The answer to that question is yes, but perhaps not in the way that most people might assume. It was first used as a reason not to build through the pass. Then, in a changed administrative and technical environment, winter (or, rather the volume of snow and resulting avalanches) was problematized as a statistic and cost that had to be accounted for. However, once it was established that it was feasible to locate a modern, all-season highway through Rogers Pass, the relatively shorter distance mattered more than winter. In 1971, Rogers Pass was commemorated as National Historic Site in part because of the location of the Trans-Canada Highway through the pass. The official opening of the highway took place on September 3 1962. As luck would have it, it didn’t snow that day.

---

Notes

¹ Canada, Parliament, House of Commons Debates, 22nd Parliament, 3rd Session, vol. 7, (5 August 1956), 6913.

² Walter Moberly to Joseph Trutch, “No.6 – Mr. Moberly to Chief Commissioner of Lands and Works,” New Westminster, 18 December 1865, in Columbia River Exploration, 1865: Instructions, Reports and Journals… (New Westminster: Government Printing Office, 1866), 7.

³ Granville C. Cunningham, “Snow Slides in the Rocky Mountains,” Paper No. 7, Transactions of the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. 1, part 2, January 1888, 18.

⁴ John G. Woods, Snow War: An Illustrated History of Rogers Pass, Glacier National Park, BC, 2nd ed., (Revelstoke: Friends of Mount Revelstoke and Glacier National Parks, 2010), 42.

⁵ Gary G. Backler and Trevor D. Heaver, “The Timing of a Major Investment in Railway Capacity: CPR’s 1913 Connaught Tunnel Decision,” Business History 24, 3 (November 1982), 301.

⁶ R.G. Harvey, Carving the Western Path: By River, Rail, and Road through British Columbia’s Southern Mountains (Surrey: Heritage House, 1998), 86.

⁷ See F. G60-5 (Golden Revelstoke Road, 1926-29), Vol. 212, A-2-a, RG 84, LAC. A summary of what happened can be found in “Report on Golden-Revelstoke Road Routes,” 7 March 1928 in F G60-5 (Golden Revelstoke Road, 1926-29), Vol. 212, A-2-a, RG 84, LAC.

⁸ J.B. Harkin to Mr. Cory, Deputy Minister, Department of the Interior, 2 June 1927, F.G60-5, pt. 1 (Golden-Revelstoke Road, 1926-1929), vol. 212, A-2-a, RG84, LAC.

⁹ Canada, Department of Mines and Resources Annual Report for Year Ending March 1951, (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1951), 71.

¹⁰ Letter to Mr. Maxell from R.A. Gibson, Director, Lands and Development Branch, Department of Mines and Resources, re: effect of Trans-Canada on Banff and Yoho, 4 April 1949, F. TC 60, pt. 2, Vol. 60, A-2-a, RG 84, LAC.

¹¹ Letter to E.C. Carson, Minister, BC Department of Public Works from Robert Winters, Minister, Department of Resources and Development, 30 September 1950, F. 34-1-0, pt.1, Box 1212, Acc. 1985-85/061, RG11, LAC.

¹² Canada, Department of Mines and Resources, Annual Report for Year Ending March 1951, 71.

¹³ Memorandum from Norman Marr, Director, Engineering and Water Resources Branch to R.A. Campbell, Chief, Trans-Canada Division, Department of Resources and Development, 11 September 1952, F. 34-10-1, pt. 1, Box 1212, 1984-85/061, RG 11; R.A. Campbell, Chief Engineer, to Mr. H.L. Hayne, October 21st 1952, F. 34-10-1, pt. 1, Box 1212, 1984-85/061, RG 11; J.P. Hague, “Selection of the Trans-Canada Highway Route Through the Selkirk Mountains,” The Engineering Journal June 1958, 57-58. In 1952 routes via Downie Creek, Goldstream River, and Tangier and Mountain Creeks were examined. Jumbo was examined in 1954 after lobbying by local Boards of Trade.

¹⁴ “Trans-Canada Highway: Rogers Pass Reconnaissance.” 27 October 1952, C.A. Scarborough, Locating Engineer, Golden, to J.H.A. Steven, Location Engineer, Victoria, DPW, F. 34-10-1, pt. 1, Box 1212, 1984-85/061, RG 11, LAC.

¹⁵ Letter from Phil Gaglardi, Minister, BC Department of Public Works, to Robert Winters, Minister, Department of Resources and Development, 27 October 1952, F. 34-10-1, pt. 1, Box 1212, 1984-85/061, RG 11, LAC.

¹⁶ Campbell’s thinking can be found letters and memorandums in F. 34-10-1, pt.1, Box 1212, 1984-85/061, RG 11, LAC.

¹⁷ W.J. Bishop and G.N. Brittain, “Report: A Reconnaissance Survey from Golden to Revelstoke through Rogers Pass for A Possible Route from the Trans-Canada Highway as an Alternative to the Big Bend Route,” Trans Canada Highway Division, Department of Public Works, 27 January 1954, 8-9, 30, 32-40, F. TCH60, pt. 4, vol. 203, A-2-a, RG84, LAC.

¹⁸ Bishop and Brittain, “Report: A Reconnaissance Survey…”, 38.

¹⁹ N.C. Gardner, “Report of Recent Survey of Snow Conditions and Snow Avalanche Activity in Glacier National Park, Winter 1953-1954,” F. TCH60, pt. 4, vol. 203, A-2-a, RG84, LAC.

²⁰ Tina Loo with Meg Stanley, “An Environmental History of Progress: Damming the Peace and Columbia Rivers,” Canadian Historical Review, 92,3 (September 2011): 399-427.

²¹ Bishop and Brittain, “Report: A Reconnaissance Survey…”, 39.

²² Bishop and Brittain, “Report: A Reconnaissance Survey…”, 9.

²³ Bishop and Brittain, “Report: A Reconnaissance Survey …” 3, 19-20.

²⁴ Memorandum from R.A. Campbell, Chief Engineer, Trans Canada Division to Norman Marr, Chief, Water Resources Branch, Department of Resources and Development, 12 May 1953, F. 34-10-1, pt.1, Box 1212, 1984-85/061, RG 11.

²⁵ J.P. Hague, Selection of the Trans-Canada Highway Route through the Selkirk Mountains,” 59.

²⁶ The configuration of the Columbia River development was still very much in its conceptual stages in the early 1950s.

²⁷ “Rogers Pass Final Choice for Highway,” Vancouver Sun 5 July 1956, 1.

---

Feature Image: Official opening of the Trans-Canada Highway, Rogers Pass, 3 September 1962. Bruno Engler photograph, Public Works photograph collection, LAC e011181202.