Mountain Voices and Echoes from NiCHE’s Archive

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Since 1996, the Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) has used archival photographs, documentation from land surveys and government reports, repeat photography, and image analysis to track how Western Canada’s Mountains have changed. In their latest publication, Mountain Voices: The Mountain Legacy Project and a Century of Change in Western Canada (2025), photographs from MLP’s collection are paired with short essays by alpinists, activists, artists, workers, and mountain researchers. By asking contributors to reflect on the impact of Canadian mountains on their lives, “Mountain Voices brings the landscape to life through the passion and devotion of those who love it deeply.”

the cover of "Mountain Voices"
Mountain Voices: The Mountain Legacy Project and a Century of Change in Western Canada is out now from the University of Calgary Press

You can read an excerpt by ice core scientist Alison Criscitiello on NiCHE, although Criscitello is not the first voice on the site to wonder at Western Canada’s mountains. NiCHE contributors have reviewed a mountain of alpine media, including Spirit of the Peak, the Ski Like a Girl podcast, and academic books. Mountain-centered events have drawn NiCHE’s readers to celebrate the 2009 book launch of Richard Mackie’s Mountain Timbert: The Comox Logging Company in the Vancouver Island Mountains, and attend talks by Robert Bateman, Julie Cruikshank, and D.K. Stephen as well as several iterations of the Thinking Mountains mountain summit (pun unintended).  

In this blog post, let’s look at how Western Canada’s mountains peak out of NiCHE’s own archives.  

View of a map from 1868 showing two "Indian Trails" crossing mountainous terrain in British Columbia, marked by red and green lines
From Jeff Slack’s 2010 piece on Ancient Alpinists: First Nations in the Coast Mountain Past.Two “Indian Trails” were recorded on this 1868 map. One track crossed between the Homathko and Klinaklini valleys, while the other connected the Southgate drainage to the Bridge River country near Bralorne.

Peak 1: Places of Danger and Plenty 

Mountains peak out of NiCHE’s archives as places of danger and plenty, depending on how well one knows a specific mountain, or got there in the first place.

Jeff Slack’s 2010 piece showcases West Coast First Nations alpinists’ knowledge of BC’s mountain ranges, alpine technology, and mountainous resources (including berries, game, and obsidian traded across North America). Slack points to the work of SFU-based Squamish archeologist Dr Rudy Reimer, at the forefront of alpine archeology, who combines field work with oral history to understand the Coast Mountain landscape’s history. In another piece, Slack took inspiration from the Mountain Legacy Project’s repeat photography technique to look at the environmental change of Whistler (BC), highlighting how tourism shaped the region’s history.   

In contrast, mountains were among the many factors in Yukon that complicated the Northwest Mounted Police’s expansion during the Klondike Gold Rush. Scott Dumonceaux’s piece explains how police adapted as they collected environmental knowledge, started using packers (and then the railway) to transport supplies, and expanded settlers’ infrastructure along the mountain passes. This, he argues, allowed the Canadian government to take control of and industrialize the region. 

Because mountainous regions are remote and dangerous for the inexperienced, they have also been used as sites of incarceration. Michael O’Hagan’s piece “Prisoners in the Park” flags the wartime experiences of German prisoners of war sent to Riding Mountain National Park (Manitoba) on a woodcutting labour project. Another internment story comes from Jane Komori, who explains in her post about Japanese Canadian rock gardens (including her grandfather’s) that experiences of mass incarceration during the Second World War were “deeply tied to the environments and landscapes in which incarceration occurred,” namely the remote, mountainous valleys in which the government placed camps. Placing incarceration camps in the Slocan Valley (BC), Letitia Johnson argues, was an extension of the government’s segregation policy towards Japanese Canadians–which even led to the construction of a new sanatorium.

Bear cub captured by German PoWs in Riding Mountain National Park
From Michael O’Hagan’s piece “Prisoners in the Park”: Bear cub captured by German PoWs in Riding Mountain National Park, MB, 1944. RMNP Collection

Peak 2: Wilderness and Leisure 

Tourism as an economic engine played an important role in bringing settlers to Western Canada’s mountains. As Jim Clifford explained in a 2011 blog post, at the turn of the 20th century, “Canada’s Rocky Mountains were developed as a nationally iconic region for wilderness tourism.” Developers built resort chains, railway lines, and luxury amenities to give tourists a sense of wilderness, all of which manifested in emerging Canadian nationalism. Whether that wilderness truly is wild is something environmental historians could, have, and surely will again fill quite a bit of airtime discussing. Claire Campbell reflected on her most recent visit to Banff for a book talk around Parks Canada’s centennial, calling Banff “the most concrete, or extreme, illustration that parks are places of human history, marked by generations of experiments in environmental management and manipulation.” 

A trio of blog posts came out of an environmental history field trip to Banff National Park, organized ahead of Thinking Mountains 2012 at the University of Alberta. You can follow the field trip via Michael del Vecchio’s tweets, on which he reflects in Tweeting Banff’s History. Bobbie Swartman reflected on how being in the park brought to life the complex ecological and municipal management issues he had heard about in Tourism Policy and Planning courses. Finally, Eric Payseur described the trip as “better than hockey” and shared what he learned about the adaptive wildlife that call Banff home. 

Mountains remain embroiled in what Jessica DeWitt called “park mythology, a “creation of white privilege and white denial that obscure parks’ function as places of exclusion and racialization, largely managed by colonial governments. Her piece about Alberta’s rocky and reluctant relationship to its park system shows the long-standing financial considerations that trouble the idea that ‘parks are not for profit’ (check out the Parks and Profit series for more on this, including William Thompson’s magical realism story “Felix,” written from the perspective of a national park bear!) 

Canadian Pacific Railway promotional material for the Bow Valley and Banff Springs Hotel. The image shows two well-dressed women overlooking the hotel, with mountains in the background.
From Jim Clifford’s piece “The Canadian Pacific Railway and the Making of the Canadian Rockies, 1887-1927”: Canadian Pacific Railway, 1926. Chung Collection 200-5-2

Peak 3: Infrastructure and Energy 

The infrastructure crossing and reshaping mountainous environments have also made their way on the site. Meg Stanley’s piece for the Winter in Canada series explained how the Trans-Canada Highway’s path through Rogers Pass was chosen to get motorists through the Selkirk Mountains despite officials rejecting the site twice due to its harsh winters. Laura Keil’s post commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Mica Dam uses oral history testimony to highlight how the Canoe Valley was changed by dam-related flooding. Today, its namesake river disappears in high water, and nearby Valemount endures annual dust storms. 

On a different kind of energy production: Sean Kheraj wrote one of fourteen export reports (available online) that informed the City of Vancouver’s reception of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project providing historical background on the pipeline and its environmental damage. Reflecting on his experience providing expert evidence and analysis as an environmental historian, Kheraj reflected that: “It makes me wonder what other areas of environmental history research could be integrated into policy development and public debate.” A lecture Kheraj gave at Concordia University on the interprovincial approval of pipeline projects is also on our website. 

Mountains, in NiCHE’s archives, are complicated places of plenty and provision, incarceration and isolation, work and leisure. They are also deeply changed and changing landscape: something that the Mountain Legacy Project knows well. 

Black and white photograph of the Trans Mountain pipeline when it was being built in 1950.
Construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline through Jasper National Park, 1952–3. Source: IP-2e-2-8, Glenbow Archives.
Featured image: Waterton National Park, courtesy of the Mountain Legacy Project.
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Gabrielle Mclaren

Gabrielle (she/elle) is a PhD student in York University's Department of History, with research interests in environmental illness and settler colonialism's social reproduction in 19th century Canada. She holds an MA in History from Concordia University, where her thesis dealt on malaria's impact in Upper Canada, using the construction of the Rideau Canal as a case study. She graduated from Simon Fraser University in 2020 and spends her time crafting in Toronto.

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