Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a long way from Banff, Alberta, but it is clear that the journey was worth it for Mary Schäffer Warren (1861-1939), an American writer, painter and photographer, and her first husband, Dr. Charles Schäffer, an amateur botanist. From their first visit to the Canadian Rockies in 1889, they travelled back nearly every summer to study the wildflowers. Mary continued these mountain explorations after Charles’ death in 1903, pushing deep into the wilderness. In 1908, she and one of her travel companions, Mollie Adams, became the first non-Indigenous women (on record) to visit Chaba Imne, today also known as Maligne Lake, north of the newly established Jasper National Park. Schäffer Warren wrote about the experience in her 1911 book, Old Indian Trails of the Canadian Rockies. Not only did she write about it, but she also surveyed the lake for the Geological Survey of Canada, an extraordinary accomplishment for a woman of that time.
A century back in time might seem an even greater, if impossible, challenge to bridge than continental distance, but Trixie Pacis, a photographer and film-maker and Meghan J. Ward, outdoor writer, historian and Royal Canadian Geographical Society fellow, had some ideas. In 2021, the friends — who shared a love of the mountains and photography and a shared respect of Schäffer Warren’s contributions to both — embarked on a years-long journey to bring the talented explorer’s life to film in large part by recreating the final leg of her 1908 journey to Maligne Lake, complete with travel companions. “This was an opportunity to lift Mary’s words off the page and live them,” says Ward. She likens the project to a conversation across time, both with Schäffer Warren in the past and generations in the future to “honor these trailblazers but also find a better path forward.”
Wildflowers premiered to critical acclaim at the Banff Mountain Film Festival in 2024 and has been screened since at several international film festivals. In March, the film aired on The Knowledge Network where it is also available for streaming.1 NiCHE editor Mary Baxter recently chatted with the Pacis and Ward, the film’s co-producers, to find out more about their Wildflowers project and why they wanted to share this early Canadian-American woman’s explorations on the big screen.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
NiCHE: How did you become interested in Mary Schäffer Warren?
Meghan: When you first come to the Rockies, it doesn’t take long before you hear about Mary Schäffer Warren. She was a standout woman trailblazer whose enticing story is one that the tourism industry loves to introduce to visitors. It’s hard not to fall in love with her story andeverything that she accomplished in the time that she did. As my career took me into writing and work as a historian, I kept reencountering Mary. So when Trixie came to me back in 2021 with the idea for a film, at first I was a little like, “Oh, Mary, everybody knows about Mary,” and then quickly realized that Mary’s really not very well known across Canada. We wanted to do more with her story.
Trixie: I grew up in Vancouver and hadn’t learned a lot about the Rockies or their history. But when I found myself living in Kimberley, just across the Alberta B.C. border and working for Paul Zizka Photography [owned by Meghan and her husband, Paul Zizka], that opened the door to learning about the history of this region. The story of Mary Schäffer Warren piqued my interest to know that there were women who made such a big impact in this region, considering so many place names or the surface-level history of this place is centred around men.
Learning about Mary coincided with doing the Adventure Filmmakers Workshop at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity. Part of that workshop was an exercise of pitching a concept. Mary’s story was just the kind of inspirational piece that was front-of-mind at that point in time, and the idea of portraying her story stuck with me. When I mentioned the idea to Meg, we realized that we had something here that we were both passionate about turning into a film.
NiCHE: What have you learned in making this film about her life?
Trixie: At the beginning of the research process, I had certain perceptions about who Mary was. By the time we were done researching, a lot of those perceptions had been corrected or changed. For example, I assumed she was a feminist because she was a woman who was doing something that many women didn’t do, and going against the grain of what it meant to be a woman. I learned that she was against the suffragist movement and had traditional views on certain aspects of being a woman. Part of the journey was course correcting these assumptions or perceptions.
Meghan: I think it’s similar for me, and also just that when I first encountered Mary, I encountered the story of this woman who had been to Maligne Lake at a time when women weren’t doing these things. And you have this tiny window into her life. Through the process of researching and reading, it reminded me just how many different versions of Mary there were. She reinvented herself over and over and over again. Often, it coincides with her name. She was Mary Townsend Sharples, and then she was Mary T. S. Schäffer, and then she was Mary Schäffer Warren. And through these different life stages and marriages and milestones, she was constantly reinventing herself.
I originally encountered Mary when I was in my early twenties. While making this film, I turned the corner into my forties. Mary had reinvented herself as an explorer around the age of 44. This is a part of her story I had never really understood before. Going through that transition and embracing a new stage of life, it was interesting to reflect on how Mary had a completely different life from me. Not a lot tethered her. She had the ability, freedom and money to go and pursue these things. You still have to have courage, especially at a time when she was doing something so untraditional.
NiCHE: Why is Maligne Lake so important then and now?
Meghan: First of all, it’s an important ancestral homeland to several First Nations and Métis people. In the context of Mary’s story, it became deeply entwined with her legacy. But she did so much more than just go to Maligne Lake. That she surveyed it is very significant because she was asked to survey the lake by the geographical board when women weren’t even allowed on surveys—
Trixie: and she had no idea how to do it—
Meghan: Yeah. She was self-taught, did a great job, named the features that are still on the maps. But Maligne Lake itself, it’s a beautiful spot. It has this energy and power and importance to it that puts it in a league of its own.
Trixie: It’s worth mentioning that Mary advocated to include the lake in Jasper National Park. Initially, it didn’t fall within the borders, and it wasn’t protected. When Jasper National Park expanded, the borders expanded to include the lake, but with that came restrictions around how Indigenous people could operate in the land they had occupied since time immemorial. There’s a lot of implications to her connection with the lake and her advocating for the lake to be part of a park system. Of course, now it remains untouched in the sense that there’s no other development besides the Maligne boats that take tourists down to Spirit Island.
Using animation and colour to reflect the past
NiCHE: Why colourize and animate the photos in the film?
Trixie: Mary was a self-taught photographer, and we had the opportunity to enter the archives and look at her glass plate lantern slide photography. It’s almost like a little miracle that these lantern slides exist because they had been produced in the backcountry and survived being transported back on a saddle in that kind of terrain. When you illuminate them and look at them through a loop, they come to life. We wanted to honour her work as an artist. We wanted to honour her work as a colourist because these were black and white photographs that she would spend the winters hand-tinting herself. That’s laborious work. And it’s creative work because you’re trying to recreate a scene that you saw months ago.
It is kind of like the film process—what your colour grade does or what your colourist does to your film to tell a story. We wanted to honour these images and the work that went into them by bringing them to life through very subtle, gentle animations and make something still feel like it was more organically a part of a film, which is moving images.
Meghan: This was a way to bring those photos to life. I had previously worked with the animator, Doug Urquhart, on another film. He worked his magic with about eight or nine images to provide that two-and-a-half-dimensional effect.
The next step was to do the repeat photography. From the beginning, we planned six or seven locations in Mary’s 1908 expedition to replicate so that we could also bring those landscapes to present day and offer very real comparisons for the viewer, some of which our animator blended. He took the archival photo and then transitioned it to the present-day image. When we show this film to audiences and we’re sitting live, we hear an audible gasp as the photos shift, especially when we show that the glacier shrinking at Skoki Lakes.
NiCHE: Why were beaded flowers used in the film to identify the recreated journey’s milestones?
Trixie: The best person to answer that question would be Lisa Shepherd, who did the beadwork herself. In early conversations with her about the work, we discussed using flowers that are indigenous to this region—flowers that Mary would’ve seen in her travels.
Charles Schäffer, Mary’s first husband, was a botanist. His work was what brought the couple here. He passed away before completing his book; Mary actually completed that work. She would illustrate flowers for his book. So, as we were representing flowers in our film, we thought it was an opportunity to show the strength of the connection and its authenticity by choosing flowers that are from here.
Lisa has reasons for the flowers she chose and the colours of the beads for each flower. One example that she gives in the film is of a flower beaded in a pearly white and a clear white to reflect the wedding finery that one of her ancestors, Suzette Swift, had showed to Mary when they had a real-life encounter a the Swift homestead. Lisa is weaving her own Métis family history and her own connection to Mary into her present-day work.
Hurdles in back country, changes between then and now, and a tragic loss
NiCHE: What were some of the challenges you experienced in producing the film?
Trixie: I tore an ACL [a knee ligament] a few weeks before we had planned to go into the backcountry to make this film.
Meghan: It happened about three weeks before we were set to leave, and this trip was two years of planning to that point. We ended up recruiting Natalie Gillis to join us in the backcountry and serve as our expedition photographer. Natalie brought so much to the film. Tragically, she passed away before the film came out in 2024, and we cherish the opportunity we had to bring her on the Wildflowers journey.
Logistically, one of the big pieces was to recruit a cinematographer with experience filming in the backcountry. This was really essential. There’s a lot of gear management: you have to back up files, you have to be able to carry the extra weight. You have to know how to anticipate shots. We interviewed several cinematographers and landed on Anandi Brownstein, who was a big part of creating a successful filming experience in the backcountry.
We also had to be really conservative with our distances so that you have time to stop and go and get the shots you need. We waited at Maligne Pass for a whole hour, for instance, just to see if the fog would lift so we could take a photo.
Trixie: One of the biggest challenges was simply getting the permits to camp. In this particular valley, they only allow one booking per campsite per night, and we were trying to string together several consecutive bookings. We actually tried the year before we filmed and were unsuccessful in getting the reservations. We had to postpone the whole project a year. The second time we tried, we secured the bookings. A whole crew of friends logged into the reservation system at the same time to increase our odds because it’s a lottery system.
NiCHE: Any bears?
Meghan: Well, the Maligne River Valley has been decommissioned because of the grizzly habitat back there that they’re preserving.
We never saw a bear, but we saw so much evidence. We saw scat, we saw bear rubs on the trees. We could feel them, but we didn’t see them.
NiCHE: Talking about animals, in Mary’s day, would people have hunted here?
Meghan: They were hunting sheep and goats as they were going throughout their expedition.
Trixie: There weren’t the same restrictions as there are now. Even the Jasper Park borders were different from what they are now. The management of the park was completely different in her day. I mean, we aren’t able to ride horses through this region, which if we were, you know, truly following in her footsteps, we would have done. She didn’t have dehydrated meals in her day either—
Meghan: Although they experimented with them—she and Mollie spent the winter before the trip experimenting with with dehydrating foods. They didn’t have very good success. They ended up leaving the cooking up to the men.
Trixie: The friendship between the two of them is something that I would’ve loved to have explored more in the film, had we more time.
Addressing history’s complications
NiCHE: Making complex ideas understandable is hard to do, and you do it so well in this film. Why is it important to address history’s complications?
Meghan: We do a disservice to our cultural learning and the decolonization of our narratives when we simplify. And telling a different, more nuanced and multifaceted story is the important work that we need to do moving forward.
Trixie: For many, many years, the popular adventure films, especially in the outdoor space, were seeking new lines and male heroic figures. Now, there’s a real hunger for different kinds of stories. There’s space to tell stories about female characters who did something meaningful in a different way. If we have the space to explore these stories, it’s part of our responsibility to do that. If you don’t tell a nuanced story about a complete character, you’re not doing history justice. You leave room for people to make assumptions instead of learning the truth.
Top/Feature image: Wildflowers’ mountain hike. Natalie Gillis Photo.
- [1] It can also be rented on streaming services such as Vimeo and Prime for a fee. ↩︎
Mary Baxter
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