This post is a featured excerpt from Mountain Voices: The Mountain Legacy Project and a Century of Change in Western Canada (November 2025), edited by Eric Higgs, Zac Robinson, Mary Sanseverino, and Kristen Walsh. This collection is the latest book in our Canadian History and Environment series with University of Calgary Press, which is edited by Alan MacEachern. This excerpt is published in collaboration with the Alpine Club of Canada.

The late-afternoon sun slanted across Îyâmnathka’s south face. As a twenty-two-year-old climber newly arrived in Canada from Colorado, I was impressed. So was my brother Morgan, also seeing the peak for the first time. The year was 1968.

I pointed out a crack that ran from base to top. Morgan was a better rock-climber than I. Did he think it was a proper chimney, wide enough to admit the full human body? He squinted over to the cliff, perhaps a half-mile off and a couple of hundred feet high.

“Nah, it’s probably off-width,” he replied, meaning too wide to jam a fist or a boot into yet too narrow to get inside and wriggle up. Difficult to climb.

The following summer I was 213 metres (700 feet) up Îyâmnathka, which was called Yamnuska by those who were not members of the Ĩyãħé Nakoda living nearby. I was trying to climb that crack. It was actually four miles from the highway and wide enough to swallow my car.

If Morgan had been along, he would have worked his way back into the chimney. We would have reached the top rather easily. But Morgan was not there, and the fellow I was climbing with was no better a route-finder than I. We were both so intimidated by that gaping black gash in the mountain that we chose to force our way up beside it, terrified, on very steep rock that refused to accept our pitons and promised us a long fall if we slipped.

Îyâmnathka was committing. In the moth-and-flame manner that climbers know so well, Îyâmnathka was very attractive. And it was only an hour’s drive west of Calgary.

“I came back to Îyâmnathka again and again. I learned how close to approach the flame, savouring the adrenalin as I ventured high above my last piton toward an overhang that I might or might not be able to climb.”

I came back to Îyâmnathka again and again. I learned how close to approach the flame, savouring the adrenalin as I ventured high above my last piton toward an overhang that I might or might not be able to climb.

After a few years I came to love Îyâmnathka. In exchange, Îyâmnathka didn’t kill me.

In fact, it tolerated my whole family. On June 21st, 1975, my wife Cia and I took our two little boys along the trail up Îyâmnathka’s east ridge. Lying in our sleeping bags, we watched through the night as the sun moved along below the northern horizon. We did this on the summer solstice year after year, sometimes getting chased down into the trees by a midnight thunderstorm.

In 2001, my novel Raven’s End introduced Canadians and Americans to Îyâmnathka. Thousands of additional readers in Italy, Germany, Holland, Denmark, and Japan have found themselves in armchair flight via translated editions.

Îyâmnathka means “the flat-faced mountain,” which is most appropriate. Another name is Mount Laurie (Calgary teacher John Laurie was a friend of the tribe.) Whatever you call it, this landform is worth visiting, worth protecting from the cancerous quarrying at its base or the touristy tramway that some corporation is bound to propose.

Pick an autumn morning when the aspen groves are brilliantly yellow against the deep green of the conifers. Take Highway 1A west from Cochrane so you approach from the proper angle. When you get to the bridge over Old Fort Creek, Îyâmnathka’s mile-long, thousand-foot-high precipice dominates the view. Pull over and stop. It’s as if a giant cleaver split the mountain down the middle and glaciers carried half of it away.

You may see a few black specks circling up there—ravens, each with a four-foot wingspan —and they will provide the true scale of the scene. It’s big. It’s old. It’s going to outlast us, no matter how much of the world we reduce to dollars and dust.

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Ben Gadd

Ben Gadd, 79, is one of Canada’s better-known naturalists and Rockies writers. Author of them ground-breaking Handbook of the Canadian Rockies, Ben has written ten other books and contributed to several more. His novel Raven’s End has become a prize-winning Canadian best- seller. Ben has received four Banff Mountain Festival awards for his work, as well as the festival’s prestigious Summit of Excellence prize. In 2014 the Geological Association of Canada awarded Ben their E. R. Ward Neale Medal for his many years of sharing Earth science with Canadians. In 2016 he received the Geosciences in the Media award from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. After earning a degree in Earth science, Ben has pursued a career mainly in natural history, starting with three years as a Parks Canada naturalist. He has also taught writing at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and Grant MacEwan College. Until his retirement in 2016, he worked in the summer as a freelance interpretive guide—one of only 19 guides accredited as master interpreters in Canada’s professional Interpretive Guides Association—and in the winter as a writer and sought-after lecturer on Rockies topics. He has also produced interpretive signs for national and provincial parks, as well as geological exhibits for museums. Heard from time to time on CBC radio, Ben has also appeared in many television items and several documentaries on the Rockies. He supports various conservation groups in promoting wilderness protection. Ben and his wife Cia live in Canmore, where they are Grandpa and Grandma across the yard from Marie and Rose.

Latest posts by Ben Gadd (see all)

• Îyâmnathka: Yamnuska - April 1, 2026