North of Jasper, there sits what some still call the final frontier. While the Rocky Mountains south of Jasper all the way past Banff draw in millions of tourists every year, north of Jasper is relatively untouched. The area’s glaciated peaks, canyons, waterfalls and flowering meadows are left alone in comparison. Knowledge of the area’s history is even less common.

However, a new book by three different writers seeks to fill that blank space in the history of exploration into the northern Rockies. This past Friday, August 27, two of those authors were at the Jasper Yellowhead Museum to talk about their new book, The Forgotten Explorer: Samuel Prescott Fay’s 1914 Expedition to the Northern Rockies.

Mike Murtha, Dr. Charles Helm (the book’s editors, as the book is mostly a collection of Fay’s journal entries) and Bob Sanford (who wrote the book’s forward) are on a mission. They want to start telling the story of how the Rocky Mountains north of Jasper came to be fully mapped. It’s not a story that a lot of people know.

“The popular perception is that the Rocky Mountains end at Mt. Robson. Well, that’s not true,” said Dr. Helm. He said that Bob Sanford, who was not present at the talk, kicked off the project when he saw that Helm had the beginnings of a book. Someone had to “start filling in the vacuum,” he told Helm.

Fay and his party set out on a 1,200 km route on June 26, 1914 with five saddle horses and 16 pack horses, taking a route that to this day has still not been traversed again. Traveling the hard way over the mountains (they went directly over top of ridge-lines instead of following rivers and contours), they spent days cutting down trees to make way for their horses and then took those horses over rocky scree slopes approaching 45 degrees in angle. They finished their route some three and a half months later on October 15, 1914, with the crew still fully intact.

World War One had turned into a full scale conflagration at that point however, and some of Fay’s men left to go overseas to fight the Germans on behalf of the British Empire less than a week after they got out of the bush.

“They were just absolutely remarkable people,” said Murtha.

Dr. Helm said that writing the book was especially important to him, as he lives in Tumbler Ridge, B.C. (population 2,454 and located right inside the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains near Dawson Creek, B.C.), where Fay marks the beginning of recorded history. Before Fay, Tumbler Ridge simply did not exist and without him mapping the region, a place like Tumbler Ridge would not have been possible, said Helm.

“He was really filling in the blank spots on the map,” said Murtha.

Fay kept a detailed journal of his travels north of Jasper which he turned over to the U.S. Biological Survey (now known as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) and the Canadian government. Those journals have been reproduced in the book, along with maps, photos and other paraphernalia that Fay and his team developed. 

“It’s not a glossy book, full of colourful pictures, which we could’ve tried to do,” said Murtha. “Instead, we think it’s a book with real insight into the travels of these men.”

The night at the museum also included a reading from Jerry Auld and his historical-fiction mountain exploration book, Hooker and Brown.

Jerry Auld, born and raised in Calgary, has been a resident of Canmore since 1996. He has worked on provincial park trail crews in the Rockies and describes himself as an avid mountain climber.

Auld’s book is an exploration of some of the real-life legends and myths that surround great explorers and first time mountain climbers who mapped out North America and the Rocky Mountains, such as David Thompson, David Douglass, Thomas Drummond, Sir William Hooker, Sir George Simpson, Arthur Coleman, Norman Collie, and James Outram.

“We live now as the first generation to not have any blank spots on the maps,” said Auld. “There’s Google Earth, GPS and other tools, but it seems to me that we’ve lost something, some sort of mystery.

“These men, there were no post cards, no videos to motivate them, they would just go.”

Auld explains that the book “is a journey to determine what is truth and what is legend, what is mystery and what is ego, what is the map and what is the territory, and the way in which we can nurture mystery and so keep in touch with the land - the sense of place in which we live - and how we can keep the mystery alive.”