After following in the footsteps of Mary Schäffer, the first non-Aboriginal woman to travel through the backcountry of Jasper and Banff national parks, Dr. Helen Andrew and her daughter, Andrea Insoll, recently published a book about their journey.
The book, From Hell to Breakfast: Riding Old Indian Trails in the Canadian Rockies 1907-2007, is the culmination of more than a decade of work.
The book explores Schäffer’s trek through the Rockies in 1907 from present day Lake Louise to just north of the Columbia Icefield and parts in between.
Andrew said she accidentally stumbled upon the story when she first visited Jasper in 2001.
“I was going to the Icefields on the bus and the guide kept talking about mountains that were all named after men and I asked if any women ever went up there and he said, ‘Yes, Mary Schäffer did,’” she recalled.
Upon her return to Banff that evening, she began searching for information about Schäffer and soon found a book called Off the Beaten Track by Cyndi Smith, which described the exploits of 14 female explorers and mountaineers, including Schäffer.
Inspired by Schäffer’s trek through the Rockies, Andrew decided to find out all she could about this mountain explorer, with the hopes of repeating her journey as a comparison study.
After years of research, including a preliminary research trip to Banff in 2001, Andrew finally set off on her own expedition in 2004 at the age of 65. Like Schäffer, Andrew also brought a companion, Insoll, who took photographs and graphically illustrated the differences in the landscape between then and now.
Together the two of them, along with two Métis guides, retraced the remote valleys and lakes north of Lake Louise on horseback, rediscovering the areas Schäffer visited nearly 100 years earlier.
“We tried to do it as close as we could to what Mary Schäffer had done, so we could get a feel for how it felt for her and what the differences were for us,” said Andrew, who was reached by phone from England.
Because of high water levels on the Athabasca River, it took them two separate attempts to complete the expedition.
“We couldn’t go to Fortress Lake the first time because there was too much water. The Athabasca was roaring past and we couldn’t get the horses in,” she said.
Refusing to give up, she returned to Canada in 2007 to complete the expedition, but the river was again too high and too fast to safely cross.
She blamed the high water levels on global warming, which is causing glaciers to rapidly retreat.
“I hadn’t really thought about it or anticipated it very much, but it became very obvious when we were doing it that that’s what was controlling what we were experiencing in some areas,” she said, explaining it would have been easier for Schäffer to cross the river 100 years earlier.
Andrew’s most fond memory from the expedition was when they reached the top of Watchman Lake, just south of the Columbia Icefield in a remote park of Banff National Park.
“It really made me understand why these mountains are sacred to the First Nations. It was awesome, but in the old fashion sense of the word,” said Andrew.
The entire expedition cost her about $12,000, which she only recently paid off. She also received about $2,000 from Michael Palin, better remembered as the leader of the knights who say “Ni” in Monty Python’s Holy Grail.
“It changed me,” said Andrew, about the entire experience. “It made me think really hard about our planet and how women fare in doing stuff like this now compared to what they did then and just how fortunate I was to be in a position to do it.”
From Hell to Breakfast: Riding Old Indian Trails in the Canadian Rockies 1907-2007 is on sale now.
Paul Clarke
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