With a 12-foot-long cross slung over his shoulder, Hans Schwarz climbed the east ridge of Mount Edith Cavell, determined to plant the structure on the summit—just as they did on peaks in his home country.
It was 1961, a year before the Swiss-born climber became a certified mountain guide and started his 40-year career guiding and training climbers in Jasper National Park.
That was the first cross he planted in Jasper, but it wouldn’t be the last. In the next few years, he carried another up Mount Colin and later—when he realized few people would see the ones on Colin and Cavell—he built one on Morro Peak, a well traversed summit east of town.
“Since Morro was an easier climb and quite a few people hike up there, I thought that would be a good place to have it,” he said.
As well as being an easy hike, Morro was by far the easiest place to plant a cross. Rather than climbing the peak with it on his back, Schwarz was able to build a cross just a few feet from its resting place, using dead trees he found in the gully at the back of the peak.
Schwarz built two that way, replacing his first cross with a sturdier version a number of years later.
For the last 50 years, that cross has been an iconic Jasper landmark, standing the test of time—unlike the ones on Colin and Cavell, both of which were struck by lightning.
But sometime in the last year the famous summit marker high above the Athabasca River disappeared. Now, all that remains is the rock cairn that once held it up.
“It’s a surprise to me,” said Schwarz. “It’s always just been there.”
The 85-year-old hasn’t been up to the peak in a number of years, but he’s kept tabs on the cross, each year checking in with his old guiding partner, Peter Amann, to see if it was still there.
Amann said it was just in the last year that it vanished.
“It was kind of fixed up and then it totally disappeared,” he said.
Summit markers have been in use for centuries around the world.
Schwartz said in the old days they were used for communication: each cross was a registry.
“In Europe there’s a cross on all the mountains,” he said. “When somebody was lost on a mountain—a climber didn’t come home—you knew you could go to the top of the mountain and look at the record and see if they made it up there.”
This of course was before the days of satellite phones, cellphones and spot devices.
“That’s why you were very careful when you got to the top to make an accurate description—not just, ‘Oh, we made it up. It was horrible’ and all of these other things that people put on registers now—people write junk in them now.
“Back then you put when you arrived there, the way you climbed up—east ridge of Mount Edith Cavell—and what time you got to the summit—12 o’clock, 1 o’clock, 6 o’clock—and then what way you’re climbing down—the west side, or the back side, or returning on the ascent route. That gave you an idea of where to start looking.”
Schwarz said he can’t remember the exact year he put the cross on Morro Peak, although he can still remember writing a note in the old registry, which is now in the possession of the Whyte Museum and Archives in Banff. He said it was likely between 1962 and 1965.
No one seems to know exactly what happened to the cross.
Schwarz’s wife, Helen, questioned whether the wood finally rotted out. Schwartz, himself, wondered if the cross was struck by lightning, meeting the same fate as the ones on Colin and Cavell.
But, according to Loni Klettl, of the Jasper Trail Alliance, it may have met a sinister end.
“It was cut off and somebody hucked it,” she said, recounting what she was told by a group of women who hiked the peak last November, only to find the cross was gone. “The girls looked around for it and couldn’t find it, so somebody must have hucked it.”
Klettl said since she heard the news, she’s been fired up. She even approached Parks Canada to ask if the trail alliance could erect a new cross.
“There’s definitely an undercurrent in town that many people feel it should be put back,” she said.
“The cross on Morro means a lot to people, not just locals, but people in Hinton and everybody that hikes up there—that’s thousands of people.”
Amann, who along with a few others maintained and fixed the cross over the years, agreed.
“I definitely think it needs to be replaced,” he said. “It would be great to do it and get Hans up there.”
Klettl admitted she isn’t optimistic that Parks approval will come, but said in the trail alliance’s new work plan it has identified Morro as a trail that it would—at the very least—like to formalize.
Currently the route to the peak is marked with strips of flagging tape, attached to branches, rocks and logs. Without the colourful tape, everyday hikers would be hard-pressed to find their way up the scramble without getting lost.
Klettl said, if the work plan is approved by Parks, trail alliance volunteers will erect permanent markers along the trail, indicating where to go.
Schwarz remembers Morro fondly.
He spent more than 30 years guiding people up to the peak and teaching people to rock climb and rappel on the various routes the mountain provides.
“For his schools he had three routes that the climbers practiced on, each one a little harder than the first,” said Helen, who handled the administrative side of her husband’s business and documented a lot of his history in a tidy scrapbook filled with typed stories, newspaper clippings and photos.
“He’d climb to the summit of Morro and get a four-length pitch which gave the students a real taste of climbing, then onto the summit to be greeted by the cross, which Hans had put up.
“He would tell his students that this was a tradition in Europe, to put a cross at the peak as a reminder to us that, while we were happy in our particular achievement for that day, we should remember that the greatest victory was achieved on the cross.”
Schwarz said, although it was nice to have the cross there to greet you when you reached the summit, its absence won’t make a difference to the people hiking Morro Peak for the very first time.
“They’ll just be so happy they made it up there and they’ll enjoy the scenery. That’s what counts.”
Nicole Veerman
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