From plucking people off precarious slopes to rescuing lost adventurers in the backcountry, Steve Blake has seen a lot over his 20-year career as a visitor safety specialist with Parks Canada.
But nothing prepared him for a call he received on his 10th wedding anniversary.
“It was a summer day in August and one of my colleagues called and said, ‘we need a rescue, there’s someone injured out by Wabasso Lake,” recalled Blake.
“He went on to describe the circumstances and then I said to him, ‘this injured person you’re talking about happens to be my wife doesn’t it?’”
After confirming his suspicions, it was quickly determined that his wife, Angie, needed to be airlifted out due to her injuries and location.
“She had a fairly serious knee laceration, not life-threatening by any means, so on my anniversary one summer I had to do a long line rescue and pull my darling wife out of harms way.”
For Blake, who retired from the visitor safety team this month, that story is just one amongst hundreds of other search and rescues missions he’s carried out over the past two decades in Jasper National Park.
“There’s lots of stories,” said Blake. “Some of the more heartwarming ones happened when I was just helping someone in a relatively minor situation and some of the more substantial ones, they were big and real, but a lot of the memories are connected to the relationships that I developed with people,” he said.
Blake first joined Parks Canada as a 20-year-old summer student in 1985, working at the Trent-Severn Waterway National Historic Site in Peterborough, Ont.
At the time he was studying geography and environmental sciences at Trent University.
He returned for the next two summers until he moved to Lake Louise where he worked with Parks Canada’s visitor services.
For the next eight years he spent his winters working at Lake Louise Ski Resort, first with the trail crew, then on ski patrol and eventually with the avalanche forecasting team.
By 1992, Blake set his sights on a new challenge and joined Jasper National Park’s warden service. He was posted at the Sunwapta Warden Station for a summer.
“My primary role when I started was working as a front country warden carrying out resource management and enforcement activities and supporting public safety, which we now call visitor safety,” said Blake.
It was there where he got his first taste of search and rescue.
“When I worked at Sunwapta our area included the Columbia Icefields, which has a reasonably busy call volume for minor, but also significant, rescues,” said Blake.
Following his summer stint at Sunwapta, he moved to Jasper for a full-time position that included preparing the daily avalanche bulletins for Jasper National Park.
“The focus of the visitor safety program in Jasper in the winter is primarily focused around the avalanche safety program,” said Blake, explaining he worked closely with the visitor safety team.
With a background in forecasting avalanches, experience as a ski patroller and a short stint with the warden service, Blake was more or less a shoe-in for Jasper National Park’s visitor safety team, which he joined in 1994.
Within five years, he moved up the ladder and in 1999 became the visitor safety manager for Jasper National Park.
Throughout that time he also spent five years as the president of the Canadian Avalanche Association and Canadian Avalanche Centre, from 2005 to 2010.
In 2013, he also spent a summer as the resource conservation manager at Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve.
Today he is the ski area and special projects coordinator for Parks Canada, overseeing Marmot Basin, Lake Louise, Sunshine Village and Mt. Norquay, among other projects in the Mountain National Parks.
“It’s a big change, but I also see it as very interesting and I’m excited to be part of the whole Parks Canada team,” said Blake, about his new position.
He stressed the biggest lesson he learned working in visitor safety was the importance of taking care of himself.
“There’s obviously a level of physical fitness and preparedness that goes into doing that kind of work, but it’s also important to take care of yourself and your family from a stress management perspective,” said Blake.
“I can’t emphasize enough how important my family was to my success, because they supported me leaving the dinner table or running out of the house in the middle of the night or spending days or weeks away on training,” said Blake, who has a 22-year-old son and a 26-year-old daughter.
“I definitely have to say my thanks to them, but also to my many, many colleagues that I had a chance to interact with in that role.
“We did a lot of good in that time and I feel very proud of what we did together as a team.”
