I first came to Canmore as the gateway to Assiniboine. To get up there in 1970, we would figure out whose car was the oldest since the Spray Road was terrible. The sign read “Travel at Your Own Risk” and car insurance on it was invalid.
My first visits to Canmore itself were to drive Elizabeth Rummel back home after her day of volunteering at the Archives in Banff where I worked on days when Edna Appleby couldn’t make it. She liked the idea that I was from Vancouver as she had once worked at Hollyburn Lodge on the North Shore.
In Canmore, at Lizzie’s, there was always a cheery invitation to come in for a cup of tea or a bowl of home-made stew. She loved to share – stories, her latest reading, newfound knowledge of the natural world, news of mountain friends. More often than not, a visitor would drop by to share her enthusiasm. Once we went up to visit her old friend, Lawrence Grassi, Lizzie with a generous billycan of hot stew in hand.
Charlie Hunter spent his whole summers in Assiniboine, pitching his teepee near Lizzie’s cabin at Sunburst Lake and chopping wood for her camp. Charlie had been, among other things, a very able logbuilder. In his later years in Canmore, he made wonderful miniature cabins, complete with tiny windows. These he would offer for fund-raising raffles for worthy causes. As a happy winner of one of these, I treasure Charlie’s cabin as it sits on my front porch, a small reminder of bygone mountain architecture, and of coming back to a mountain hut after a day of climbing or meadow-wandering.
In the mid-1970’s, when Ottawa was rumoured to be considering a non-renewal of Banff leases, and renters in Banff were jittery, it seemed a good idea to look beyond the Park for a permanent nest. I opened the newspaper and there were two houses for sale in Canmore. After a sleepless night, I put my money down on the larger one, all 800 square feet of it! It had been Bessie Musgrove’s home. There is still a grand show of her lilacs on the street every summer and a robust peony bush flowers in the backyard. Her friend and garden helper, Mary Hausdorf, told me, “Musgroves was a joyful house”. Over the years, working away in the big city, each tenant loved the place, too (even the tenant-poacher, but that’s another story). It has been said, too, that the ancient lines of spirit running from White Man’s Pass to Grassi Lakes continue across the valley bottom, near the house.
Canmore has changed a lot but I’m still happy this lively community is my home. Some things haven’t changed at all – the deep green of the Bow River, that long view of Rundle, and the abundance of backyard rhubarb!
In Canmore Seniors at the Summit, ed. Canmore Seniors Association, 2000, p. 83.
