Byron Harmon: Columbia Icefield Centennial Collection, 1924
To celebrate twenty years of filming and photographing the Canadian Rockies
Byron Harmon plans this expedition with the goal of making a feature length film and photographic series of the country he knows, between Lake Louise, Columbia Icefield, and Jasper, and has been photographing ever since arriving in the Canadian Rockies. He plans to travel on the Icefield itself with horses, then return to Banff over high mountain passes and early autumn snow.
Mt. Columbia soars above it’s glaciers on the northern rim of Columbia Icefield. Byron has witnessed it from afar but never before has he come close enough for photographs. The route to this mountain is akin to a pilgrimage for him.
Crowfoot Glacier, 1924 || The party leaves Lake Louise on August 16, 2024 and travels west then north along what will become, in 1940, the Banff Jasper Highway, now named the Icefields Parkway. The distinctive shape of Crowfoot Glacier has now lost the lower claw thanks to climate warming.
Staged Photo, Teepee at Bow Lake, with Rob Baptie, 1924 || The route follows Bow River to its source at Bow Glacier and Bow Lake. The teepee in this photograph is erected in marshy conditions on the lake edge, a perfect view of what will become one of Byron Harmon’s most famous photographs.
At the Toe of Saskatchewan Glacier, 1924 || Small lakes at the toe of a glacier form, disappear, form again as conditions change. This lake no longer exists and Saskatchewan Glacier no longer ends in this impressive wall of ice. In 1924 it was a major feat to get the horses over the bouldered rubble and ice onto the glacier.
Soapy Smith Leading the Horses on Saskatchewan Glacier, 1924 || Soapy, Rob and Ulysse coax and prod the horses, over the steep bouldered terminal moraine onto Saskatchewan Glacier, so that Harmon may stage and photograph dramatic scenes of horses crossing the ice. This glacier is the source of the Saskatchewan River system.
Mt Bryce from Mt. Castleguard, 1924 || The summit of Mt. Castleguard is reached from Castleguard Meadows, a lovely alpine meadow tucked in between Saskatchewan Glacier and Mounts Andromeda and Athabasca. From the summit the entire Columbia Icefield is in view. Byron photographed and filmed a panorama from this vantage point.
Soapy Smith on Columbia Icefield, 1924 || Soapy Smith was the outfitter for this expedition. He fattened up the horses for the arduous trip to come on his ranch near Morley, in the foothills east of Banff; Morley is in the Stoney-Nakoda Reserve. In order to teach them to walk on the treacherous glacial ice he initially tied their tails to the following horse.
Rob Baptie, Lewis Freeman, Soapy Smith Setting Up the Radio, 1924 || Harmon invited Lewis Freeman, an American adventure travel writer, to join him and assist with making his film. They met in 1922 at Lake of the Hanging Glaciers in the Purcell Mountains. Adding a modern touch, Lewis Freeman brings a wireless radio along, hoping to broadcast and receive from the height of the continent. The five men listen to the World Series and ballroom music from the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco at their camp near Athabasca Glacier.
Soapy Smith, Athabasca Glacier from Wilcox Pass, 1924 || After photographing Athabasca Glacier, from Wilcox Pass, the party circled Mt. Wilcox, and descended the scourged stone bed of an ancient former glacier, to meet up with Sunwapta River which flows north from Athabasca Glacier through what was then an impassable gorge.
Fording Sunwapta River, 1924 || Because of the late spring of 1924, the rivers were in full flood all along their route, resulting in dangerous river crossings, but interesting photography. The horses were occasionally swept away and had to be rescued. The horse packs were not watertight, a major oversight in planning this trip. Those containing photographic gear and film, the radio, and food suffered repeated dunks in the icy, silt laden waters. Most of their sugar and salt dissolved in the North Saskatchewan River. Some sections of trail were impassable because of flooding and detours around mud flats.
Mt Quincey, 1924 || This is one of my favourite photographs. Byron often put some evidence of his presence in his photographs. His hat on occasion, or a tripod. In this photograph look for the tripod on the lakeshore and the single horse.
Mt Columbia, 1924 || If there was a grail, for Byron Harmon, on this expedition it was Mt. Columbia. They camped below the northern-most rim of Columbia Icefield at last grass for the horses. The next morning, the mountain hid from him, swathed in snow filled clouds. Lewis Freeman wrote: “Then followed eight days of futile waiting—an interval in some ways more trying than the worst spells of travel in mud and water.,,Then suddenly and without warning, the veiling clouds fell away like a parted curtain. Mistress Columbia, garbed in a clinging mantle of new fallen snow, radiant in the calcium-like glow of the low but brilliant afternoon sun, stood bowing, “At your service!”.
Lewis Freeman, Rob Baptie, Soapy Smith, Ulysse La Casse at Fortress Lake, 1924 || Fortress Lake is at the head of Wood River in Hamber Provincial Park in British Columbia. In 1990 the park was added to the Canadian Rocky Mountains World Heritage Site by UNESCO which was designated in 1983. It remains a remote wilderness area with few facilities, but a fly in fishing lodge,
Staged Photo at Maligne Lake, 1924 || Maligne Lake, near Jasper, was a scenic highpoint for Byron. As at Bow Lake, he staged a camp scene of teepee including smoke from a campfire on the shore of the lake. This large lake was the beginning of their return trip to Banff through early autumn snows.
Ascending Poboktan Pass, 1924 || It had been Byron’s goal to make a “snow film”in high passes on the return trip from Jasper to Banff. Snow comes early at elevation in the Canadian Rockies, sometimes in September but always by October.
Soapy Smith Leading the Horses up Poboktan Pass 1924 || It was a struggle for the horses to climb through snow in the high country. Fortunately the valleys were still snow free and provided rich fodder for the horses.
Having a Smoke on Jonas Poboktan Divide, 1924 || The view and a smoke; Lewis Freeman, Ulysses La Casse, Soapy Smith and Rob Baptie relax after a hard climb. I’m not certain of the exact location of this photograph.
Columbia Icefield Centennial Collection, 1924
To celebrate twenty years of filming and photographing the Canadian Rockies
…continued from above
Columbia Icefield, Hydrographic Apex of North America
Columbia Icefield is a gigantic reservoir of frozen water, cradled by surrounding mountains. Smaller icefields and glaciers, extending north and south from Columbia Icefield, along the Continental Divide, water much of North America.
The hydrographic summit of Columbia Icefield is a visually smooth curve of ice and snow called Snow Dome. It has been said that a cup of tea spilled on the summit of Snow Dome will trickle to three oceans: east via the Saskatchewan River system to Hudson’s Bay and the Atlantic, south and west via the Bush and Columbia Rivers to the Pacific, and north via the Athabasca River to the Arctic Ocean.
Ice Reservoir
The ice, in places, is thousands of feet deep. Its surface is riven and sculpted, during the summer months, by melting water which flows across its surface in streams, carving deep crevasses and swirling mill holes. Beneath the ice an underground system of limestone caves and passages receives the meltwater and periodically releases it through openings at the perimeter such as Castleguard Cave.
The Nature of Ice
Ice expands and shrinks. Where it descends over cliffs, ice pillars, called seracs, form. At its perimeters glaciers flow around and over the girdling mountains, clinging to rock as they inch downward, ending in terminal moraines from which rivers flow, sometimes from ice caverns of spectacular beauty.
Unmapped and Seldom Seen
This hazardous region is what Byron dreams of recording on film. He has previously travelled, filmed and photographed around the perimeter of Columbia Icefield a number of times but never photographed the icefield itself, set in its ring of mountains. He will be the first to make a photographic study of this area.
Harmon’s Goal is Photographs and Film Footage, rather than ascents.
With advice from his friend Ulysse La Casse, who was the cook for American climber, J. Monroe Thorington’s expedition to Columbia Icefield the previous year, he doesn’t need a guide. He will rely on his own considerable knowledge of the mountains, but hires La Casse as the cook.
A Tribute to the Passing Era of Mountain Travel by Horseback
As well as presenting this remote landscape to the public, this expedition will document hardships and triumphs of the trail. The horses themselves, and their handlers, will feature prominently in a way seldom seen before in Harmon’s work. Soapy Smith is engaged as outfitter with Rob Baptie as his horse wrangler. Ulysse La Casse will cook and also help with the horses. Soapy chooses the horses carefully; they spend a leisurely summer fattening up on grass before the trip begins.
A Vanishing Way of Life
From the outset of his career, Harmon has been aware that he is documenting a way of life which is fast disappearing. By 1895 the Canadian Pacific Railroad has blasted through the heart of the Rockies and changed forever the idea and reality of remote wilderness in Canada. By 1911 the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway has reached Jasper in the north. Cars are in Banff by the 1920’s. My grandfather is not a sentimentalist, hoping to cling to a by-gone era. He vigorously promotes the sharing of scenic wonders of Canada with the world. He has grown up in a family which lived through the transformation of the Pacific Northwest in the USA from sparsely settled indigenous land to ambitious colonial development. He has no illusions about the changes to come.
Wilderness Still Captures His Imagination.
Harmon invites Lewis Freeman, an American adventure travel writer, to join him and assist with making his film. They met in 1922 at Lake of the Hanging Glaciers in the Purcell Mountains. Both were there to photograph and film that remote headwater of Columbia River. Freeman was beginning a trip down the Columbia by canoe, with a cameraman. He was employed by American film producer, Charles Chester, to make one of his Chester-Outing-Scenics.
Harmon Hopes for Publicity for His Film
The April 1925 issue of National Geographic will carry Freeman’s long illustrated article, Mother of Rivers * and he will also publish a book about this trip, On the Roof of the Rockies, which he will dedicate:
To Byron Harmon who, through his photographs, has given the Canadian Rockies to the world. **
As a modern touch, Freeman brings along a wireless radio, hoping to broadcast and receive from the height of the continent. The five men listen to the World Series and ballroom music from the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco from their camp by Mt. Andromeda. Byron brings carrier pigeons, hoping to send messages to Banff of what supplies they will need to pick up in Jasper. A letter of Freeman’s is read back by the Oakland California Station. The radio supplies nightly entertainment for six weeks: an opera rehearsal, late night jazz, a prize fight and daily news from Oakland and Vancouver as well as occasional plugs for their trip.
Heading North in Hazardous Conditions
The party leaves Lake Louise on August 16, 2024. With no bridges and few established trails travel through this country can be relatively easy or extremely difficult. Most of the glacial meltwater, which swells and sometimes floods the rivers in early summer, should have dissipated with cooler nights and shorter days in August. Instead, because of the late spring of 1924, the rivers are in full flood all along their route, resulting in dangerous river crossings, but interesting photography. The horses are occasionally swept away and have to be rescued. Their packs are not watertight, a major oversight in planning this trip. Those containing photographic gear and film, the radio, and food suffer repeated dunks in the icy, silt laden waters. Most of their sugar and salt dissolves in the North Saskatchewan River in the first days of their journey. Some sections of trail are impassable because of flooding and detours have to be found around mud flats.
Teepee at Bow Lake
Their route follows Bow River north from Lake Louise to it’s source, Bow Lake, where they stage and photograph a camp with teepee on the marshy lake-shore, a scenic location which no-one would actually choose as a campsite. This will become one of Harmon’s most famous photographs. They continue north over Bow Pass, filming a series of beautiful lakes in Mistaya Valley and “the Graveyard”, a wide alluvial plain, so named for the bones left by Indigenous hunting parties which once littered this wide flat valley bottom.
Castleguard Meadows, Doorway to Columbia Icefield
They camp in lovely Castleguard Meadows, surrounded on three sides by glaciers and mountainside. Harmon photographs Castleguard Cave, one of the major outlets of the underground karst system below the Icefield, and waterfalls which drain the cave.
Photographing Horses on Ice
Thorington successfully used horses on the Icefield in 1923, setting a precedent.
Soapy, Rob and Ulysse coax and prod the horses over the steep bouldered terminal moraine of Saskatchewan Glacier, onto the ice, so that Harmon may stage and photograph dramatic scenes of horses walking on the glacier. Reading Lewis Freeman’s account, it is clear how much fortitude these mountain trained horses had. They adapted to water—once initiated they preferred swimming to stumbling over boulders and wading through mud. There were no broken legs. It is also clear how competent and patient their handlers were, who encouraged them over difficult sections, tied head to tail, until they grew accustomed to the terrain.
View from Mt. Castleguard
The entire team climbs Mt. Castleguard and Byron films a panorama of the Icefield from the summit. In the distance can be seen Mt. Bryce, and his destination, tiny Mt. Columbia, Mt. Lyell and The Twins, on the far shore of a vast sea of ice.
Athabasca Glacier
It isn’t possible to cross the Icefield from Saskatchewan Glacier to Athabasca Glacier, as hoped, because of crevasses and seracs on Athabasca Glacier’s headwall. Instead they retrace their route down Saskatchewan Glacier and circle around Parker Ridge and Mt. Andromeda to the terminus of Athabasca Glacier.
They film and photograph what will become the only publicly accessible glacier in this region. A future highway and a major tourist site will, one day, bring millions of visitors to view Athabasca Glacier’s diminishing ice. Markers will document the years of its recession. Tourists will travel on its surface in snowmobiles, not horses.
Down the Sunwapta, up the Athabasca Rivers
After photographing Athabasca Glacier from Wilcox Pass, the party circles Mt. Wilcox, and descends the scourged stone bed of an ancient former glacier, to meet up with Sunwapta River, which flows north from Athabasca Glacier through an impassable gorge. They descend the Sunwapta to its junction with Athabasca River, then ascend that river to its source beneath the heights of Mt. Columbia, Mt. Lyell and the Twins. These peaks which they have seen as tiny from the summit of Mt. Castleguard now loom above them.They camp below the northern-most rim of Columbia Icefield, at last grass for the horses. Harmon has reached his goal.
Filming Mt. Columbia
The next morning the mountain hides from him, swathed in snow filled clouds. He’s determined. He hasn’t come all this way over rutted trails, swum flooded rivers on horseback, stumbled through boulder fields, spent months on the trail, returned year after year as he learned the route, to be turned away now. The following excerpt from Freeman’s The Mother of River *** describes his vigil:
Columbia Peak is the Most Beautiful of the North American Rockies
Then followed eight days of futile waiting—an interval in some ways more trying than the worst spells of travel in mud and water. We were vouchsafed one unforgettable view of the slender pinnacle of its summit, suffused in the gold-pink glow of the sun that set the day of our arrival. Then the most beautiful peak of the whole North American Rockies system settled down to the provocative tactics that had made it a mountain of mystery since the day of its discovery….
A Four Day Blizzard Sweeps Down Upon the Camp
…The half famished horses were munching willow bark and leaves in place of of the grass already gnawed to the roots. Our own salt, sugar and canned goods were gone, and only a much-reduced ration of bacon, flour, and oatmeal remained. Still we hung on…As a reward for our patience what should she do but take the veil completely. With a four day blizzard from the north educing the width of our world to a bare fifty feet from the teepee door, we went on waiting, cheered by the wonders of lighting that we told ourselves had to come when the proverbial sunshine followed the storm.
But when on the fifth day—the eighth from that of our arrival—the sunshine, passing by the still veiled mountain peak, came only to flood the snowy valley, we gave up the fight and dejected and beaten, prepared to depart.
With the gaunt, hollow-eyed horses barely able to totter under the depleted loads, the pack train set off down the valley at noon of September 25. The sky was overcast, but Harmon and I, with our saddle animals and the horse packing the cameras, remained behind on the off-chance of an altogether improbable clear-up. Pushing up the valley leisurely to a sheltered spot two miles from the base of the mountain, we ate our lunch and waited for something to happen.
Columbia Peak Drops its Veil at Last
…Then suddenly and without warning, the veiling clouds fell away like a parted curtain.
Mistress Columbia, garbed in a clinging mantle of new fallen snow, radiant in the calcium-like glow of the low but brilliant afternoon sun, stood bowing, “At your service!”. Both light and setting were beyond anything we had dared hope for—sparkling side-shafts of sunshine, with just enough cloud for background and shadow.
And a battle this had been—in a sense one in which, after tasting all the bitterness of defeat, we had snatched a golden victory at the last moment. That, as I think of it now, was the highlight of the trip.The view lasted for forty minutes, ever changing, ever beautiful, and in that time we exposed still negatives at the rate of one a minute, besides running 400 feet of movie film. The black rectangles of paper torn from Harmon’s film packs were piled up behind his tripods like the brass shells around a hand-pumped machine gun at the end of a battle….The sooty pile of nimbus, which rolled down from the north to snuff out the radiance streaming from Columbia, pelted us with a spatter of snowflakes. When we had packed the cameras, we rode out of the timber fifteen minutes later into the teeth of a baby blizzard…
On to Fortress Lake
From Mt. Columbia they make a side trip to Fortress Lake, at the head of Wood River, in what is now Hamber Provincial Park in British Columbia. It’s a large and beautiful lake, they linger to photograph in fine weather, before finally reaching Jasper, where they pick up winter clothing and fresh provisions.
A “snow movie”
The return trip begins at Maligne Lake where, in 1911, Byron photographed American artist, Phimister Proctor, painting the lake. This time he sets up another teepee, with smoke pouring out of it in a picturesque cloud, and films it from afar. Then the party quickly climbs into winter. Harmon wishes, on this return trip, to photograph and film the pack-train travelling through high mountain passes in autumn snow, scenes he has never before captured on film. Freeman records:
Fighting Through Snow in 10-Below Weather
For the next ten days, save for windswept peaks and small patches under thick trees we never saw the bare earth….Our hardest fights were over the divide between Poboktan and Jonas creeks, and at the pass between the Brazeau and the Cline.
It was ten below zero the night before we tackled the former. We had to sleep on boughs without overhead shelter…with the horses weak from difficult forage conditions, we were near to failure at both passes, but were fortunate enough finally to win through….
Once down to the Saskatchewan at the mouth of the Cline, we had a well-travelled trail all the way south. More important still, the route led by valleys famous for the finest grazing in all the Rockies….
With the horses picking up weight and strength all the way, we cantered into Banff on October 24, ten weeks after our departure from Lake Louise.
Praise Abroad, Skepticism at Home
Freeman’s account documents many hardships encountered on the trail. It is widely read and praised by readers of National Geographic Magazine. Veteran travellers in the Canadian Rockies, however, cast skeptical eyes on The Mother of Rivers, for they have travelled these trails without encountering the disastrous conditions he reported. Guide Jimmy Simpson, who is in the privileged position of owning a lodge on the shore of Bow Lake, goes so far as to write a contemptuous letter of complaint to the Superintendent of Banff National Park.
Harmon’s Accomplishment
Ignoring jealousy as a possible cause of grumbling about The Mother of Rivers, and overlooking the difficult conditions of 1924, caused by the late spring and extensive flooding, I believe many locals failed to understand the purpose of Harmon’s expedition. The images tell their tale. Byron planned dramatic scenes for his movie and still photographs. The elements and conditions encountered helped fulfill his goal, portraying men and horses struggling through difficult terrain. It would not have served his purpose to choose the easiest route, or encounter only fine weather.
Miraculously the Film Survived
Byron’s 5”x7” negatives survived their immersion in several mountain rivers. They were protected in sealed pouches before exposure, but after exposure they were vulnerable. The motion picture film was in canisters, but I doubt they were waterproof.
Retouching scans of these negatives has been a challenge. Their dust-riddled and scratched condition is mute testimony to the difficulty of this trip.
The film footage also survived but I have not yet located a copy of the finished film. A copy was sold to Fox News. The American Alpine Club once had a copy, but it disappeared from their storage. I may have found a copy, recorded in the Canadian National Film Archives records, but attributed to Lewis Freeman. I have tried, and failed, to confirm it’s identity and correct it’s attribution.
Perhaps copies are hidden in attic storage of those descendants of mountain-climbing ancestors who loved the Canadian Rockies. Perhaps it will reappear, like Mt. Columbia, when the conditions are perfect. It was shot on flammable, and self-destructive, cellulose-nitrate based film so who knows what condition copies may be in if they do reappear.
A glimpse into Past and Future
Ironically, it is the still photographs which have endured. They allow us to view this slice of history but also give us a comparison between what was there in 1924, an unrecorded and unmapped wilderness, and what is, at present, a diminishing resource. If climate warming abates the glaciers may swell once again, as they did during the Little Ice Age in the North Atlantic, which lasted from around 1300-1850. If not, as I once imagined in a poem, the karst landscape lying beneath Columbia Icefield may one day be a vast alpine meadow and North America a parched and arid continent.
* The National Geographic Magazine, Volume XLVII Number 4, April 1925, Mother of Rivers—The Great Columbia Icefield of the Canadian Rockies, Lewis R. Freeman
** On the Roof of the Rockies, Lewis R. Freeman, New York, Dodd Mead and Company, 1925
*** The Mother of Rivers, the National Geographic Magazine, Vol. XLVIII, No. 4, April 1925, p. 377 - 446