July 27th Thunderhead over the Prince of Wales Hotel the day after Cardston was hammered with hailstones.
So it seems I have now managed to crank out columns for the Pass Herald for seven straight years and I gotta tell yah, it has been quite a journey for me. This last year was pretty interesting research wise and I thought I might slip back over the twenty five or so submittals and revisit the storylines.
This year started out with an article about wind and more wind. It was bad enough that a Nanton school lost its roof in late in November of 2010. My iPod weather app continues to have red flashing wind warnings for here and as I write this the RCMP have issued warnings for Highway 22 and four semi’s rolled over this afternoon (Tuesday Dec 11th). Seems like it gets worse every year. They said there would be erratic and uglier weather as global warming set in and they were not kidding. The total for our summers hail damage has come to over five hundred million dollars in Alberta. Unprecedented! I am pretty sure I saw the wind blow the bit out of a horse’s mouth out Cowley way the other day and he had his back to the wind!
I followed with a piece about cruise ships, having been on a cruise on the Carnival Splendor in May 2011. It of course looked at the Costa Concordia disaster which is now almost a year old and eventually the death toll hit 32. The ship’s captain will soon go on trial but you and I know this one will go on for years. Cruise ship travel is pretty dame safe but you can be sure it will be even safer now.
Next I chose to revisit the story of our west coast being under submarine attack during the Second World War and some of the stories that went with it. The records that are available these days are remarkable and the attack on the Estevan lighthouse off Vancouver Island was verified not only by shell fragments that were identified but by studying the actual Japanese sub records and their comments.
I then shared the story entitled “A Doomed Garden of Eden” which dealt with a master plan by American investor C.E. Barnes to create a great green valley called Walhachin in the desert country around Cache Creek, BC. I watched Ken Burn’s two part documentary on the famous American dust bowl of the 1930’s recently on PBS and it reminded me of the quote I found from an old Cariboo prospector who said about Walhachin after it failed: “they came with all their savings wrapped up in the countless settlers’ effects, full of great hopes and dreams and about all they ever raised was a hell of a big dust."
Following this story came a piece on Phineas P. Gage a blasting foreman on the Rutland and Burlington Railroad who managed to survive having a steel bar blown right through his skull in 1848. Apparently the picture that we ran with the story of his skull in the Smithsonian with the hole in it kind of unnerved some of you readers. It is bizarre, that’s for sure!
This was followed by a series of pieces on Liz Sherrington’s adopted greyhound, a Nova Scotian coal miner named Hughie McIssac who walked from third base to home plate on his hands just for laughs and a sojourn into curious word origins. It is fun to dissect word origins and what I ran into with the word bulldozer went places I never imagined possible.
I am still digging into Mrs Mundie’s scrapbooks and will undoubtedly have more to share from this amazing collection of fifty or more books from local papers that dates from the 1960’s to the 90’s.
I also took you back to the Rogers Pass for a piece called “Tales of the White Executioner” that profiled a 1910 snow slide that killed 58 men. We remembered the Balmer North anniversary in April and I shared my harrowing experience with a pyramid scheme in The Case of the Inverted Pyramid.
Then came my piece on Glen “Blondie” Poulton who passed away on May twentieth of this year. The family was very grateful that I took the time to revisit his life with the readers and I along with many others will miss his big smile and raucous laugh. I plan to do an overview of those lost in 2012 in one of my columns as there were many special people we said good bye to. As a researcher obituaries are so important, lifetimes squeezed into a small word capsule.
As we moved into the summer the columns looked at Julia Makin’s story, a profound piece of history through the eyes of a young girl whose father was one of the 189 lost at Hillcrest in 1914. I also took you through the intricacies of the development of coal in the Elk Valley, an area of history I studied for 25 years when I lived in Fernie. They were mining coal five or more years before the Alberta side and their history is remarkable. Later in the summer we followed the progress of the 162 foot long Bassano railway station on its journey to the Beiseker Railway Museum and dug into the story of ground squirrels that magically disappear in early August of all things.
In the fall lineup I revisited the story from the past on how Thomas Blakiston passed by the Pass and that led to yet another piece on the naming or renaming that is of the Gould Dome and Tornado Mountain. Of course I am always being monitored and do not always get it quite right on these things. Enter then Dr. David McIntyre with the following corrections about its length and highest point: “The Livingstone Range is about 70km long, and it's split—roughly 50/50—by The Gap. The highest point in the range is Centre Peak (the soaring pilots' Mecca), which is about 10km south of The Gap and perhaps 8km south of Thunder Mountain. The second-highest peak in the range is Mount Livingstone, which is located in the northern half of the range. Thunder Mountain comes in third.”
My writing season was all wrapped up in early winter with stories about Australian Robert Pettigrew retracing his father’s footsteps here from 1932, a remembrance story of setting aside differences during the war and recently acknowledging Drumheller’s commemoration of the 207 men lost in their coal mines.
So there it is folks. A quick overview with a promise to continue digging up bones. Most columns are available on line in the archives folder of passherald.ca. So here is a wish for a very Merry Christmas to all from Lorraine and I. See you in the New Year.
