From a distance, mountain landscapes may appear timeless and immutable. Take a closer look, however, and montane ecologies reveal themselves to be laboratories of radical transformation: rocks weather and fall; ecosystems burst into life for brief intervals; tree-lines shift; and wildfires rage. Even the very peaks themselves inch inexorably upwards or downwards with the flow of time.

Amidst all the constant, unyielding change that animates the Earth's high places, people have long sought a vantage from which to survey this shifting terrain. Who can resist the romance of a breathtaking, mountaintop view? Or then to imagine what generations past might have seen from the same spot?

In the mid 1990s, a small group of scientists in western Canada grew dissatisfied with mere imagining — they wanted to see that change for themselves. And in a forgotten corner of a national archive, they found some very heavy boxes that held a rare promise: an opportunity to look back in time at a landscape scale.

– – –

For musical credits, select photos, citations, links, and more, click here.

Support the show and join our Patreon community

– – –

Learn more about the Mountain Legacy Project: mountainlegacy.ca

Explore all the photos and data: explore.mountainlegacy.ca

More on land cover classification | Webinar | Deep Dive

You are listening to Season Four of

Future Ecologies.

Mountains are very special places, no matter

how you look at them. Whether it's recreation, or its

biodiversity, or its human geography and human diversity,

they're... they're absolutely beautiful, wonderful places.

There's a world that's compressed along a

gradient that is tangible. So you can you can see it, feel it

— you can walk from a forest and be in the alpine tundra in two

hours.

You know, you get isolation plus time. You

have places that are hard to get to, and they're hard to get to

for a long period of time. And it leads to diversity rising in

those situations. And so mountains are always really

exciting.

Everyone who's ever moved through a

mountainous landscape, like you know that it's like, it matters

which direction you go, and you pick carefully the way that you

move based on the topography of that landscape. And that's the

same for every other creature that's moving — or every other

biological or abiological process: wind, water, pathogens.

And so those processes shape the change that we see: the

gradients across those landscapes.

So even just over small little bits of space

(like meters, we're not talking kilometers), you can have

radically different climate conditions and totally different

species in those places.

At every level, at every elevation, it's a

completely different system. So it's a connected system, but you

find a different assemblage of plants and animals and all kinds

of other things. And it's all... it's all very immediate.

Because mountains are so difficult to

move around in, they're often very under surveyed. Actually it

turns out that we think we know lots about biodiversity, but if

you go there at different times than when other people have

visited a site, or you go to a place that people don't get to

very often, you'll almost always find something new.

Something about being in the mountains, and just

the vastness of those landscapes, and the hazards you

sometimes see and experience, the friendships that are forged

in those environments feel like they can weather a lot.

Yes, I always like to say: if you're lucky

enough to be in the mountains, you're lucky enough.

Hey, I'm Mendel.

I'm Adam. And it's no secret that we here at Future

Ecologies have an abiding love for the high country. Every

year. I wait with mounting anticipation for that brief

window, just a few months really, when the snow recedes

and all of the alpine ecosystems just burst into life. In some

ways, it's what I live for. It's a call that I find completely

irresistible.

For many of us, mountains are little more than a

backdrop for the rest of our lives, lived here on the

flatland. For some though, they can be an intoxicating

invitation to explore, discover, and self realize. And for a

select few, mountains can be a many-layered text, that if

deciphered carefully, opens a window into the history of life,

ecosystems and the planet itself.

I mean, I mostly just go up there to see the

wildflowers. What do you find most fascinating about

mountains?

I, you know, I love being able to look at the

strata of rock, and be able to peel back time. You know, it

looks unchanging, it looks immutable and timeless. But when

you get up close, you can see all these transformations in

Earth's history. All the tectonic, climatic, and

evolutionary shifts that have literally determined the shape

of our world.

Yeah, there's, there's also mushrooms up there

too, right?

I'm more than just the mushroom person. But

yes.

I didn't... I don't mean to paint you into a

corner, Mendel.

That's okay.

Today, we're gonna get elevated with some true mountaineers, who

are building on a legacy that spans over a century of

incredible environmental change.

That's right. And they're going to tell the story

in their own words

From Future Ecologies, this is Mountain

Legacies.

Broadcasting from the unceded, shared, and

asserted territories of the Musqueam. Squamish, and

Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies: exploring the shape

of our world, through ecology, design and sound.

Okay, so I'm Jeanine Rhemtulla, and I'm an

associate professor in the Department of Forest and

Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia.

And I am... what am I? I'm a landscape ecologist by training,

and I'm really interested in in large landscapes — and how they

change across space and through time; and who the people are in

those landscapes that are shaping that change, making

decisions about how we want to live on those landscapes into

the future.

And I've always wanted to be Jeanine.

I'm Eric Higgs, I'm a professor in the School of Environmental

Studies at the University of Victoria.

Longtime listeners will remember Eric from the

"Nature By Design" series that kicked off our third season.

He's a friend, mentor, and now my colleague at the University

of Victoria. And he also helped us produce this story.

A story which begins way back in 1996 — in

Jasper National Park, high up in the Canadian Rockies.

I was a graduate student at the time: I

was a master's student at the University of Alberta, in the

department of renewable resources — of all awful names —

doing a graduate degree. And I wasn't very happy in that

I hadn't yet found the project that really

made my heart sing. And I was actually ready to quit, to be

honest. And then I was kind of casting about at the university,

you know, just trying to find somebody that was doing

interesting work that felt like it was the right fit.

And somewhere along the lines of knocking on doors, I knocked on

the door of Professor Eric Higgs. And he just started

talking about this project that he was putting together: the

Culture, Ecology, and Restoration project in Jasper. I

don't remember what we talked about, I just remember being

blown away by the interdisciplinarity of it: the

way that he was bringing together people from all

different disciplines, different perspectives on a question: what

does it mean to do restoration in a national park?

He said "your job on this project, what I want you to

answer is, what did this national park look like 100

years ago?" And so the idea was that we were going to recreate

the ecological history and the cultural history of the park,

and bring those together to ask about how the landscape and the

people in that landscape had changed.

It was way more challenging to answer that

question than we ever expect it to be. So we thought that was

we walk in, we go to the archives, there'd be some

books, you know, book chapters written about this, and that

we'd be able to piece together on what the landscape looked

like. We got quite desperate after the first few weeks,

right? And we were having a dinner I recall around the table

with a group and I just said "we have really got to go out, and

everybody tomorrow has to figure out, like, can we find anything

that tells us what this is like?"

We thought about using dendrochronology, so

you can core trees. But that's very painstaking, and you can

only do it in small areas. So we'd looked, for example, for

old historical air photos, right? That's always a standard

place to go. But the earliest are photos from the 1940s. And

so that got us back partway, but not the whole way.

this place used to look like." And he said, "Oh, I got these

old photographs in this desk drawer," and so walks me over

the desk drawer, and he opens up the bottom. And then there's

these just beautiful albums of pictures. And you would go like,

page after page — black and white, and they were kind of

like I don't know, by maybe five by seven, or six by four.

Beautiful pictures, these kind of cryptic numbers in the upper

corner where you could tell there was some kind of like,

there was some kind of series or something... Front ends of the

books had this little index in them that had station numbers.

So they were something, but it wasn't quite clear who had taken

them, or what they were. And they had a date in the corner:

1915.

That's about all we knew about them.

That, and I remember... I remember that map

— it was like an 11 by 17 map. And the map had numbers on it.

And at some point, we put together that the numbers on

that map matched the numbers that were in these albums. And

we were like, "Oh, those are the photo stations where we would

need to go to take those pictures." And I think you were

the one that said we should go repeat them.

So we climbed... we sort of scrambled up to

powerhouse cliff. We found an old animal trail and we followed

it up. It wasn't very difficult to get up there. But we walked

along the ridge of this cliff and you know, holding these

historic photos out. We took photocopies, right?

Mhm.

Yeah. And we got up along the ridge, and we kept

looking, and it was like we weren't finding the right spot.

And then eventually it was like, "oh my gosh, this has to be the

right place." And then we looked at across the Athabasca Valley,

and nothing made sense. And you described it as kind of vertigo.

Like you have this interpretive vertigo, where you know you're

in the right place looking at a photograph of that place. And

then what you're seeing isn't anything like what it looked

like.

There were trees, everywhere we looked

there was this huge carpet of green trees, tall

trees, thick homogeneous trees, right? And that's what we expect

in a national park. That's what we come to know Jasper National

Park to be, is trees, right? Because it's a protected area.

But when you look at the pictures, the pictures are this

patchy mosaic of all of these different little shrubby things,

and there are some grass areas, and then there's trees of

different types and textures:

some coniferous trees, some

different types and textures:

deciduous trees, different heights of different trees.

different types and textures:

Like, just a mosaic — a mosaic of diversity.

different types and textures:

So here you are standing in the middle of a national park, which

different types and textures:

has been preserved intact to be the way that it's supposed to

different types and textures:

be. And yet we're looking standing in the same spot that

different types and textures:

these surveyors were 100 years before, and the park is

different types and textures:

fundamentally different.

So then we just walked away and left it all

alone.

No, we started walking and we did a couple more stations, and

then having a mathematical mind that you do you started to think

"maybe I can actually reconstruct the vegetation

patterns from these oblique photos. Wouldn't it be cool if

we could like repeat all of the images in Jasper National Park."

And so we started getting all enthusiastic about this idea.

Because we now knew there were 92 separate locations, and from

each location, there were multiple images. So there were a

total of 735 images. And most of these were mountain tops.

Never imagining that this would become

bigger, right? Like we just thought this was this one

survey, we focused our work on just this one space. So those

were the pictures we were repeating

The story that's etched in my mind so strongly is

the very last day of the second summer of this work, where we

were wrapping the last station:

we saved Pyramid mountain for

were wrapping the last station:

the last, and that was the very first real mountain that Jeanine

were wrapping the last station:

and I climbed. But by this point, after three years, we

were wrapping the last station:

were like, pretty fit, and used to mountains. We shot the last

were wrapping the last station:

photograph, and I had a bottle of bubbly stashed away and some

were wrapping the last station:

smoked salmon. And we watched the ravens circling, and we had

were wrapping the last station:

a just a wonderful time.

were wrapping the last station:

I don't think I would recommend champagne on a mountain top when

were wrapping the last station:

you have to climb down as a life choice. But that was what we

were wrapping the last station:

did. And we got off these big quartz boulders and down to

were wrapping the last station:

where we were staying. And there was a package for us. It was

were wrapping the last station:

from our colleague, Ian McLaren, who was an historian, literary

were wrapping the last station:

historian at the University of Alberta — an amazing archival

were wrapping the last station:

researcher as well. And it was the season and survey report

were wrapping the last station:

from Morris Bridgeland, who was the surveyor. We knew the

were wrapping the last station:

original name really well. And it was his report to the federal

were wrapping the last station:

government on his 1915 survey in Jasper National Park. So at the

were wrapping the last station:

very last day, the last moment of our survey, we finally knew

were wrapping the last station:

where they had gone, and in what sequence. And it was fantastic.

were wrapping the last station:

We read the whole thing as we're eating dinner and reading and it

were wrapping the last station:

was like, "Oh, my gosh, they did this!" And they turns out, they

were wrapping the last station:

had two camera crews, which is how they managed to get through

were wrapping the last station:

all the photography in one season. And then we both kind of

were wrapping the last station:

moved on from the project. And we thought, "this is our

were wrapping the last station:

moment."

were wrapping the last station:

And then enter Rob Watt.

I go by Rob, there's too many Bobs in the world

At that time, he was a park warden at Waterton Lakes

National Park, and he was an inveterate historian, amateur

historian.

And for some reason, there were something like three

dozen volumes of Morris Parson Bridgeland's photographs, on a

shelf in the common area of the office. And I didn't understand

the background at the time. I didn't even know who Morris

Bridgeland was. I gathered from the book that he was a land

surveyor, and he took a bunch of photographs. But we didn't have

any of his maps, for instance, and of courses this was way

before there's anything like an internet. They had a big map

collection down in what was the admin office in Washington. So I

poked around in their map collection. And lo and behold,

three mapsheets with Morris Parsons

Bridgeland's name on them, and camera stations!

And he said, You know, "I have maps that show,

you know, where there was evidence — photographic survey

locations, because it shows that on the map," and it turned out

to be by the same surveyor that we were working with in Jasper:

Bridgeland. He said, "and I have the index to views," which was

all important because that tells you where they were. I mean, the

names aren't always modern names, but at least you knew

where they were. But he said "but I don't know where the

photographs are."

And so Eric contacted us in about 2002, very

interested in where those photos came from, and was there a

bigger collection,

Jill Delaney, lead archivist in photography in

the private archives branch, at Library and Archives Canada.

I've actually been working with Eric for 20 years

on this project. And I've only been at the archives for 25

years. So it's been a big part of my career.

And that's too long a story to spin. But we found

out that these glass plate negatives were held in boxes at

NRCAN — Natural Resources Canada, not at the National

Archives. And they were actually, in a sense, lost.

I have this story. It's probably not accurate, but I like it

anyway. It's a bit of a conspiracy tale: that some

benevolent civil servant realize the value of these images and

misfiled them. We did come across records and that's

basically a destruction protocol. They were held on too

long. They take up a lot of space. They're heavy. Nobody

uses them. They're gone.

Three grad students from the U of A went to Ottawa,

to the one of the national repositories, where records go

to die.

And they were walking along and just by

accident, I think, out of the corner of their eye. And poking

out from the bottom of one of these barcode tags was a number

that matched the kind of sequence of numbers that was on

the box. And they said, "Woah! Wait a second, can we take a

look at that box?" and pulls it off shelf — super heavy. And it

was filled with glass plate negatives. So were the rest of

the boxes on that shelf.

Lo and behold, they found them.

So these are what's called a half plate:

about four inches by six inches. That's a relatively thin glass

plate, a bit thinner than window glass, let's say — but not much.

It's kind of the same as with a film negative, it's basically

the same concept. It's just that instead of the emulsion being on

the film, it's on glass.

Alright, so our cameras — in the age before

digital — our cameras used to use film. And when a camera took

a picture on that film, it would make... the image that it

recorded on the film was like backwards of what you actually

see. So in places where, if you're using black and white

film, where something was dark in real life, it would be light

on the negative and where it's light in real life, it is dark

on the negative. And you only get to see back what that real

picture looks like when you put that negative onto a piece of

photographic paper and shine light through it, where it

reverses that image again, and it ends up looking like what it

really looks like in real life. So if you're looking at the

negative, your eyes have to kind of imagine the whole thing...

backwards.

There's maybe 100,000 glass plate negatives in the National

Archives covering most of British Columbia. And they are

spectacular images. These were the photographs that surveyors

were taking at the turn of the century to make maps of this

area.

The government was worried about American

expansionism in the 19th century. So they started doing a

boundary survey between the US and Canada in the 1860s.

The original surveyors, in the most case

mountaineers or geologists, who were hired by the Government of

Canada or by the provinces to to create these maps.

This kind of topographical survey. The

problem was that when they hit the mountains, they realized

that doing a kind of standard rod and chain survey was going

to be really difficult, really slow, and really costly, and

probably impossible, in some places.

The traditional means for surveying land was to

establish reference points in the landscape. And then from

those reference points, using fixed distances and elevational

measurements, using transits and so on, you would get a sense of

the topography, the elevational change and the distance. So you

could create pretty accurate maps. So if you're moving across

Saskatchewan, or what's now Saskatchewan, not so hard.

Tedious, but not hard.

Yeah, it's like having a tape measure,

The Gunters chain

So the chains were part of a legally determined

length

66 feet long, divided into 100 links of approximately

9 inches per link

And so that was why, when they came to the

mountains, like you can imagine dragging your chains across the

Like "Woah! Now we have this really steep

mountains...

elevation, and we've got all this complexity around

topography..." And to do that using traditional techniques is

hugely laborious.

So what they would do is they would go to a

mountain peak, they would level the camera, and then they would

take a whole panorama around to look at all of the peaks that

you could see from that one peak.

So let's imagine that you have three

A, B, and C. So you'd get to peak A, you'd build yourself

a nice big cairn. And then you'd take a set of panorama images,

so that you could see peaks B and C. Then you'd go to B, build

yourself a nice big cairn. And then you would shoot back so

that A and C are in your panorama set. Then you'd go to

C, build yourself a nice big cairn. You'd say, "Well, why the

heck did you put a cairn on C? Isn't that extra work?" Yeah,

you're going to D, and D is going to tie back to C.

And all the way through the mountains.

It was a very, like, calculated process. I

don't think that it was done with artistry in mind. But the

result is that some of the photos are absolutely beautiful,

but that's also just the nature of the landscape and the

subjects that they're taking pictures of.

It's not a tourist camera, right, it's a technical

camera that had to survive the rigors of hiking and climbing

through the mountain.

And then that's what they were carrying

they had these big boxes on their backs that would hold

12 glass plate negatives and this old camera. And so imagine

climbing mountains with like a backpack filled with pieces of

glass.

It wasn't nearly as cumbersome as some earlier

processes, where you had to take all the chemistry and a dark

room with you. But probably the equipment weighed about 40

pounds that they had to take up to the peak where they would

actually do the photography.

And so yeah, climbing a mountain is hard. But

if you can climb a mountain and take pictures, and take your

pictures, again, in this 360 degree circuit going all across

— you're taking a picture of all the land that you don't have to

drag the chains across.

And it dramatically shortens the amount

of time the surveyors have to spend in the field. And then you

could pack all of these negatives together —

then they would send them back to the

office in Ottawa, where they must have had a whole office

full of people doing geometry, essentially right, to turn those

oblique angles back into a proper topographic map.

The maths is fairly complex. Of course, they had

some pretty smart people working on it.

Our earliest topographic maps of certainly of

the mountains, but of much of other places in British Columbia

were done with this kind of technique. But 100 years later,

like we look at the pictures, and to have to turn those into

top down maps is... it's just become an art that we've that

we've lost. Like, we just don't do it anymore.

And so began the Mountain Legacy Project,

leveraging this massive collection of historical

photographs, over 100,000 pictures covering almost all of

BC, part of Alberta and the Yukon, to reveal over a century

of change.

And to do that means repeating each and every

photograph, on each and every mountain peak, one by one,

Okay, you have a photo, you go to the place where

that photo was taken, you point your camera in the same

direction, you try to take the exact same photo.

People who have done this a lot... so we have field

crew members who've worked with us over the years. There's

always one every summer who's kind of like the station

whisperer, you know, who does the research with the

photographs ahead of time before you go out into the field, and

gets a sense of, you know, whether there's one location or

two that this historical surveyor shot from. And then

they just have a sixth sense, a pattern recognition that allows

them to say, "I think it's over there."

Because basically, you're going out and you're

triangulating the reverse of what the surveyors did. They

knew where they were. We're trying to trying to figure out

where they were, so we're backtracking from their

photographs.

Yeah, I know I have not been the only one that

has been on the wrong mountain. We don't do it very often. But

once in a while.

Well, it speaks to that it's an art and a science

to find your right location.

Yeah with a little bit of mountaineering

thrown in as well.

You've heard from some of them already, but

now it's time to meet a few members of the MLP field team.

Well age before beauty, I guess. So I'm

Mary Sanseverino, and I am a retired member of faculty in the

Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria,

Faculty of Engineering. And I've been a member of the Mountain

Legacy Project since 2010. And still do a little bit of work

with them from time to time.

I'm Jenna Falk. I was involved with the Mountain

Legacy Project from 2011 to 2014, roughly, while I was doing

my master's in the School of Environmental Studies at UVic.

And when I went in the field for the first

time, I went as Jenna's assistant.

Which still does not make sense to this day.

Makes great sense, great sense to me.

Mary kept us alive.

So fieldwork was incredible. My name is Julie

Fortin. I did my masters with the Mountain Legacy Project at

UVic 2016 to 2018. I joke with my fellow MLP'ers that I peaked

too soon, and I will never have another experience like that.

So I've almost been... 10 summers in the

Rockies now because of this project. My name is Kristen.

Kristen Walsh

First became involved with Mountain Legacy in

2014. Went out for stellar field season with four amazing, strong

headed women. What we do in terms of our work is very

different from mountaineering. Because often people get to the

summit, and then beeline it down to get to the sauna or a beer

with friends. But our work really begins when we arrive on

the summit.

You know, we work with the surveyors. We work

with their with their work. And you're so close to this work,

that really you feel like, like you know that person.

Because they all have a signature in their

photographs

Bridgeland! That man was fearless. Every time we

were doing one of his sites, I had this sort of like low-key

dread. Because I just knew that wherever he said that that

tripod, you know it was going to be not always the most low

it was going to be right on that outcrop, right

over that precipice, just to get that perfect angle and perfect

shot. And we knew we're in for that day.

My name is Sandra Fray. So I worked as a field technician in

the summer of 2016 and 2017.

And finally, Alina Fisher.

I am a PhD student in environmental studies. I'm

also the research manager for environmental studies. So kind

of wear two hats.

It's... it's so cool to be like kind of

walking in their their footsteps. And even some of our

techniques are very similar to the techniques that they used

back at the turn of the 20th century. And their maps are, for

the time, pretty accurate.

Very accurate.

There is a somewhat of a science to it. But

there's a good dose of intuition as well, that's hard to explain

unless you've been there doing it. And sometimes you'll just

arrive at the top and you can imagine where someone stood 100

years earlier, or sometimes there's a physical cairnnn that

they built.

Oh yeah

Huge carins.

Huge cairns!

Like, you know, some were what, 8, 10 feet tall.

Mhm mhm.

Massive things.

Then you need to snuggle into that cairn to take

the picture. And sometimes the obvious spot is not the spot.

And you'll spend hours... So definitely a lot of patience

needed in lining up those photographs.

That was always like our our kind of type A personal

in the foreground. Like how close can you get the

foreground to match exactly. And some of the rocks were in the

exact same place.

Same place, yep.

Yeah, I know. I'm always wondering, "Can I

sacrifice a little bit of scientific accuracy right now,

not to get attacked by wasps? Is this okay?"

Isn't the verdict "shhh?"

Yeah. The verdict is safety first.

Yes, safety is always the first.

So I was, well not recently, but a few years

ago, I was on Eiffel peak in Banff National Park. And Arthur

Wheeler was there 1903. And he built an eight foot cairn. That

cairn is still there. The pin that he put in place is still

there. I know because we were there in an electric storm, and

the cairn started to sing at you. When that happens, you must

leave.

One of these hazards that you're on the

lookout for in the mountains is weather, primarily. It can be a

beautiful day. Mountain weather will do what it does best, and

it changes on a dime. There was one day where we were on a peak,

and we were very focused on the photographs we were taking.

We're going about taking our pictures, la de la de

da.

And there was a storm cell that caught us by

surprise.

Uhh... I don't really like the look of those

clouds.

And of course, with the storm cell came all of a

sudden... hail that's pelting down on us, and everything got

slippery. And because it was a heli drop-off, full hover exit,

you know, just right on this sort of conical peak, we had a

really hard time climbing down a little bit, not to be the

highest point on that mountain.

And then we looked at each other and we saw that

our hair was standing on end.

There's certain times when you just don't want

to be on top of a mountain. Not only do you not want to be, but

you shouldn't be.

You could just really feel the static in the

air. And I remember hearing these boulders next to us where

we were sort of crouched, just... could hear them buzzing,

You can... hear the static in the rocks,

Sort of like in between a cat hissing and

something like sizzling in a hot cast iron pan.

Everything that was metal, from the pin on top of

your ballcap, you could hear that kind of singing and... it

felt very real in that moment.

So that was a learning experience. Always keep

your eye on the clouds.

You know, I like to say when you go to the

mountains "Nobody died. Nobody cried. Well, nobody died."

Some of them were happy tears, to be fair.

Very happy tears, especially going "Yes! We

made it!"

There are tears of joy. And then there are tears of

relief.

There's so many moments, but they were fun at

the time. Weren't they?

I feel like it's Type 2 fun, because at the time,

you're like... you're struggling. You're slapping

yourself non-stop to keep the mosquitoes away, and sweat's

dripping in your eyes, and your hair got tangled in a bush as

you're walking past something. You're hungry. You're thirsty.

"Oh crap. My three liters of water is not enough."

I feel like the most fun I've had on these

projects, and then generally, is those times I'm also asking

myself "Whose idea was this?"

"What are we doing here?" And then later you're

Yes!

like, "That was so much fun."

Type 2 fun.

Because it's fun... when you look back on it.

Yeah.

But at the time, there's a bit of swearing

involved.

Yeah.

Yeah, I've also embedded Type 3 fun. Which is –

Which is never fun?

No, it's mostly what you deal with office of [bleep

bleep]. Don't... don't quote that.

All in all, this does not sound that different

from my bad mushroom trip at the top of Black Mountain, back in

2010.

But did you come back with a priceless dataset of

1000s of repeat photographs?

No, I... I did not. I was just happy to make it

off the mountain alive.

Well, now that we too are coming down out of

the mountains, let's have a look at those photos, shall we?

We shall, After the break.

Adam.

Mendel. This is Future Ecologies. And today

we're hearing about the Mountain Legacy Project from the folks

that made it happen.

In this second half of the episode, we ask

"What can we learn from two sets of identical photographs, taken

over a century apart?"

We have this remarkable and very rare

collection. It's very unusual to have data that's this old in

this remarkable collection of what landscapes

looked like over 100 years ago. Aesthetically, it's really neat

to see that but from the point of view of a scientist, this is

very difficult to get data.

Brian Starzomski, Director of the

School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria.

There are no other ways to get data like

this, there are no other ways to look this far back in terms of

what landscapes and what the ecology of the West looked like.

The... the fidelity of the information that

are on the historic glass plates, it's hard to beat that.

Now, mind you, it's an oblique view.

Interpreting oblique photos is more difficult

than interpreting photos or data that's collected at a right

angle, which is what satellite derived or remote sensing data

is.

And I can tell you, as a person that does a

little bit of software, it's not easy to go from the oblique view

to something that goes on to a 2d map — that goes to the

orthographic, the... the look down view, like an air photo.

You can do it, but it's not easy.

So in the photograph, the pixels that are in the far distance,

those pixels are huge. And the pixels that are in the

foreground, those pixels represent a very small area.

If I were to tell you that like there are 1000

pixels of coniferous forest, it actually kind of matters where

they are on the photo if they're in the foreground or the

background.

So in the distance, one pixel, huge area,

foreground, one pixel, tiny area.

This whole process of projecting these photographs

is actually computationally pretty difficult, but doable

now.

It's applied linear math, and a lot of

programming. And we wouldn't call it research if we knew what

we were doing. So we're really, really at the bleeding edge, if

you will. What we do with this is take land cover

classifications that are made from the photographs. So imagine

you're looking at a photo that was done in 1897. And you look

at the photo and you classify it and you say, well, that's

grassland and that's –

Mixed wood forest

and coniferous forest

Open meadow

Shrub

Barren rock

That's ice. And then you do that for a

modern photo. And then you compare the two.

Yes, that's when you get into the analytic side

of things. And it's not just all fun and games in the

mountains... I've heard!

I've got a couple of takeaways. Number one:

loss of ice. The loss of glaciation is absolutely jaw

dropping, staggering. Second:

industry in the landscape.

dropping, staggering. Second:

Several times, we were on the land, trying to line up these

dropping, staggering. Second:

images and everything worked except for one. And that's

dropping, staggering. Second:

because the mountain wasn't there anymore.

Probably 5% of British Columbia's GDP comes out

of coal mines. Coal mining is done by mountaintop removal.

It's really crazy to see the glacier gone.

But when your underlying geological structure is just

gone, it's... it's disconcerting. And I'll say a

Alpine treeline ecotone creep up slope. So that

is in so many photos.

When people think of the treeline, I suppose

they probably think of this razor sharp delineation, between

forest below it and then alpine tundra or wildflower meadows

above it, and it's often not really like that.

As you get closer to that boundary, which we call

the treeline ecotone, the trees start to change their growth

forms.

Andrew Trant, Associate Professor in the

School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at the

University of Waterloo.

And so you start to get trees that are growing

less vertically more horizontally. The growth form

that we refer to is called Krumholtz,

Krumholtz, these trees that are very

difficult to walk through, you see them in mountainous places

all over the world, the conditions are such that they

can't grow very tall, certainly less than two meters tall,

You can have the same species growing in the

forested area that you see up just around the edge. And one

can be 100 feet tall, and one could be three feet tall, same

species, but it's just the environment that really drives

that growth form.

And it's just this impenetrable thicket that

is very difficult to get through, but absolutely filled

with bird life. When we measure treelines, we do it in a variety

of different ways, we may say that a treeline is the highest

elevation that a certain height of tree goes. We might say that

this is where the two meter trees run out. Or we might say

that the treeline is the limit of where a certain density of

forest exists.

One important piece of this puzzle when we're

thinking about these boundaries and thinking about treeline is

that they are, they are in some ways controlled by temperature.

So as things are warming, then we would expect trees and

ultimately, this whole complex community to be able to grow

higher up the mountain. In most cases, that's what we saw, it

was kind of an overwhelmingly clear signal of change in that

direction.

For all of the quantification that we've

done, being able to transform these into kind of like hard

numbers that we always like to have, as scientists... I still

think that some of the most value comes from these pictures,

is their evocative value to audiences: to be able to look at

those pictures side by side, and to just be able to see the

amount of change in the landscape. And then to be able

to dig in and ask these questions like "Okay, so these

these landscapes are completely changed. First of all, which one

do you think is the present, and which one do you think is the

past?" And so often people say, "Oh, well, the one that's got

trees everywhere, that has to be what it looked like 100 years

ago. And the one that's patchy, and it's got like little shrubby

stuff, that must be what it looks like today, because we've

obviously cleared the land, right? It used to be treed, and

now we've cleared it." because that's again, our image of what

people have done the landscapes, and it's bad if there's no

trees, and it's good if there's just homogeneous trees

everywhere.

Yeah, a lot of people that I have spoken to

have said, "Oh, more trees. That's good, isn't it?" And, in

fact, no, especially a lot of the places where there are these

denser forests now have a lot higher wildfire risk. And so

that's risk to the community, a whole bunch of other risks for

climate change. Because if you have these large swaths of

connected forest, it's a lot harder to fight these fires if

they do get into places that we don't want them to be. It's also

bad for biodiversity, in the sense that, because the

landscape is more homogeneous now, species that relied on

these diverse bits of habitat have less of it, and therefore

they're suffering, whereas species that were already

dominant are doing better.

And in a mountain environment, you are limited

with the amount of area that you have, as you go higher up the

mountain, the area decreases because you're looking at

something that's kind of conical.

That's right. And actually, those alpine

meadows, those mountaintop meadows above the treeline are

some of the most remarkable and diverse habitats for a variety

of very rare plants, often with very restricted ranges, because

they're just found on those mountain tops, or hugely diverse

and abundant butterfly populations.

So one of the really remarkable things about being on a

mountaintop in July or August, are the 1000s of butterflies

flying around. And as treeline moves up, those habitats get

smaller and smaller, and this is going to happen all across

southern BC. Treelines will move up, we'll have more trees, sure,

in mountains. But we'll have much less Alpine habitat, which

means much less habitat for things like White Bark Pine, for

really beautiful rare and endangered butterflies, for

really rare and range restricted plants. And just that habitat

that we really love. A lot of people really love those lush

mountain meadows or those rocky craggy peaks. There are going to

be fewer and fewer of those as forests move up more and more in

the mountains.

The pressures that are being put on mountain

landscapes — it affects our water, affects our air, our

culturally important and sacred places. But probably most of

all, it affects our wildlife. And gradually, they are being

squeezed out of their their habitats.

Bill Snow, Acting Director of Consultation

for Stoney Tribal Administration,

I work with the three first nations that comprise

Stoney Nakoda, which are the Bearspaw First Nation, the

Chiniki and the Goodstoney First Nation.

The reserves of these three nations are just

west of Calgary, a few hours drive south of Jasper, and near

another famous National Park:

Banff.

You drive through the Rocky Mountains "Oh, isn't

it beautiful?" But then the flip side of that is this is all

grown in because fire has been suppressed for decades. And what

does that mean for wildlife and ecosystems? Fire would be

naturally occurring here if it wasn't put out as soon as

possible. So the ecosystems have changed, the wildlife patterns

and habitat has changed.

When fires excluded, we get what we have right now.

We have overgrowth, so that even wildlife can't find access into

some areas. That may bottleneck wildlife routes, to go into

certain areas where they may come into more human conflict.

And then those those overgrowth areas become tinder boxes for

natural or manmade events to to become a fire hazards.

Yeah, working in, say, the front ranges of

Waterton, where you're aware of mountain pine beetle as an

insect pathogen, and then fire suppression, and then the desire

now to prescribe fire and put fire back on the landscape. And

so many other drivers of change, you know, shifting that

ecosystem around.

And then you get these events that just leave you breathless.

So in September 2017, a wildfire came in over the Continental

Divide into Waterton. Fortunately, the national park

staff had done early warning on this fire and managed to

evacuate people and so on. But I've heard some describe it as a

slow moving explosion. The fire came in, you know, in the early

evening. And by midnight it had gone through the park. Took out

over 35% of the park area in that period. And a lot at very

high severity, meaning the fire really, really burned hot in

that area.

People were frightened by that fire. I mean, people were

traumatized by that fire. It was so severe and so fast moving.

And so it was a kind of a system changing event. And clearly one

that had been, in a sense, unprecedented.

There is work going on within Banff National Park —

firebreaks firesmart programs, that's good. But this whole

policy of no burning, period, over the last 100 years has

created... is creating a large problem. And that's going to

affect everybody, from people who visit the park, to the

people who live there. And as Stoney Nakoda, that's part of

our traditional lands. So it will impact us as well.

This speaks to something that you have to come

to terms with if you're going to work with these photos. These

photos are colonial artifacts. They are deeply colonial. The

reason that they exist is because the country needed to

make maps. And what did they need to make maps for? They

needed to make maps so that the resources could be divvied up.

The images are arguably a pre-eminent colonial

record. They were about surveying for resource

extraction, surveying for transportation, and surveying

for settlement. So they were really all about exclusion of

Indigenous peoples

On this idea that people are necessarily bad.

We get rid of them, and now we've got the park and we're

protecting it.

So yes, very effective from a colonial

perspective, but also very effective in producing a lot of

images that we might be able to use for decolonial purposes.

And so how might we do that? What about

using them to inform First Nations studies of land? Maybe,

you know, returning to burning practices, for example.

In traditional times, I believe that traditional burns

were used in select areas, to regrow areas for purposes of

harvesting, not only plants and medicines, but for wildlife. And

was also used to clear pathways to create access,

Right? And here were these photographs that

showing well oh gosh look like this park that we've "protected"

(here I'm using scare quotes) "protected" for 100 years and

look, it's fundamentally changed. And why is this? And

it's forcing us to consider what's causing this change, what

was maintaining the ecosystems that looked the way they did 100

years ago. And oh look, it was actually people taking care of

these lands that made those lands look like what they did.

When the Stoney people would travel through

different areas, you know, they wouldn't go and cut down a brand

new tree, a green tree. They would use the dead wood in that

area. So just by living in camping in a certain area, they

would take all of that away from that landscape. And they would

always be moving around. So they'd go from one area to

another, and another clan or family might be behind them

doing the same thing. And so you have this maintenance going on,

just by Indigenous people moving through those areas. But you

don't have that anymore.

We have been in talks with Banff National Park on reintroducing

Indigenous burning. Not all areas, but select areas. I'm not

saying that fires are going to solve everything. But those past

practices held those areas in in a certain kind of balance.

And of course, humans and fire are not the only

ecosystem forces at play here. The historical dynamics of these

mountains also included large grazing mammals: Like bison.

We see that by having wildlife like bison out there,

they are able to impact that landscape. They are able to feed

on not only the grasses, but the willows. They rub up against the

trees when they move around. They trampl down on the new

growth that comes up. When bison are out there, they hold the

forest in check from overgrowth. They make trails... through

willows and through the bush, to get to the places that they want

to go to. And so they have an impact on the landscape that we

don't totally fully understand yet.

Stoney Nakoda have been in support of the bison

reintroduction project, going back to 2014. They were

translocated into what's called the Panther Dormer area — sort

of the northeast part of Banff National Park. There's no roads

to get in to this particular place. So the bison had to be

airlifted by crates in helicopters 30 kilometers into

the actual reintroduction zone. They've gone from 16 head in

2017, and today there are over 90 head.

There's a lot of overlap related to wildlife studies, related to

fire, related to land planning, especially in Banff National

Park. Landscapes today are drastically different from how

they looked 100 years ago. So that's really important to know.

But beyond revealing those changes, and

offering some tools to intervene, these photos can play

a part of an even more fundamental question.

Stony Nakoda nation have used the images to sort of

say, "Well, what were these mountains called before? And

let's rename them, you know, let's at least get them into

cultural currency."

Those places have a story and a name that hasn't

been told yet. It's important because many of the places,

especially in the Canadian Rockies, do not reflect the

Indigenous name or the Indigenous meaning.

One of the first pictures that we were able to work on with the

Mountain Legacy Project is the first picture from the east side

of Lake Louise. And yes, it is a beautiful place, but it's also a

spiritual place. And that's not what visitors understand when

they come there. Lake Louise, you know, "crown jewel of the

Canadian Rockies." And the person who's credited with the

discovery of Lake Louise is an early mountaineer named Tom

Wilson.

August 21, 1882. Tom Wilson was working on the railway when they

came through that area. And at different times during the day

they could hear like a big rumble off in the mountains,

like an avalanche or rock slide. There was a group of Stoney

people camped nearby in the Banff area. And so he went to go

visit them and ask them "What's that sound? That rumbling

sound." And they told him that "That's God speaking to us." And

so he got all intrigued, "Well where's this place? I want to go

see this place." So one of the guides, his name was Edwin

Hunter, Stoney guide, and he took him up there to go see the

lake. And when they got up there he could see those rock slides,

so Tom Wilson was guided up there by a Stoney, but he's

credited with the discovery. So if places and names have

meaning, we're not communicating that meaning. We were able then

to take that photo, and then add in Stoney name for Lake Louise:

Horâ Juthin Îmne, which is the Stoney translation for Lake of

the Little Fishes. We thought that had more... more meaning

and more reflective of what that place is. So when we have a

chance to say "Yes, this is Horâ Juthin Îmne," that tells us that

there's fish in there — small fish — And that there's also

additional names in that area that we haven't got yet. So I'm

talking about Mirror Lake, and Lake Agnes, and other peaks in

that area.

It's really meaningful to be able to get to work on these

types of images within the Stoney Nakoda. territory. The

images have been used towards a process of colonization. So why

can't we use those images towards the process of

Indigenisation? It's taken 150 years to get to this point where

we can relay some of these images. But now people know

The images are open to anybody who wants to use

them. We built this custom database, called the Mountain

Legacy Explorer, and it holds all our historic images and all

our repeat photographs. We collaborate with the National

Archives in doing this. And so that's been a big commitment for

us — is to daylight these images to make sure that people can get

access to them.

And then not only do we have that as a tool, but then

it speaks to us now to say "What are we going to do about it? Are

we going to take all those images and put them in nice

frames and keep them on the shelf? Or are we going to take

what they're saying, and apply it?" Is that something that can

be impressed upon regulators and government to say "This is how

we need to be managing landscapes towards. This is how

we need to be providing access for wildlife."

You know, we're fascinated with change, at the

same time as being really afraid of it sometimes. We don't like

change, but we also love to study it, whether it's one day

to the next in our flower garden, or 120 years to the next

in a mountain pass. And through these photographs, we have such

a unique perspective in the Rockies to see that long term

change that we don't necessarily in low lying areas. So I think

it's for anybody to recognize that landscapes change for many

reasons, and they're going to keep changing. And with climate

change, there's a sense of loss when we lose the landscapes that

are familiar to us. But there's also, I think, a good reminder

in these photographs that we have an opportunity to support

species and ecosystems through that inevitable change.

And if you'd like to dig into that longterm

change for yourself, you can explore all the photos and all

the data of the Mountain Legacy Project at mountainlegacy.ca.

It's actually really cool, you can slide back

and forth between the historical photo and the modern day photo

and see the changes on a really, really detailed level.

Yeah, and they're beautiful.

They are beautiful. This episode was made

possible by a Pathways to Impact grant: mobilizing knowledge in

support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals,

Specifically those pertaining to clean water,

climate action, and life on land.

And of course, the Mountain Legacy Project itself

wouldn't have been possible without all of the people that

you heard here, and many, many more.

So thanks to Eric Higgs, Jeanine Rhemtulla,

Rob Watt, Mary Sanseverino, Jill Delaney, Andrew Trant, Alina

Fisher, Brian Starzomski, and Bill Snow.

And the amazing field team alumni, including

Julie Fortin, Kristin Walsh, Jenna Falk, and Sandra Fray.

Plus everyone who we didn't get to speak to:

Rick Arthur, Ian MacLaren, Navarana Smith, and countless

others — grad students, helicopter pilots, archivists,

etcetera, etcetera.

Future Ecologies is a completely independent

production. So thanks as always, to our patrons who support this

show. To join them and get early episode releases, extended

interviews and other bonus content, including access to the

best Discord server on the web, go to

patreon.com/futureecologies.

This episode was produced by me, Mendel Skulski.

And me Adam Huggins

With music by Thumbug, Erik Tuttle, Shadow

Acid, Sage Palm, and Sunfish Moon Light.