Of mountains and men

It was by complete chance that Ian MacLaren discovered Morrison Parsons Bridgland, the subject of his new book, Mapper of Mountains.

While studying landscape change in Jasper National Park one summer, the U of A history and English professor and his team received a set of photographs from a park warden. The photos were taken by Bridgland, a dominion land surveyor, back in 1915 from atop many of the parks mountains.

The photos piqued MacLaren's interest, and he decided to investigate further, finding that there was more to Brigland's story than the photographs alone.

"Mapper of the Mountains is really an unearthing of the story of an extremely accomplished mountain climber who made the first systematic maps of Alberta's mountain parks," he said of the University of Alberta Press-published book.

"He was also a co-founder of the Alpine Club of Canada and was the fellow who gave many of the names to mountains in Jasper Park. His amazing career has gone pretty much unheralded for all these years."

To gather information for his maps, Bridgland would climb a mountain, take eight photos over 360-degrees, descend the mountain and scale another, to do it all again. Driven by his passion for mountain-climbing, he would scale the mountain peaks in the summer and draw up his results during the winter. And now, more than 90 years later, all of the work he did in mapping out the Rockies – the photographs, the maps, the co-ordinates and the measurements he took while perched upon the peaks of the Rocky Mountains – has proven to be as valuable as it was nearly a century ago.

One research group in particular, the Rocky Mountain Repeat Photography Project, compares all of Bridgland's original photography to identical photos taken recently in the mountain parks to learn about changes in vegetation cover and glacier retreat that have occurred over the past century.

"People are still astonished by how elaborate and precise Bridgland's work was when they look back at all of the calculations and triangulations he made back then," MacLaren said. "Especially considering the lack of technology that was available for him to use when he did it."

The book, which includes samples of Bridgland's photographs and is designed to resemble the very first guidebook to Jasper National Park written by Bridgland in 1917, is more than a formal examination of the surveyor's work. It is also the compelling human-interest story of a man who spent his life pursuing his passion for the wilderness and mountain climbing.

So it's no surprise that this past May, Mapper (which MacLaren wrote with contributions from Eric Higgs and Gabrielle Zezulka-Mailloux) won the 2006 Alberta Book Award for Trade Non-Fiction, a strong indication that the book has been perceived by the public as both an interesting academic exploration, and as casual, lakeside reading.

"Receiving the trade-book award, not the scholarly one, was really delightful for us, because it acknowledges that we accomplished our intention of making the research we did on Bridgland and his work available to a wider readership, one that's certainly larger than the normal academic one," said MacLaren.

"Hopefully that also means more people will learn about Bridgland and the important legacy he left behind."