Alberta - Reclaiming Canmore Part 1
The start of a two-part series on how Canmore, Alberta was founded, almost ruined, and saved.
EPISODE NOTES
This episode was a tough lesson in doing your research ahead of time. This Alberta trip, and the ability to capture material for this series while I was there, was a little bit out-of-the-blue. So I was flying by the seat of my pants the whole time. I only really learned about Canmore’s history once I was already there, limited to reading about it in the little pockets of time that I wasn’t out hiking and filming. I missed a lot. There were great locations, like the old mine entrance, that were a stone’s throw from me but I just didn’t find out about until I got back. Lesson learned.
TRANSCRIPT
Canmore, Alberta, can feel like it came out of a dream. Known as the Gateway to the Rockies, it’s a cradle of beautiful vistas, crystal clear mountain rivers, lush forests, a fairy-tale town and home to a menagerie of wildlife.
But in the fringes, if you know where to look, are the relics of a bygone day. Empty spools and wooden carts. A metal-trussed bridge. And here, an electric blue pool that smells like rotten eggs.
These are the remnants of a very different place. The Canmore of a century ago would be unrecognizable today.
Those mountain streams and thriving forests now stand as a monument to the power of reclamation and what can be achieved if we give nature a chance to return. Because Canmore almost had a very different fate.
In 1884, there are no structures here save a switching station for the Canadian Pacific Railway. But that switching station happens to sit atop the Cascade Coal Basin. 155 square kilometers… and 1.6 billion tons of coal.
A mining charter is granted in 1886 and from that moment on… this place lives and dies by coal.
The town grows as miners arrive. Nine coal seams are mined by underground tunneling. Business is booming, and gets a boost from the first world war. To keep up with demand, Ukranian prisoners are shipped down from an internment camp in Banff to work the mines.
But through it all, any kind of environmental consideration was… pretty much nonexistent. Coal waste and spoil heaps pile up on the banks of Canmore Creek and the Bow River. Wire rope, oil spills and other junk litters and poisons the landscape.
It’s easy for them to look the other way - because when they do they see the expanse of untouched Rockies and a sprawling National Park. What did it matter if their tiny pocket of land got a little scarred? And they’re about to make the biggest scars of all.
In the 1950s, domestic demand for coal is plummeting. Canmore’s whole future as a mining town looks bleak. But that’s when a saviour appears - from all the way across the pacific. Japan is seeing huge postwar growth and find themselves in need of a lot of coal. Enough to make a deal with Canmore: $50 million for 500,000 tons of coal a year.
All of a sudden Canmore’s faced with the opposite problem: they’re only producing 300,000 tons a year.
So to ramp up, they turn in part to open pit mines, including this one - Canmore Creek No 3, the last of the open pits. It grows to 365m long, 150m wide and 36m deep.
But by the 1970s, even Japan has shifted to petroleum. With no new saviour waiting in the wings, Canmore’s mines have lost their purpose. On Friday the 13th, in July 1979, locally known as ‘black friday’, everything shuts down. In their time, Canmore’s miners had extracted 14.5 million metric tonnes of coal and dug 3000 kilometers of underground tunnels.
They’re left with a critical question: what now? Regulations are still borderline nonexistent. They could get away with leaving Canmore as-is. Polluted, strewn with mine runoff and oil, pockmarked with the gaping wounds of open pit mines.
But they don’t. They choose to honour ‘walk away pit closure’ - a principle that says if you achieve certain goals, you can leave an open pit mine guilt-free.
And so begins the reclamation of Canmore. Not just the open pits, transforming the whole area back into a pristine natural environment. It’s going to be a massive undertaking. And that… is where we will pick up next time.