Waterton Lakes National Park. Cover.
Waterton Lakes National Park. Cover.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 License.
Williams, Mabel Berta. Waterton Lakes National Park. Ottawa: Department of the Interior, n.d. [c. 1927]. Republished on the Environment & Society Portal.
If there are grander and more imposing parts of the Rockies, there are few, if any, more perfect in loveliness. A man may have seen all the rest , and yet find himself, to his surprise, losing his heart at first sight to Waterton Lakes Park. The reserve is the smallest of all Canadian scenic parks, covering only 220 square miles, and throughout it consistently refuses to astonish us with bigness of any kind. Those who desire the loftiest mountain, the deepest valley, the highest waterfall, the largest anything, need not come to Waterton Lakes Park. Yet there is no apparent diminution of grandeur and here, as in many places in the Rockies, one realizes that where impressiveness of scenery is concerned, mere questions of altitude are beside the mark. If Nature has been economical with her canvas, it is to good effect. The park is “all compact together.” It contains, someone has said, a maximum of scenery in a minimum of space. (Text from Chapter 1)
Focusing on the southern Alberta Park that shares a border with Montana’s Glacier National Park, this travel guide, written by Mabel Bertha Williams, is from around 1927.
Public domain.
- Campbell, Claire Elizabeth. “Pragmatism and Poetry: National Parks and the Story of Canada.” In “Big Country, Big Issues: Canada's Environment, Culture, and History,” edited by Nadine Klopfer and Christof Mauch. RCC Perspectives 4 (2011): 101-11.
- Campbell, Claire, ed. A Century of Parks Canada, 1911–2011. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2011.
- MacEachern, Alan. “MB Williams: Living & Writing the Early Years of Parks Canada.” Environment & Society Portal, Virtual Exhibitions 2018, no. 2. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/8305. ISSN 2198-7696 Environment & Society Portal, Virtual Exhibitions.
- MacEachern, Alan. “Banff Is … Hell? The Struggle of Being Canada’s First, Most Famous, and Most Visited National Park.” Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia (Summer 2016), no. 10. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7623.
