The Kicking Horse Trail. Cover.
The Kicking Horse Trail. Cover.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 License.
Williams, M. B. The Kicking Horse Trail. Ottawa: Department of the Interior, 1930. Republished on the Environment & Society Portal.
Among the long-closed regions of wonder and romance into which a way has at last been found are the Canadian Rockies. Each year the door has been opened a little farther, until now a good part of the most beautiful sections of these glorious ranges is within the motorist’s reach. The completion of the new highway, “The Kicking Horse Trail,” marks the fulfilment of one more daring engineering conception, the building of a transmontane highway through the heart of the Central Rockies, across the difficult regions traversed by the Canadian Pacific railway.
Now, as has been said, with the completion of The Kicking Horse trail, a new door opens. The whole beautiful region from Lake Louise west to the Columbia valley—pre-historic trench between the Rockies and the older ranges to the West—is at last accessible. Following the same route as the first transcontinental railway, the motorist may now cross the famous Kicking Horse pass to Yoho Park, visit the magnificent Yoho valley, see lovely Emerald lake, and then go on by the great Kicking Horse valley, to the western confines of Yoho Park and there cap his spectacular journey with the eleven-mile traverse of the thrilling Kicking Horse gorge. (Text from Chapter 1)
This is the 1930 edition of a guidebook first published in 1927 and written by M. B. Williams. The scenic trail between Lake Louise, Alberta and Golden, British Columbia is the jumping-off point for a fawning tribute to the automobile.
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.