The Abbot Pass Refuge Cabin National Historic Site
David Hik, Zac Robinson et Stephen Slemon
“The rains descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon
that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.”
Alpine Lighthouse (Abbot Pass Hut). Photo: Paul Zizka
It was never going to last forever. But the house the Swiss guides built high in the mountains – masonry on the outside, plywood wood on the inside, a kitchen, an attic, one dormitory for men and another for women – followed the lesson of the parable exactly. They built on rock – on the high, narrow ridge in the Canadian Rockies that forms Abbot Pass, 2,925 metres above sea level, between Lake O’Hara in Yoho National Park and Lake Louise in Banff National Park, on the Continental Divide.
Just bringing the building materials to the site involved heroic levels of organization and labour. They hired wranglers with horses to carry wood, windows, bolts, and lime for making cement up from Lake Louise to the base of the avalanche-prone Death Trap, a steep, glaciated canyon between Mount Victoria and Mount Lefroy. From there, they carried 35-kilo packs over a ladder that spanned a large crevasse, and then winched sleds up the steep sections to gain the pass, from where they’d quarried the stones.
Gallery images:
Left: The top of the northern slope, just left of the newly constructed hut, in 1922. Photo: Courtesy of the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, V200-PA-81B
Middle: The exposed, steep and unstable north slope cutting away underneath the Abbot Pass Hut in 2021. Photo: Parks Canada
Right: Quarried on site, and etched with the year of construction, this is one of many of the preserved stones from the hut’s outer walls. Photo: Pete Hoang
After moving to Canada, Swiss-born mountain guides Edward Feuz Jr. and Rudolph Aemmer had seen a need for “altitude-accommodation for serious mountaineers” in the burgeoning tourism industry of the 1920s, and they opened theirs in 1923. “Up here,” said Feuz Jr. at the inauguration ceremony, “with all those beautiful peaks everywhere, this simple hut is a home.”
The Abbot Pass Refuge Cabin should still be standing, the snowmelt from its shake roof still flowing to both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Mountaineers should still be coming here during the climbing season, dining, bunking, and warming themselves by the wood stove before making their early morning start for the summits. But this summer, Parks Canada is taking the guides’ house down. No-one had accounted for climate change.
How could they have? Until very recently, the Lower Victoria Glacier blanketed much of the north slope beneath the hut. The ice almost reached the hut’s northern wall. But now the glacier’s edge rests fifty metres downslope. What has been exposed — what was for much of the past century held intact, frozen and insulated from surface erosion and intense solar heating — is the actual composition of much of the hut’s footing, and of the pass itself: a mix of compacted
scree and fallen rock, made stable by permafrost. Against the ordinances of nature — increasingly varied, and erratic — the slope is falling away.
“The Abbot Pass Refuge Cabin should still be standing, the snowmelt from its shake roof still flowing to both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.”
The short timeline of the slope’s demise is breathtaking. The first report of the slope’s instability reached Parks Canada in 2016. A geotechnical assessment followed, and the hut was closed so that Parks Canada could install slope-stabilizing rock anchors. By the end of 2018, remediation costs had exceeded $600,000. Poor weather and safety concerns hindered progress in 2019, health measures due to COVID-19 in 2020 and, through it all, slope erosion beneath the hut continued.
But it was the record high temperatures in 2021 — the infamous “heat dome” — that vanquished what hope remained. The rate of permafrost thaw hastened catastrophically. According to Parks Canada, “approximately 114 cubic meters fell from the slopes under the hut.” Structural cracks appeared in the hut’s outer masonry. A precipitous gap yawned open beneath the hut’s northwest corner.
Gallery images:
1. Ferrying building materials up from Lake Louise to the base of the Death Trap in 1922. Abbot Pass is the snowy saddle visible in the picture’s top right. Photo: Courtesy of the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies (WMCR), M93/V200 PA 68b
2. Carrying loads of building material up through the Death Trap to Abbot Pass in 1922. Photo: WMCR M93/V200 PA 72a
3. Building the Abbot Pass Hut’s foundation with stones quarried on site in 1922. Photo: WMCR M93/ V200 PA 78
4. Dismantling the roof piece-by-piece before bundles were flown out during unpredictable weather. Photo: Pete Hoang
5. Once the main structure was dismantled, the grouting was removed. Photo: Pete Hoang
6. A scar of what used to be during the final days of dismantling. Photo: Pete Hoang
7. Two walls were partially left intact as a memorial to the building for future visitors. Photo: Pete Hoang
All mountains erode eventually. Most of the time these changes are incremental and unnoticed. But permafrost and glaciers are the “glue” that holds high mountain slopes together, and when gradual warming and extreme weather events contribute to rapid permafrost thaw and the thinning of glaciers, slope failures can happen very suddenly.
In recent decades, warming temperatures and increased precipitation in western Canada have led to a significant increase in mountain landslides. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes, with very high confidence, that 1.5°C warming will further accelerate this trend. Only an immediate reduction in greenhouse gas emissions will curb the most serious consequences for natural systems — and for human infrastructure.
At Abbot Pass, the mean annual temperature has already increased about 1.4 degrees Celsius since the mid-twentieth century, precipitation by over six per cent.
The Swiss guides built their mountain hut in an earlier and more innocent age — one where you could believe that change came slowly to the high alpine. That age is behind us, the demolishment of what was until now a National Historic Site standing witness to the irreparable damage brought about by a rapidly warming planet.
David Hik is a Professor of Biological Sciences at Simon Fraser University and presently Chief Scientist for Polar Canada; Zac Robinson is a historian and Associate Professor at the University of Alberta; and Stephen Slemon is a Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Alberta. The three have collaborated, variously, in mountain-based research and teaching for over twenty years. This essay first appeared in Canadian Geographic magazine Jul/Aug 2022.