Film series brings 25-year-old interviews to life to show how mountaineering has changed in Canada

The interviews were done 25 years ago, and some of the stories told by mountaineers are another 25 years older.

And now, they're being revitalized into a series of online films for the next generation of climbers to hold onto.

"The history in this area … it's tangible," Canmore filmmaker Glen Crawford told The Homestretch on Friday. "Fifty years ago, this is not a long time in history, but it is when you look at how much Canadian mountaineering and mountaineering around the world has changed."

Crawford is helping produce the series, which is available through the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. He says the project is the vision of Chic Scott.

Scott, a celebrated author and adventurer, conducted more than 80 interviews of prominent mountaineers in Canada in the mid-1990s as part of research for his book Pushing the Limits: The Story of Canadian Mountaineering.

He and Crawford are now showcasing 11 of those interviews, which mostly focus on the people who lived near the Canadian Rockies and climbed there, as well as around the world.

After editing them and weaving in archival photos, they've been releasing one video a month since January.

They're also making three themed films; the first, Climbing Pioneers of Yamnuska, is available online.

"The mountaineers that [Chic] interviewed at the time are all great storytellers," said Crawford.

But there's no disguising the fact that the footage is a couple decades old.

"They're not the best quality, but they are the best stories, for sure," said Crawford. "And it's just great that Chic had the foresight to actually record them in video as well as audio."

The interviews feature people like Sharon Wood, the first North American woman to summit Mount Everest, and local legend Tim Auger, who, in addition to being one of Canada's leading climbers in the 1960s, was instrumental in hundreds of rescues as a search and rescue technician for Banff National Park.

Fundamental reason for climbing still the same

It's clear from working with the interviews, said Crawford, just how much the climbing world has changed in certain ways. In the 1950s, for example, Hans Moser put the first rock climbing route up Mount Yamnuska in Kananaskis. Nobody had climbed it before.

Today, there are about 200 different routes on the mountain's face that climbers have done.

"So yeah, the sport has changed, the capabilities have changed," said Crawford. "But I think the fundamental reason why people get out there is still the same."

With files from The Homestretch.