In the summer of 1910, 20-year-old Myra Ellison sent a letter home to her mother from the shores of Campbell Lake on Vancouver Island, where she was surrounded by a wilderness of old-growth forests and steep, snow-capped mountains.
“My boots are simply fine for walking,” she assured her mother.
For the next 300 kilometres and 40 days, those boots carried her through bogs and across glaciers as she helped establish Strathcona Provincial Park.
“Miss E,” as she is referred to in the official record of the journey, was the only woman among the 23 members of the expedition – surveyors, a cook, a photographer, packers, river men from the Cowichan tribes and her father, Price Ellison, B.C.’s chief commissioner of lands.
A meticulously kept journal recounts their journey through the uncharted heart of Vancouver Island. Mr. Ellison’s ambition was to scout out the province’s first provincial park, but the surveyors were eyeing up the timber and mining potential.
Ms. Ellison was the first in their party to reach the 1,500-metre-high top of Crown Mountain, where she smashed a bottle of Moët & Chandon Champagne and fired a rifle in the air in triumph. It was here that Mr. Ellison decided that what he could see – more than 250,000 hectares – should be protected parkland.
Centennial
expedition
route
Strathcona
Provincial
Park
john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source: openstreetmap; mb guiding
Centennial
expedition
route
Strathcona
Provincial
Park
john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source: openstreetmap; mb guiding
Centennial
expedition
route
Strathcona
Provincial
Park
john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source: openstreetmap; mb guiding
Over the years, I’ve climbed, paddled and backpacked in Strathcona and have barely scratched the surface of what’s here to explore. After digging out some of the archival records of Ms. Ellison’s adventure this spring, I decided to follow in her footsteps – albeit in modern hiking boots.
I covered just a small portion of the 1910 expedition, enough to be reminded that what she helped protect is an important ecosystem filled with breathtaking beauty, one that requires vigilance to maintain.
When the expedition launched 115 years ago, British Columbia was facing tough choices between conservation and resource extraction. The park’s less-than-pristine state today is evidence of the unending demand to log, to dam and to mine.
And now, as governments across the country seek to fast-track major resource projects to gird against the U.S. trade war, that tension is even more acute.
Price Ellison served under premier Richard McBride – a Conservative who was elected on a platform of prosperity based on mining, logging and construction of railways. But Mr. Ellison, in his report to cabinet, was also persuasive about the merits of creating a park. “Owing to the great increase in population and industrial enterprises all over the world, many countries have considered it necessary, within the last decade, to set aside as reserves large or small tracts of country,” he wrote.
The park would mean British Columbians for generations would have these areas for recreation and the chance to “view the grandeurs and beauties of nature in an unaltered form and, at the same time, to act as game preserves and thereby prevent the total extinction of different species of animals.”
Strathcona has been abused and neglected by successive governments, but it remains a keystone in the province’s conservation inventory. It is home to no less than 3,500 species and includes one of the tallest waterfalls in Canada, Della Falls. There are more than 200 mountains here, with trails through ancient forests leading to ice-capped peaks and turquoise lakes.
The B.C. government committed in 2022 to almost double the province’s parkland and protected areas by the end of this decade. But its attention, in the current economic climate, is elsewhere.
While the Ellisons were mapping out the park, timber surveyors and prospectors were gauging Strathcona’s value for resource development. Although today the park is not directly threatened, the push to develop in areas like this is strong, making it an increasingly precious reserve.
The B.C. NDP government has promised the forest industry that it will accelerate logging permitting and forest landscape planning to boost the amount of timber harvested this year. And it has passed legislation to fast-track the development of new mines and power plants, exempting projects from environmental assessments in the rush to build.
Price and Myra Ellison were part of a 23-member team that mapped out Strathcona, where Mr. Ellison wanted to keep ‘the grandeurs and beauties of nature in an unaltered form.’
Ms. Ellison, bottom left, basks in the spray of a waterfall the team named after her.
The slow chipping away of Mr. Ellison’s vision for the park stretches back to at least the 1950s, when large parts of Strathcona were flooded for a hydroelectric dam.
The Myra Falls Mine started operating in the 1960s within the park boundaries, and numerous logging permits have been handed out.
The Social Credit government of the 1980s passed regulations to expand mining and logging in parks. Strathcona became a battleground as environmentalists rallied to stop exploratory drilling for the proposed Cream Silver Mine, at the south end of Buttle Lake.
Des Kennedy led the campaign against the mine in 1988, camping at the blockades that aimed to prevent access to the drill site.
Mr. Kennedy, now in his 80th year, is farming on Denman Island and recalls this battle as a pivotal one, a precursor to B.C.’s “War in the Woods” that saw thousands come out to protest clearcutting in Clayoquot Sound.
“It wasn’t just about one park. It was a major onslaught against the system,” he said.
Bill Vander Zalm was B.C.’s premier in the late 1980s as the Social Credit government faced pushback over proposed mining around Strathcona and other environmental issues.Zoran Milich/The Globe and Mail
The protesters brought their fight to the B.C. legislature, where an activist chained himself to the legs of Environment Minister Bruce Strachan’s desk. As a reporter in the press gallery, I watched as the minister grabbed some papers off his desk, wished the intruder a good weekend, and vacated his office.
The government did retreat, but only after its own advisory panel came out against the mining plan.
“The park now embraces a reservoir that was once a lake, logged-over forest land that has not been replanted, a number of mineral claims and an operating mine, a power line right-of-way and a boundary that defies park principles,” the panel found. “Far from realizing the vision of its founders, the park, in a word, is a mess.”
By the end of the year, the Socreds promised no more mineral exploration or logging would take place. A news release at the time acknowledged that the park had been mistreated: “It is now time to clear up old mistakes made at Strathcona,” it said.
Justine Hunter and her friends set out in June to visit Strathcona, where Price Creek still bears the name of Ms. Ellison’s father.Charlotte Dorion
My backpacking trip along part of the 1910 expedition route took place in June, and I invited a couple of friends to join me. I picked the section through a watershed where the Cream Silver mine would have been built.
The entire route can be mapped out from the journal of expedition member Harry McClure Johnson. It has been reprinted by guidebook publisher Wild Isle. Mr. Johnson vividly recounts scaling icefields without mountaineering equipment, navigating whitewater rapids in overloaded canoes and bushwhacking through treacherous forest blowdowns. “It was such rough country,” he wrote.
There are many well-marked trails in Strathcona today, but the unmaintained path through the Price Creek watershed isn’t one of them. A caution sign at the trailhead urges hikers to choose safer alternatives – but this is the one that would take us through old-growth forest much as Myra Ellison experienced in 1910.
For the first few kilometres, we followed a graded logging road where a young alder forest is reclaiming nature. Where the road ended, the landscape changed abruptly. Sunlight was swallowed by the canopy above and the path narrowed, hugging the steep mountainside through an ancient forest of towering red cedar, Douglas fir and hemlock. Below us, Price Creek roared, fed by melting snow.
Old-growth trees like this one are a refuge for many types of wildlife in Strathcona.
The Ellisons, perhaps seduced by the fact that they had a crew of packers to carry most of the load, travelled heavy. Their kit included an eiderdown quilt for Miss E, pickles and marmalade, currant cakes and a copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse. A case of champagne, according to family lore, was abandoned along the way, buried for later retrieval. A sample menu from one night at their camp included vermicelli soup, lobster pâté, canned mutton, and plum pudding “with proper sauce.”
We travelled much lighter and our dinner on the mountainside consisted of reconstituted freeze-dried meals eaten straight from the bag. As the sun caught the last of the snow-capped mountains around us, I opened my one luxury item – a small can of prosecco – to toast the park’s creators and protectors.
In his journal, Mr. Johnson did not hide his awe. Seeing Campbell River Falls for the first time, he wrote, “it seems sacrilege to speak in such a presence.” He bitterly noted plans for hydroelectric development. “Soon, we may anticipate, these beautiful falls . . . will be transformed into a machine of such-and-such horsepower, that will supply light and boards and shingles and shredded wheat to the world.”
The falls are still there, but the Strathcona dam eventually flooded Upper Campbell Lake and the Campbell and Elk River valleys. It remains part of the BC Hydro electricity grid today.
Locating and climbing Crown Mountain was a hard slog for the 1910 expedition, but Mr. Ellison was determined to do it.
Mr. Ellison’s job was to survey the region, but his obsession was to climb Crown Mountain. First they had to find it, and as the expedition stretched on through the summer, some of his crew grumbled that their leader’s ambition was a farce.
When they finally spied the mountain, Mr. Ellison wept in relief, but only nine members attempted the dangerous climb. They tied handkerchiefs over their eyes to reduce the snow’s glare, but had no mountaineering ropes, because none of them knew how to use them.
Expedition photos show Ms. Ellison accomplished all of this wearing a skirt. As Mr. Johnson wrote, she looked “perfectly fresh.”
In 1964, Ms. Ellison (then Mrs. deBeck) recounted her journey in a recorded interview. She allowed that it was a challenge. “We had a really tough time of it for about nine days, and we ate every particle of food that we had,” she recalled. But, she said, “it was the most marvellous adventure.”
She recalled her expedition attire proudly: silk blouses, blazers and a slouchy leather hat. Her felted wool skirt was long enough to cover the tops of her leather boots. (It was only later, when she joined the Alpine Club of Canada, that she learned to climb in breeches.)
In an excerpt from Myra Ellison’s 1964 interview, she recalls her Vancouver Island journey of 1910 and how the team celebrated reaching the top of Crown Mountain.
Greater Vernon Museum and Archives
Guidebook author Philip Stone put Mr. Johnson’s journal into print. He also used it to retrace the expedition path in 2010 and timed it so they would climb Crown Mountain exactly 100 years after Ms. Ellison christened the peak with champagne.
Despite the incursions on the park over the decades, its value has not been diminished, Mr. Stone believes. “It’s scenically gorgeous, and it’s obviously got incredibly important ecological value, especially because with every passing year, the remaining old-growth rainforest on Vancouver Island gets less and less,” he said.
“It’s astounding to me how little investment has been put into a place that has such obviously huge benefit.”
Murray Sovereign, Price Ellison’s grandson, grew up in awe of his rugged and outdoorsy Great Aunt Myra, who was “just a couple of generations ahead of her time.”
He joined Mr. Stone’s centennial expedition wearing his grandfather’s 100-year-old boots, a trip that made him understand how his family helped forge British Columbians’ connections to nature.
“When we got to the summit of Crown Mountain, someone had left a note in the register, a rolled-up black-and-white photo of Myra – a great photo. And on the back, someone had written a note, ‘Thank you Myra and Price for our park.’ ”
Visitors to the park can form a strong attachment to it, but few know of it. Only about 60,000 people visited Strathcona last year.
Loys Maingon, a professional biologist who has spent more than a decade charting the species in the park for the Strathcona Wilderness Institute, has accomplished much despite the province’s refusal to grant a research permit.
When he started in 2015, the park had about 400 recorded species. Today almost 3,500 have been logged, including endangered species and some that were not previously known to science.
Dr. Maingon estimates the forest in the Price Creek watershed to be 6,000 years old, based on old-growth lichen found here. It was here that he discovered a microscopic algae, Cosmarium woronichinii, that has only been found once before – and that was in Siberia in the 1930s.
The discovery underlines the importance of biodiversity, he said. It’s not only about averting the extinction of animals: Such microscopic algae are the direct forerunners of our land plants. “Without humble little algae,” he wrote in his 2022 field report on the discovery, “there are no towering old growth forests to marvel at.”
From Crown Mountain, which they christened with champagne, the 1910 team got a good look at the landscape they would urge the province to preserve.
In one way, the Strathcona expedition was a failure. Price Ellison wanted the park’s nature preserved, but also enjoyed by many. He hoped exploring it would lead to the development of railways and chalets – the Swiss Alps of the Pacific Northwest.
What visitors will find, instead, are barebone campgrounds where water can be obtained using old-fashioned hand pumps. Some of the busier backcountry sites feature bear caches and pit toilets. A majority of the park is roadless.
That fortunate failure means there are still wild trails where you can, as I did on a warm afternoon in June, find yourself alone, sitting on a moss-cushioned rock with your feet in a glacier-fed stream, counting your blessings that this is still here.
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