O Canada! Without Elizabeth Parker, the Alpine Club of Canada would just be a chapter of the American Alpine Club.
Soon after the American Alpine Club was founded in 1902, its first president proposed creating a Canadian chapter. Arthur O. Wheeler, a Canadian surveyor and mountaineer wrote to Canadian newspapers in support of the proposition. Originally from Nova Scotia, Elizabeth Parker had joined the Manitoba Free Press as a journalist in 1904 and became familiar with the mountains through visits to Banff. Parker was affronted by the idea of Canada being an American chapter and wrote with nationalist pride “It knocks me speechless and fills me with shame for young Canada … Surely, between Halifax and Victoria, there can be found at least a dozen persons who are made of the stuff needed to climb, and care enough about our mountain heritage.” Wheeler was impressed and he and Parker began a collaboration that led them to co-found an independent Alpine Club of Canada in 1906. Parker became the first Secretary of the ACC while Wheeler became the first President.
Although not herself a peak bagger, Parker was an advocate for women mountaineers and attended the General Mountain Camps every summer. In the first year of the ACC, the 310 members included 77 women.
Parker was a committed protector of the mountains and shaped the direction of the ACC. In the first issue of the Canadian Alpine Journal she set the ACC philosophy to be “a national trust for the defense of our mountain solitudes against the intrusion of steam and electricity and all the vandalisms of this luxurious utilitarian age; for the keeping free from the grind of commerce, the wooded passes and valleys and alplands of the wilderness. It is the people’s right to have primitive access to the remote places of safest retreat from the fever and the fret of the market place and the beaten tracks of life.”
The Elizabeth Parker hut at Lake O’Hara is named in her honor – when you visit look for the plaque on the trail.
Featured Photo: Elizabeth Parker, a journalist with the Manitoba Free Press, at the inaugural meeting of the Alpine Club of Canada in Winnipeg in 1906. The full photo could found in Pearlann Reichwein’s Climbers Paradise book. Digital copy obtained from She moved mountains by Shannon Sampert.
