Johnston Canyon is one of the most visited places in Banff National Park due to its stunning year-round beauty! In 1994 White Mountain Adventures was the first guiding company to take clients there for winter icewalks. The canyon walls transform into a cathedral of ice, while the waterfalls freeze over and continue to flow. A question often asked is, “Who was Johnston?” Well, that’s quite a story to tell!
In the 1880’s, the Canadian Pacific Railway/CPR was being built across Canada, a pledge by Prime Minister John A. MacDonald to unite the country and bring British Columbia on board. The CPR advertised the promise of mineral wealth in the mountains to prospectors and miners of plentiful copper, lead, silver, even gold! Thousands of hopeful prospectors came, with the boom town of Silver City springing up at the base of Castle Mountain, of similar size to Calgary in its day.
Prospectors found veins of copper in the mountain on the opposite of the valley, so much so it was named Copper Mountain. Further west at Protection Mountain miners found pyrite, aka, Fool’s Gold, causing even more of a fury to find gold! This is where the story gets even more interesting…
There was a trapper turned prospector named Johnston, who ventured into the upper reaches of the canyon, returning to Silver City with two gold nuggets claiming to have found them there. The fervor for gold grew, with Johnston conveniently having a supply of implements to sell to prospectors wanting to pan for gold! Sadly, no one else found gold, with prospectors beginning to rumble about Johnston’s supposed gold find. He quietly left Silver City, heading west to the Columbia Valley in BC where there are gold claims to this day.
Silver City only lasted a couple of years before it was disbanded, since little of the promised mineral wealth was found. If you know anything about geology, the Canadian Rockies are sedimentary rock, not the type of rock filled with precious metals. Prospectors headed north to the Yukon and Alaska in pursuit of their fortune. Many of the town’s buildings were floated downstream to the newly designated Hot Springs Reserve in 1885, Canada’s first national park. The hope was that the hot springs would help pay off the debt from building the transcontinental railway. Prime Minister Macdonald is quoted as saying, “We will recoup the federal coffers, by allowing people to recuperate in the therapeutic waters.”
If you join us on an icewalk you will be wowed by the cathedral of snow and ice, which one client proclaimed, “Its like Narnia!” But also remember the sorted tale of fortune seekers and a man who shall forever remain a mystery but got a canyon named after him, which probably at inception had a few colourful adjectives added to it!
Kristi Beetch
ACMG Day Hiking and Winter Travel Guide, IGA Master and Professional Interpreter