Mountain Research Hits Home in Canmore, Paris, and Prague

Canmore is home to the headquarters of the Alpine Club of Canada and many a mountain story. On a warm spring evening, Bow Valley readers turned out to learn more mountain stories at the Canmore Public Library. Speaking to an avid mountain community, Dr. PearlAnn Reichwein explored the Alpine Club’s role in adventure and advocacy as Canada’s national mountaineering club at a talk organized by Friends of Canmore Public Library on March 18.

The Canadian Rockies are at the heart of Reichwein’s scholarship as a historian and professor at the University of Alberta in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation. Her acclaimed book Climber’s Paradise: Making Canada’s Mountain Parks, 1906-1974 was awarded the Canadian Historical Association’s Clio Prize and an IndieFAB Honours for Ecology and Environment. It was a finalist in the Banff Mountain Book Festival and also toured with winners of the American Association of University Presses design competition. In 2016 Reichwein was invited to Paris to talk about her book in a plenary lecture to the International Society for the History of Physical Education and Sport, and she is invited to present to the European College of Sport Sciences in Prague later this year after returning to teach at the International Summer School of Sport at the Université Paris-Est.

Reichwein’s new study of cowboy poet and conservationist Sid Marty will be published this summer in a new collection, Bucking Conservatism: Alternative Stories of Alberta from the 60s and 70s (Athabasca University Press, 2019). She is completing a book, co-authored with Dr. Karen Wall, on adult education and learning tourism at the Banff School of Fine Arts, initiated by the University of Alberta in 1933. The Bow Valley is the region of her current research on skiing and the Canmore Nordic Centre Provincial Park as Canadian Olympic legacies.

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