Friday 26 November 2021

Rocky Mountain Auto Tours - Banff to Columbia Icefield (1987), Columbia Icefield to Banff (1987), Jasper to Columbia Ice Field (1987)

 

This is a fun bunch of tapes, closely related to the 1993 Calgary to Banff auto tour that we posted earlier this month. What's odd is that there was no mention of this more extensive series in that article - clearly an error of omission. The run-up to the 1988 Olympics was clearly a bit of a boom time for local tourism, and Dave Callbeck took full advantage of the influx of visitors to produce a series of six tapes that provided guided tours through the mountains. We only found three of the tapes in Doug Wong's archives - and without j-cards (they were delivered to Callbeck without art - if anyone has a pic of the original packaging, we're super curious to know what it looked like).   

Since we don't have the full series, we can't tell for sure what the starting point is (is it Calgary, like the Ron Lorenz tape?), but from Doug's files it looks like this covers at least highway 93 from Banff to Jasper, with a slight detour out to Field along highway 1. Each tapes starts with the disclaimer, "due to forces beyond our control the reference points that are described by our narrator on this cassette are subject to change," and has the same somewhat stilted start/stop routine as the Ron Lorenz tape. But this one is voiced by broadcaster Liz Palmer (in other news, there's a whole website dedicated to Calgary broadcasters, which is an AMAZING trip down the rabbit hole - and, yes, Ed Whalen is on there, but doesn't have the shrine he deserves).

It's not a great time of the year for road trips, but if you're headed into the mountain parks, you can grab these three audio guides here.

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