When Mary Schäffer Warren travelled through the Maligne River valley, 115 years before our crew, she was looking for an elusive lake she’d heard referred to in Îethka (Stoney) Nakoda as Chaba Imne (Beaver Lake). She’d searched unsuccessfully for it the previous summer, but at the end of that season, a chance meeting with one Sampson Beaver, of the Goodstoney First Nation, provided a breakthrough. Upon learning that Sampson had visited Chaba Imne in his youth, Mary asked him to draw her a map to what is now called Maligne. (Unfortunately, despite her appreciation for Indigenous culture, it seems she could not surmount her colonial bias and declined to compensate him for the map, citing the gifts she had already brought to his family.)

Mary was from an upper-middle-class American family. Born to Quaker parents in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1861, she had been raised with a belief in the equality of all people. Her father, a well-known amateur geologist and archeologist, encouraged her, like many in the Victorian-era privileged class, to pursue the study of natural history. 

Mary first fell in love with the Canadian Rockies on trips with her husband Charles Schäffer, a physician and amateur botanist. Each summer, they travelled to the Rockies, where Charles studied botanical specimens, and Mary captured them in photographs and watercolours. Though her early camping experiences had brought her misery, upon hearing the stories of explorers like Walter Wilcox and Samuel Allen, she warmed to the idea of roughing it for the sake of adventure. 

Charles was 23 years older than Mary. He died in 1903, when she was 42 — the same year her parents died. Charles and Mary had no children; she was untethered and held the rare gift of independence, even if high society might shun her for what came next. She met the tragedy with the resolve to broaden the scope of her husband’s Rockies-based botanical work, which required her to venture into the backcountry. To help her master horseback riding and wilderness travel, she hired William “Billy” Warren, a Banff-based guide who had recently arrived from England after fighting in the Boer War. (This decision proved to be pivotal; though he was 20 years younger than her, the two married in 1915.)

I first encountered Mary in 2005 when I left the hills and hardwood forests of Ottawa for a job at a mountain lodge in Banff. I was 21 years old and feeling invigorated by my first experiences in the alpine when I picked up a book in the lodge’s gift shop called No Ordinary Woman: The Story of Mary Schäffer Warren, by Janice Sanford Beck. It was spellbinding. 

Over the next 17 years, I built a career as an outdoor writer and put down roots in Banff. Time and again, I found myself drawn to Mary’s story, frequently weaving it into my work. I found inspiration in how much she surmounted to accomplish what she did in unfriendly terrain — both in the roughness of the backcountry and in a society that spurned a woman who dared to explore it. I’d left suburbia for the mountain life, plunged head-first into a freelance career and married an adventure photographer. Thanks to her trailblazing, women like me weren’t looked down on for pursuing the unconventional. 

Then, 10 years ago, I moved into a house across the street from Tarry-a-while — the Banff home Billy Warren built for his wife — where I lived for three years. During Doors Open Banff, when historic homes were opened to the public, I walked across Grizzly Street to take a peek inside. Her living room fireplace still looked exactly as it did in archival images. As it turned out, Mary’s desk faced my own writing nook across the street.

Our interweaving stories culminated in 2020 when a friend, Trixie Pacis, an emerging filmmaker from Kimberley, B.C., who was also intrigued by Mary’s story, shared with me her idea to make a documentary. I agreed that a film could bring her story to a wider audience. The seed of the idea grew, and in time my role in the film snowballed from researcher to producer to on-camera protagonist.

The film we envisioned would combine two of my greatest loves: archival research and backcountry adventure. The connective tissue would be a series of repeat photographs taken during a retracing of the final leg of Mary’s journey to Maligne Lake. This 45-kilometre hike would take us from Poboktan Creek to the mouth of the Maligne River, where we would swap boots for paddles and continue our journey by canoe.

From its inception, we called the film Wildflowers. It was a nod to Mary’s quote, but soon enough, the beauty and resilience of wildflowers would take on new meaning through the women in the film.

In the summer of 1908, with Sampson Beaver’s map in hand, Mary set off once more to find Chaba Imne. Her crew included Billy Warren, cook and wrangler Sidney Unwin, Stewardson Brown and his guide Reggie Holmes. Rounding out the group was an American friend, Mary “Mollie” Adams.

Our 2023 journey may have differed in style from Mary’s, but not in spirit. In addition to Anandi, our expedition cinematographer, Trixie and I had effectively recruited two Mollies: Jane, a fellow writer, outdoorswoman and a grounding presence on the trail, and Natalie, a former wilderness guide turned commercial pilot, as well as a published poet and photographer. It wasn’t hard to sell the opportunity; both Jane and Natalie had a thirst for adventure and appreciated what we were aspiring to do with Mary’s story.

As we prepared our gear at the Poboktan Creek trailhead, the skies wept with rain, and I found myself overcome with emotion. The historian and outdoor enthusiast in me — the one who had tracked Mary’s story for nearly two decades — cherished the opportunity to retrace her footsteps.

Within moments of leaving the trailhead, I feel the world fall away. Two years of logistics and planning materialize with our first steps, and my mind relaxes despite the unknowns that lie ahead. Conversations with my hiking mates ebb and flow, at times constricted by the narrowness of the trail. We slide easily into banter or an exchange of questions between takes for the film, and the group gradually gets to know one another. Peak wildflower season is well over, so when we come upon a magenta-hued paintbrush, we stop to marvel at it, noting its happy, solitary presence in the wet forest. Natalie lingers to photograph it. 

I have a copy of Old Indian Trails on my phone and read passages aloud as locations align with Mary’s record. It is a way to bring her along for the journey.

At Maligne Pass: “Reaching the eastern slope, I think I never saw a fairer valley. From our very feet it swept away into an unbroken green carpet as far as the eye could see.” That green carpet is the one we follow through dense forest and shrubby meadows to the banks of the Maligne River.

The river is silty and powder blue with glacial run-off as it curves through the valley bottom. I trade reassuring glances with my hiking mates as we prepare to cross. “The water levels look fine,” I say, relieved.

Our concern about the water levels is twofold. We must cross if we are going to connect with our canoes stowed some 11 kilometres downriver and complete our journey. But it’s also here that, for a few hours, we plan to split our group in two.

As the expedition photographer, Natalie has been tasked with recreating six images from Mary’s collection. She had taken images of the Crowfoot and Bow glaciers from the side of the road. The other four require detective work during the expedition, combining my historical knowledge and passages from Old Indian Trails with Natalie’s keen eye and creativity. We’ve printed reproductions of the archival images, just small enough to fit inside Natalie’s camera filter case, so she has a physical reference copy. These small prints spark for her the idea of including the historical photo in the modern-day landscape, merging past and present in a single frame. 

The fifth image had originally been taken by Sidney Unwin from a high point on what is now called Mount Unwin, where he first spotted Maligne Lake. We were determined to have Natalie recreate the original photograph — if we could do it safely. Using reference photographs, Google Earth and GPS, I had pinpointed the location where Sidney captured the image. His route had been a meandering one, with unnecessary altitude gained and lost to get there. But in my research, I had found a more direct route — one that departed just before the Maligne River crossing and climbed a forested shoulder of Mount Unwin to the treeless ridge.

I drop my pack on the riverbank and join the others in gazing up at the ridge to assess the route. It looks steep, but we can see a weakness where one might gain it. This confirms an approach we had discussed the night before: the best way to obtain the image is to send Natalie and Anandi with only the essentials so they can move swiftly and safely. Trixie has paddled in and is waiting for us at the next campground, so Jane and I load the food and toiletries into our packs and continue onward to meet her. 

When the news came on June 17, 2024, that Natalie Gillis had died in a plane crash just outside Albany, New York, it sent a shockwave through the nation. She had recently completed the flying hours and exams required for her airline transportation pilot’s licence. She had plans to do another master’s degree and publish more poetry. When she wasn’t flying, she was bikepacking across Canada; she seemed so full of life and ambition. She was just 34 years old.

Wildflowers was in its final weeks in the editing room when I picked up the phone to break the news to Trixie. Suddenly, everything we had been working towards was steeped in new meaning.

I was no stranger to loss, but there was something different for me about Natalie’s death and the realizations that came after. Perhaps the intensity of our backcountry experiences had fostered a deep connection, as with Mary and Mollie. Even though I’d known her for many years, the Maligne expedition had been my first multi-day trip with Natalie. A few weeks later, she and I had climbed through glowing larch trees to the crest of a ridge overlooking the Bow Valley. We talked all day — about flying, writing and what it means to live a life of purpose.