BURSTNew for Spring 2027, Behind the Ranges, published by UBC Press, and written by Zac Robinson and Stephen Slemon offers a new history of mountaineering in the Canadian West, challenging the familiar stories of heroic first ascents and individual conquest. Instead, the book uncovers the colonial, patriarchal, and class-based assumptions that shaped how the Rocky Mountains were explored, mapped, named, written about, and ultimately understood.
From David Douglas’s 1827 claim to have climbed the highest mountain in North America to a Japanese team’s 1925 ascent of Mount Alberta, the last of the high Rocky Mountains to be climbed, the Canadian West emerged as a proving ground for imperial ambition and exploration. Over the course of a century, mapping, national park development, amateur sport, mountaineering clubs, and a growing body of climbing literature helped establish what would later be celebrated as a “golden age” of mountaineering.
Yet Behind the Ranges looks beyond the celebrated ascents to reveal the people whose knowledge, labour, and expertise made those achievements possible. Railway and park workers, packers, guides, and countless others supported expeditions while often remaining absent from the stories later told about them. At the same time, the book brings Indigenous agency and longstanding Indigenous stewardship of the Rockies into sharper focus, asking whose knowledge has been recognized, and whose has been overlooked.
The authors also examine how commercial enterprises transformed the mountains into sites of economic opportunity and natural resource exploitation. By placing mountaineering within the broader histories of empire, class, commerce, and colonialism, Robinson and Slemon reveal that the classic narratives of exploration were never simply stories about reaching the summit. They were also stories about power, access, knowledge, and the cultural forces that determined which landscapes, and which people, became visible.
Engaging and wide-ranging, Behind the Ranges will appeal to climbers and mountain lovers, readers of exploration and travel writing, sports enthusiasts, historians, and scholars of postcolonial studies. As author Katie Ives writes, the book provides a crucial step toward illuminating the “vast and deep understory” beneath North American mountaineering, juxtaposing colonial explorers’ fantasies of mythic peaks and terra incognita with the lived realities of Indigenous stewardship and the often-unrecognized work of those who made climbing possible.
Zac Robinson is a historian in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta, a governor and fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and a former vice president of the Alpine Club of Canada. He is a regular contributor to the Canadian Alpine Journal and editor of Conrad Kain: Letters from a Wandering Mountain Guide, 1906–1933. Stephen Slemon is professor emeritus in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta and a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. His work focuses on postcolonial literatures and theory, as well as mountaineering in the context of empire.
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