A Hard Road to Travel traces the changing relationships between people and forests as humans first travelled through the area, then stayed to struggle, survive and eventually flourish – first despite the forest, then in harmony with it.
A Hard Road to Travel: Land, Forests and People in the Upper Athabasca Region by Peter J. Murphy, with Robert W. Udell, Robert E. Stevenson and Thomas W. Peterson. Co-published by the Foothills Model Forest and The Forest History Society in 2007. ISBN 978-1-896585-10-9.
The book is out of print.
From the Forward
Circumscribing a vast quantity and diversity of human and non-human history, Peter Murphy has brought a long career’s experience of studying the region’s forests to bear on his history. The role that fire prevention strategies played in the history of the management of Jasper national Park, Brazeau Forest, and Athabasca Forest contribute to the portrait that he draws, as do the individuals involved. He shows the impact on forests of the evolution of new concepts and strategies for their management, like “sustained yield,” which appeared first in 1949, and the programs of aerial photography and forced inventories that had to be undertaken in order to develop it. Meanwhile, he shows how Frank Ruben, one of the regions preeminent venture capitalists, wedded forestry and mining, and how the likes of Reg Loomis, Des Crossley, and others established forestry practises in the Hinton area in the 1950s that would serve as a model for both government and industry across the continent. How the hamlet of Hinton stole its pulp mill from the town of Edson is another story that unfolds in these pages.
Murphy’s treatment is deftly and judiciously enhanced by Robert Stevenson’s unparallelled expertise as an historian of photographic collections of the region’s people and forests, and the benefits and insights of Bob Udell‘s highly acclaimed success as a manager of the region’s forests.
— I. S. MacLaren
