Chief Mountain highway, Alberta, 1940 Park warden, Bert Barnes, at Carthew summit. Saddle horses belonging to park warden in foreground. Sign reads, “RMP NO.1” – Rocky Mountains Park, Spray Lakes, Alberta, 1938 Bill Peyto, Banff National Park, Alberta, 1890s Bert Barnes, park warden, on patrol with dogs in Belly River Valley, Waterton Lakes National Park, 1929-1930 Relief camp 3 on Crooked Creek. Portrait of Bill Peyto, guide and park warden, Banff area, Alberta, 1900-1903 Park warden at lodge. Although the job description has repeatedly changed, they are still the guardians of our wildest places. Today, law enforcement plays a substantial role in the duties of Park Wardens, and an increasing amount of their time is spent in the park’s most frequented locales, instead of those sought-after remote confines. Park and Game Wardens were a remarkably knowledgeable bunch, so visitors turned to them for their expertise of the natural world. Even public relations became more commonplace. A series of backcountry cabins were erected to assist on those long patrols searching for illegal hunters and poachers. Search and rescue became more apparent, as did trail building and maintenance. As tourism in Canada’s west increased, so too did the responsibilities of the wardens. Permanent positions were created, luring some of the most famous characters the warden service ever produced, such as ‘Wild’ Bill Peyto. Over twenty years later, in 1909, the warden service was officially realized by the Department of the Interior.

In those early days their main concerns were with fire suppression and game management. The person first appointed to the role of warden (known as Forest Rangers at the time) was John Connor, back in 1887. The Warden Service has been in existence for over a century. I felt the following blurb, which I penned for the aforementioned Wild Jobs story, is a fitting intro to these guardians of the wild.

For this post I opted to share some historical pictures of both Park and Game Wardens from Canada’s west. They’ve been the topic of several stories, including my years long search for one of Bill Peyto’s mysterious cabins and they were profiled in my running series on Wild Jobs. I’ve been fascinated with the National Parks Warden Service for years.

Nd game wardens