Natural feature
Icefields Parkway
Two-hundred-thirty-kilometre mountain highway cut by hand and horse team through glacier-fed valleys during the Great Depression.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Icefields Parkway near Banff turns on a single card game in a relief camp bunkhouse in November of nineteen thirty-two, when two Depression-era laborers cut a deck of cards over the camp's one spare pair of socks. It traces the men historians came to call park prisoners, the five-dollar monthly wage that built the first miles of this road, and the years of isolated camp labor behind the pavement underfoot. Best heard looking down at the road itself, laid largely by hand and horse team.
This audio guide was created using AI.