Jasper National Park

David Mattison is a librarian with the B.C. Provincial Archives and
Records Services Library.

The author and the photographer are described as “one of Alberta’s leading Environmentalists” and “one of Canada’s foremost mountain Photographers” on the title page of this book and entry number 1071, Wildlife in the Rockies (GB Publishing, 1982). That is a questionable location for such flattery. The photographer is the G B in G B Publishing.

Largely a collection of photographs, this visual tour of Jasper includes a brief introduction to the park: its history, its geology, and its wildlife. The text is straightforward but very general. The foreword is a bit self-conscious as the “editor” seeks to explain the benefits of a national parks system. A two-page scaled map in gray and white lays out major park features.

The colour photographs depict the main attractions of the park in summer and winter. This is standard nature fare by now familiar through a host of other books and desk calendars featuring the same kind of views: mountains reflected in lakes, thundering waterfalls, close-ups of frosted flowers, peaks wreathed in clouds with sunlight slanting through, hikers and skiers, and wildlife.

The captions are more lengthy than in Wildlife. The difficulty of writing good captions is illustrated by this example: a close-up of an unidentified flower with four drops of water reads “Nature’s delicate beauty has always been a source of inspiration for artists.” This book represents a more substantial effort than Wildlife but is by no means, like Wildlife, to be taken as some kind of guide; rather, it is an impression and a souvenir.