University of Calgary professors are digitally preserving an endangered heritage site important to Canada’s mountaineering history.
Today, western Canada is known for its vibrant mountaineer culture, but this was not the case in the years following the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1885. Thus, the Canadian Pacific Railway brought Swiss mountain guides in the Rockies to share their mountaineering knowledge and encourage them. tourism
Edelweiss Village, six Swiss-style chalets on 20 hillside acres, was built north of Golden, BC between 1910 and 1912 to house these guides and their families.
With the village now up for sale for $2.3 million by the descendants of the original guides, University of Calgary professors are working to digitally capture the site and make sure no time is lost.
According to the National Trust for Canada, Edelweiss Village is one of the top 10 endangered places in the country. That’s because the site is north of the city of Golden in the Regional District of Columbia Shuswap, a rural region without heritage laws, so potential buyers would not be required to preserve the buildings.
The Swiss Edelweiss Village Foundation has been set up by a group that hopes to buy and preserve the location, but it is not guaranteed at this time.
Digital preservation is a useful alternative
For Professor Peter Dawson, digital preservation is the best thing when a site cannot be physically preserved due to cost or environmental factors. Using a terrestrial laser scanner, Dawson and his team capture data from heritage sites to create virtual replicas that the public can access online.
Professors at the University of Calgary are digitally capturing the Swiss Edelweiss Village to ensure its preservation. The National Trust for Canada considers the village one of the country’s 10 endangered heritage sites. (Ose Irete/CBC)
The Digital Heritage Archive focuses on “core” heritage sites such as the Swiss Village. These are places that are significant to people and communities despite not having official designations of importance.
“Our mission statement is basically to digitally preserve these grassroots heritage sites, so that some record of them remains if it ever happens to them. But also so that the public, through the public face of the archive, can learn about its history and its importance to that particular community,” Dawson said.
Public awareness is essential
Dawson says public awareness is key to preserving heritage. Digital archives help raise awareness by making these sites available to people who cannot physically access them.
To make the archive attractive to the public, Dawson is working with Professor Denis Gadbois of the university’s art and art history department. Gadbois uses photography to create virtual tours of heritage sites that go beyond simply cataloging their attributes.
“Just digital preservation will help make a replica or just retain that history, but it won’t necessarily create the visual history that you’re going to need for people to understand the beauty and the history,” Gadbois said.
A rendering of the Edward Fuez Chalet, one of the buildings in Edelweiss Village, created by the University of Calgary Digital Heritage Archive. (Archive of Digital Heritage)
Hope for physical preservation
Johann Roduit is one of the founders of the Swiss Edelweiss Village Foundation. He moved to British Columbia from Switzerland and says it was amazing to see the people and the impact of Swiss immigration in Canada.
He believes that the village is not only important to the heritage of both countries, but to the culture of mountaineering around the world. He was surprised to see the place for sale.
“I was a little surprised. How can such a heritage be sold? I come from Europe [and] I am thinking of ancient monuments [there] — you’ll never have heritage sites for sale.”
Roduit says the initial plan was to have the site captured digitally so people in Switzerland could see it. Now the organization is working to raise funds to buy and preserve it.
He says the organization has raised one-third of the funds for an initial deposit of $100,000 through crowdfunding and will continue to negotiate with vendors.
Roduit says he’s grateful for the support the organization has received from Alberta and British Columbia, as well as Switzerland. The crowdfunding is phase 3 of his six-phase plan to buy and revive the area with a sustainable cultural tourism concept.