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Donning pants to understand history of mountaineering

A local company has contributed in an unusual way to the capturing of history.
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Seat of power: Femke and Thumen Jongens from the Netherlands pose with the pants in Glacier National Park.

A local company has contributed in an unusual way to the capturing of history.

If you travel through Rogers Pass, you’ll see a unique sculpture in front of the Rogers Pass Discovery Centre in Glacier National Park. It’s a pair of pants or, as they’ve been named by Revelstoke artist Rob Buchanan who designed them, The Breeches of Miss Conduct. They’re also interactive – people can pose as if they’re wearing them.

The artist’s statement notes that Glacier National Park is the birthplace of sport mountaineering in Canada. In the late 1890s, CPR imported mountain guides from Switzerland to work in the posh Glacier House Hotel to serve the needs of international visitors craving mountain adventure. It was also the Victorian era, a time when it was socially unacceptable for a woman to wear breeches in public.

That didn’t stop Georgia Engelhard, the niece of artist Georgia O’Keefe.

“By age 23, this brash, young woman always wore men’s pants while climbing and sometimes even about town, where she was occasionally mistaken for a young man,” notes Buchanan’s statement. “Georgia scaled an impressive number of peaks in the Canadian Rockies and Columbia Mountains. In 1931 alone, she reached 24 summits in the Selkirk Mountains in three short weeks. The Swiss guides who led her on these adventures often joked about putting rocks in her back pack just to slow her down.”

The steel Breeches of Miss Conduct are copper-coloured, thanks to the work of Salmon Arm’s QC Universal Coatings. Owner Wayne McCreight explains that his company, which does sand-blasting and custom powder- coating, had already done a couple of projects with Parks Canada. Six people work at his business in the industrial park which has been in operation for nine years.

QC’s work usually involves “a lot of commercial and industrial bits and parts that are manufactured in the industrial park here and in Kamloops. We also coat railings as well, car parts, anything basically that is metal, we can coat,” he says.

In this case, steel pants needed their attention. The company powder-coated them, which is a paint process whereby dry powder is baked on.

“I must say, that was a first. We’ve done a lot of obscure things but we had not done a pair of pants,” says McCreight.

This unique sculpture helps visitors to the park understand how Engelhard helped lead the way for later generations of women in the mountains.

The disdain she had to face by following her heart is well-described in the Sept. 11, 1920 issue of the Banff Crag & Canyon newspaper:

“The young women who strut about the street and dine in the hotels dressed in riding togs should be soundly spanked and sent to bed… Pants are made for men and not for women. Women are made for men and not for pants…”

 



Martha Wickett

About the Author: Martha Wickett

came to Salmon Arm in May of 2004 to work at the Observer. I was looking for a change from the hustle and bustle of the Lower Mainland, where I had spent more than a decade working in community newspapers.
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