Shortlisted: Banff Mountain Book Awards

The Cardinal Divide: A Cole Blackwater Mystery has been shortlisted for The Canadian Rockies Award in the 2009 Banff Mountain Book Festival. The award is presented annually to the best book about the Canadian Rockies entered in the Mountain Book Festival. The Mountain Book Festival is held at the Banff Centre for Mountain Culture November 5^th and 6^th.

To be nominated for this award, at the Banff Mountain Book Festival means a lot to me.

I went to the very first Mountain Book Festival, when it was still the poor cousin of the Banff Mountain Film Festival. That was 16 years ago: I was living in Lake Louise at the time, penning columns on mountain life and the mountain environment for the local newspapers, and dreaming that someday I might have a book to display at the nominations table.

I met Chic Scott at that Book Festival that first year, and we began what was a short-lived tradition of a cup of tea or coffee together to talk about climbing, skiing and writing. It’s been ten years since I sat down with Chic to talk shop; he’s nominated for the same award this year – as are friends John Marriott and Graeme Pole – so I hope maybe we can all meet to share stories about writing, photography and the mountains we love.

The landscape is the protagonist in The Cardinal Divide. The craggy ridge of the Divide itself is always there, as the soon to be deceased mine manager notes in the prologue of the book: “He craned his neck and looked south into the darkness, beyond the existing mine, toward the Cardinal Divide’s jagged back. In his minds’ eye he saw the reef of stone rising abruptly from the rolling foothills that broke against the implacable wall of the Rocky Mountains. Though the Divide was beyond his life of sight, Mike Barnes knew it was there. Could not forget it was there. So much angst over a hill.”

(A very real place: The Cardinal Divide)

And while the book is a murder mystery, it’s about very real issues and a very real place; issues that for more than a decade as an activist in Alberta I struggled with, and that for 30 years have been vexing many people across North America: How do we protect a place that we love from the overwhelming forces of single-minded progress? How do we bridge such a cardinal divide within our communities, when one group of people look back to short term exploitation to prosper while others look forward to sustainable solutions, back lack the means to implement them?

The Cardinal Divide doesn’t answer these questions, but set among the murder mystery is the story of a community’s connection to a powerful place. In asking the question we’re one step closer to an answer.

It’s a great honor to be nominated for this award.