Backpacker Buzz

Get a glimpse of life as an HI wilderness hostel manager. From Jasper's The Skinny

Up the Maligne Valley, tucked away next to the river, is a little one-room wood cabin. It’s small and quaint, and has a serene garden beside it – a nice place to sit on a summer evening with a good book and listen to the river water trickle through the rocks. But as I walk up to the cabin, I hear something emerging from the open window that doesn’t quite fit with the tranquil scene… thundering electric blues! This is the home of Volker Schelhas, local naturalist, outdoorsman, and longtime hostel manager at HI-Maligne Canyon Wilderness Hostel.

On a snowy October day, Volker invites me in for a cup of tea, a chat, and a tour of his home – if you can consider sitting in a chair and being able to see the entire house a “tour”.

It’s hard to believe that Volker and Paulette raised two daughters in this cabin, living like pioneers – no indoor plumbing, no electricity and water until 1996, a bedroom separated from the living area by a simple curtain. Most of us couldn’t imagine living under such minimalist conditions, but for Volker the small size and lack of some modern accoutrements are merely minor inconveniences – the tradeoff for getting to live outside town in the wilderness of a national park. He and Paulette are the only year-round residents of the Maligne Valley.

As Volker and I sit and talk, across from me I notice one of the unassuming centerpieces of the house – a World Wildlife Fund calendar with each little box chockfull of dark blue cursive writing. Upon a closer look, I see that the calendar is a daily catalogue of weather conditions, wildlife and bird observations, and other details highlighting the temporal rhythms of nature. Volker has been keeping these daily notes since 1986, a few years after he moved to Jasper from his native Germany. He says it helps his own memory, but also gives him a good feeling for how the natural world changes slowly over time. But he doesn’t just write down wolf and caribou sightings. He pays more attention to nature than that. Every spring, for example, he annotates the arrival of each bird species on its spring migration, and in the autumn he comments on the senescence of leaves as they change from green to yellow. More than anyone else I know, Volker feels the wilderness – it’s an integral part of who he is.

Volker fills up his calendar through daily hikes, bike rides, and drives to look for wildlife. At the time of my visit, he was keeping eye peeled for moose as their rut was in full swing. Depending on the season, Volker will change his activities in order to best observe what the animals are up to. In the winter, he drives the Maligne Lake road looking for wolves or cougar tracks. In August, he might go for a hike at Wilcox Pass to watch for birds of prey migrating through the area. Volker tells me that the highlight of his unofficial career as a naturalist came at Thanksgiving 2003.

That autumn, he watched a pack of six wolves take down a cow moose at the Medicine Lake delta. As he was watching the moose run towards the mud flats of the delta, the alpha male wolf came tearing up beside it, jumped, bit the moose on the neck, and hauled it down by himself before the rest of the pack showed up. The wolves stayed and fed on the moose all weekend – at least until Sunday, when a momma grizzly and her two cubs showed up and claimed the carcass from the wolves. That set up a “Battle at Kruger”-style showdown where the wolves continually tried to dislodge the bears from their trophy kill. After a couple of days, the wolves used their greater numbers to harass the bears into leaving. As I enjoy my tea, Volker pulls out a well-kept album of photos of this encounter taken by a Swiss friend and shows me some of the highlights.

I ask Volker if he’s ever had an interest in formalizing what’s clearly his passion – say, by going to school for an ecology degree or looking for a job in the biology field. He says he hasn’t; with his present lifestyle and work arrangements, he has the time and the wherewithal to pursue his pastime as much as he wants but with no external pressures.

Undoubtedly, he’s where he wants to be – a small cog in a large ecosystem; one of the few people privileged to live in a little cabin in the middle of a national park, living in sync with the rhythms of nature – and he doesn’t take any of it for granted for one moment.

By Lucas Habib

This story originally appeared in The Skinny, a not-for-profit publication aimed at young adults in Jasper.

Read the article and the rest of this edition of The Skinny. Pick up a copy at locations around Jasper.