Digging Into a B.C. Mountain Town’s Quirky Swiss Heritage
Published November 5th, 2024
Photography by Jennifer Bain unless otherwise noted.
Photo Credit Edelweiss Village+Resort
My bright red chalet with a pointy roof and snow-white ornamental decks in Golden looks more East Asian than Swiss or Canadian.
This makes a weird kind of historical sense, because when the Canadian Pacific Railway built six homes here in British Columbia for mountaineering guides from Switzerland in the early 1900s — decades before you could Google everything — it only imagined what Swiss architecture looked like.
Chalet Aemmer. The pagoda chalet. The Japanese one. Call this two-storey beauty what you will, but it’s home base while I delve into the tale of how this area became the birthplace of sport mountaineering in Canada, why we turned to Switzerland for help with tourists, and how six architectural oddities became a “village” worth saving.
Photo Credit Edelweiss Village+Resort
“Those buildings were never built to be practical,” confides Brittany Newman, executive director of the Golden Museum and Archives, during my three-night stay at what’s now Edelweiss Village+Resort.
“When CPR built them, they were just very fancy, for-show buildings. Essentially, they built them within full view of the rail line so that when people would drive by, they could see these crown jewels of the CPR Swiss legacy.”
This story begins in 1896 when American lawyer Philip S. Abbot died on Mount Lefroy on the B.C.-Alberta border in North America’s first recorded mountaineering death. The CPR soon hired certified mountain guides Christian Haesler Sr. and Eduard Feuz Sr. from Interlaken, Switzerland to guide the international tourists it was bringing here on its new railway and teach them safe climbing techniques.
From 1899 to 1954, these men and other Swiss guides safely led hundreds of “first ascents” on peaks — including Mount Assiniboine, the “Canadian Matterhorn” — and shaped the mountain culture of Western Canada.
The Rockies were promoted as “50 Switzerlands in one.” Tourists were drawn by photos of the Swiss guides and Swiss motifs. The CPR even constructed a mini Swiss village called Edelweiss on a hillside near Golden to ensure the seasonal guides didn’t return to Europe.
Built between 1910 and 1912 on jagged terrain, the six unique chalets with eclectic decorative elements were to be permanent homes for the Swiss guides and their families.
But the chalets were poorly insulated and a one-mile walk from town (this was before most people owned cars), so the families soon moved into Golden and plans to expand to 20 chalets were killed. Walter Feuz, the last Swiss guide to live in the village, eventually bought the houses and the surrounding 50 acres of land. He added a modern house in 1978 and the storied property was passed down through his family.
By 2013, the Edelweiss Heritage Village Project sprang up to collaborate with the owners and help preserve the village. But in 2021, Edelweiss Village was put on the market for $2.3 million.
The 50-acre property is literally steps outside of the town limits of Golden. It’s in the Columbia Shushwap Regional District Area, a rural area that doesn’t have heritage protections, and part of it backs on to the buzzy Golden Skybridge development. Potential buyers were eager to demolish the historic chalets.
Swiss-Canadians Ilona Spaar and Johann Roduit quickly formed the Swiss Edelweiss Village Foundation, grabbing headlines and getting the village on the “Top 10 Endangered Places List 2022” put out by the National Trust for Canada.
“The remarkably intact wood and stucco houses feature eclectic decorative elements such as intricate bargeboards, half-timberwork, and ornate balconies loosely interpreting the Swiss Chalet style,” the National Trust said.
The original residents, it pointed out, helped construct the renowned stone Abbot Pass Hut (named for the late mountaineer) in Banff National Park. That 1922 hut became a National Historic Site but had to be dismantled in 2022 because of climate change challenges
“Edelweiss Village, then, is one of the strongest remaining links to the golden age of Western Canadian mountaineering and its cross-cultural, Swiss-Canadian heritage,” the National Trust declared.
The foundation hoped crowdfunding would help it create an inclusive, environmentally and economically sustainable heritage tourism site. But when that failed, it became a liaison between the Edelweiss owners and potential buyers.
In July 2023, Montayne Capital Corp. bought the property. Inspired by the Swiss foundation Vacances au coeur du patrimoine — a project that restores abandoned historical buildings and rents them to tourists — Montayne is doing the same and planning a resort.
“We just fell in love with the story,” one of Montayne’s four co-founders Davin MacIntosh, an environmental lawyer from Canmore, tells me. “There are so many mediocre accommodations out there. This just had that amazing story.”
Photo Credit Edelweiss Village+Resort
Now that the six chalets have been spruced up, Montayne envisions trails, barrel saunas, new modern rustic cabins and perhaps a spa for starters. It’s already collaborating with the foundation over plans for a Swiss Guides Great Hall that would host meetings, weddings and events.
Edelweiss Village had its soft opening in September. Being one of the first to experience the lovingly restored chalets means embracing ongoing construction and a “work in progres” vibe. The chalets are spread over a hillside along a winding gravel road and are on a sensitive septic system since they can’t get water and sewer service from Golden.
My unique pagoda chalet stands out. The others — minty green, two shades of yellow, pale blue and red with kelly green highlights — look like gingerbread houses. They have between one and four bedrooms and currently average $620 to $847 a night.
Instead of a TV, my chalet has a small wooden box where I can place my cell phone and “disconnect to reconnect,” But I’m travelling solo with nobody to chat with — and I’m too scared of grizzlies to wander the woods alone — so do some Googling instead.
I quickly discover that Rudolph Aemmer didn’t necessarily live in Chalet Aemmer. Nobody knows which guide lived where, except for next door at Chalet Edward & Walter Feuz.
I can admire the mountains in the distance, but it’s hard to picture the original Swiss families trudging to Golden for supplies when I can see the Trans-Canada Highway, a Tim Hortons, a Petro-Canada and a mill from my two balconies and know there’s a sushi restaurant at the foot of the resort’s gravel road..
Time marches on. The foundation recently celebrated the 125th anniversary of the Swiss mountain guides with a two-day conference and several hundred guided tours of Edelweiss Village. In downtown Golden, a huge historical mural showcases one of the chalets and three guides alongside a train and mountain goat.
After visiting Kicking Horse Mountain Resort to safely meet a bear named Boo at the Kicking Horse Grizzly Bear Refuge, I pop into the Golden Museum and Archives to see a Swiss guides room with rare artifacts like skis, rope and glasses for preventing snow blindness.
“I think the important thing is that the village is safe, which is what we’ve been working on for awhile,” Newman tells me. “So now it’s up to Montayne to continue to keep it physically safe, and then the role of the museum and the Swiss Edelweiss Village Foundation is to keep the legacy of the guides themselves, and the history of the village, safe — but also to continue to promote it and present it and make sure it’s accessible to the public.”
Golden sure seems poised for more attention. It’s not far from Banff and Jasper national parks in Alberta, and in between Yoho, Kootenay, Glacier and Mount Revelstoke national parks in B.C.
It’s just an hour’s drive to the Rogers Pass Discovery Centre, which details how Glacier became the cradle of mountaineering in North America and boasts the Breeches of Miss Conduct statue by Revelstoke artist Rob Buchanan. Stand behind copper-colored steel pants with your hand on an ice axe and you get to pretend you’re about to climb mountains.
The pants honor American Georgia Engelhard who, with help from Swiss guides, was the first female climber to ascend many of the Rockies’ peaks. She climbed in the Victorian era when it was frowned upon for women to wear breeches in public.
Inside the discovery centre run by Parks Canada, I read how the CPR built lavish hotels as mountain tourism exploded. The Fairmont Banff Springs and Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise live on, but the hotel built here in Rogers Pass called Glacier House was torn down in 1929 after the railway was rerouted because of avalanches.
Near the Illecillewaet Campground parking lot, I circle a quiet clearing to see what’s left of this Swiss chalet-inspired hotel. There are pieces of the stone foundation and a plaque on a historical marker that explains how the 90-room hotel with a bowling alley and observation tower was used by “mountaineers, adventurers and sightseers from all over the world” and “provided a small island of civilization” in what was once remote wilderness.
Vintage photos on the stone marker show the hotel’s Swiss vibe, a train and four Swiss guides. There is, of course, a sentence praising the guides who once helped hotel guests enjoy the mountain peaks.
The highest “mountain” I climb is that hillside at Edelweiss Village, and that’s only to take photos of each chalet. The best shots are from down by the traffic lights near the gas station.
But it feels like quite a hike from my chalet’s basement to its main floor living room and kitchen and up to the top floor trio of bedrooms and lone bathroom. The decor inside my “pagoda chalet” is what I’d call modern minimalist Canadian.
Each night, the bulldozer working on the resort road shuts down, the TCH traffic peters out and Golden lights up. When it’s finally quiet enough and dark enough to admire the mountains without too many distractions, I salute those trailblazing Swiss guides who left such an indelible mark on this part of Canada.
Jennifer Bain
After a career at daily newspapers, Jennifer began travelling the world in search of quirk in 2018. She goes wherever the story is, but has a soft spot for Canada and has been to all 10 provinces and all three territories. Jennifer has won multiple awards and written two cookbooks and three travel books. She lives in Toronto but has a vacation house on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, which some cheekily say is one of the four corners of the supposedly flat earth.