Years later she was asked by Jon Whyte how she spelled her name; with a "s" or a "z". She asked what he wanted to know for and when he told her he was compiling photos to be hung in Skoki Lodge, she spluttered, "In the backcountry I was Lizzie! Lizzie. Always. Never anything else."

Lizzie she was and more particularly so from this summer of 1943 onwards.

The first thing Lizzie did when she acquired Skoki Lodge was to secure Ray Legace at Lake Louise to be her outfitter and pack in her supplies by horse during the summer months. Legace remained as her outfitter throughout the whole time she managed the lodge.

This first summer Lizzie also secured Maudie Glaister, the daughter of an old friend in Millarville, to work for her. Each year Lizzie had to scout around and hire a cook, chambermaid, and general maintanance man. The maintenance man would chop wood, haul water, shovel roofs and maintain the light plant.

One of Lizzie's best friends was Cliff White, Sr., who would frequently bring up her staples from the railway station at Lake Louise to Temple Chalet. Cliff was the only man who would not tell her "grizzly stories that would make your hair stand on end." He was "just wonderful" and would only caution her "to just be careful."

Underneath the dining room of Skoki Lodge was a cold root celler in which to store food. Lizzie filled it with bags of potatoes, flour and other supplies, which she did not want to become frozen in the winter or which she wished to keep cool in the summer.

Initially, Lizzie barely broke even financially, but she loved the life. During the war years it was hard to get food because of the rationing but she managed to survive with the same food concessions granted to restaurants and each fall Ken Jones and his friends would go into Skoki to cut wood for the following winter.

During the winter months Lizzie hired young fellows to act as packers for the meat and perishable supplies which had to be brought into the lodge. One year Jack Chisolm was her packer and in 1946 Jim Deegan took on the job. Deegan was a young fellow, about twenty years old, fresh out of the armed forces and recently recovered from war injuries.

I remember I first met Lizzie in 1943 when I was on embarkation leave from the navy, through my uncle Beef Warner, a warden at Lake Louise. She was at Temple. The next time I met her I was out of the navy and looking for a job. I got a ride up to Temple Chalet on the snow cat and skied into Skoki alone with seventy-five pounds of butter for Lizzie, and I got a job as her backpacker.

The whole winter of 1946 I backpacked into Skoki almost every day. The lodge was not busy until Easter time but people did come on weekends. Sometimes I packed from Temple Chalet and sometimes from Lake Louise train station.

Going from Skoki Lodge to Temple Chalet I took one hour to the top of Deception Pass and a half hour from there to Temple. Once a month I had to carry in two fifty pound batteries for the light plant. Going up Deception Pass was hard. I would go a ways and then lean on my ski poles for a rest. Often halfway to the pass, when Lizzie was with me, she would say, "Take that pack off and I'll carry it to the top." She was an amazing woman.

Sometimes she would bawl the heck out of me.

"Gosh, get off the back of my Goddamn skis. We used to kill people in Germany for that."

In those days I was just like a young grizzly.

About every one and a half months I would pack in a quarter of beef. About one hundred and fifteen pounds they would weigh. The leg would stick about three feet above the top of my head. One time I fell when I was halfway down Deception Pass and the leg of beef knocked me out cold with my head between my skis. It was two hours before I came to and dragged myself down to Skoki Lodge.

Every week there was one hundred pounds of potatoes to be packed in, in a big sack strapped onto my Trapper Nelson pack, and seventy pounds of eggs. Lizzie kept the meat in the pantry behind the kitchen where it froze.

The cook that winter was Lillian Lancaster. Lillian had no fear in spite of the fact that she did not know how to ski. On the way from Skoki Lodge to the top of Deception Pass I had to teach her to ski. From there she took forty-five minutes to reach Lake Louise.

Miss Lancaster made beautiful flapper pie, but it seemed that every time she made it I had to siphon gas from the motor of the gas-operated generator and my mouth was so full of the taste of gas that I couldn't eat the flapper pie. I guess it was one of those Murphy laws because flapper pie was my favorite.

Backpacking was just part of the job. I also had to chop wood, shovel roofs and haul six pails of water from the creek every morning before breakfast. The firewood was awful stuff. . . .had to have five or six wedges in it to get it to split. It did not burn well either.

I had lots of adventures in there at Skoki.

One time when I was going from Skoki to Louise, it was late in the season, I got to Ptarmigan Lake and stopped to rest on my ski poles and they just went down, down, down, right into the lake. Boy did we ever pussyfoot across that lake! Had a heck of a time getting across.

I remember Herman Gadner who got killed on Little Richardson. He was quite a dare devil. Once he was being photographed by a Toronto Star photographer on the top of Mount Redoubt, on a cornice overlooking Redoubt Lake. There was a sheer two thousand foot drop below the cornice and Gadner just got out on the cornice and did ski turns - being photographed all the time.

Well, that light plant used to cause a lot of headaches. It acquired some pretty powerful names, which could not be used when there were ladies present. It used to heat water for showers which were in the engine shed, but by the time Lizzie was at Skoki it was only used for lights. Every night at six o'clock I had to start it up. It was not too noisy because the engine was muffled.

Yes, I always called her Elizabeth. Lizzie was too informal for someone of that breeding. Most people in those days called her Elizabeth.

Yes, I went back into Skoki after my twentieth birthday bash in Banff but I didn't just carry that crate of eggs. I had about twenty pounds of mail on top of the eggs as well. I got into Skoki about eight o'clock at night and it was pitch black. I had got to know the route pretty well. It was all flagged out and I knew how many paces it was between each flag. There wasn't much to think about except what the condition of Deception Pass would be.

The winds off Ptarmigan Peak would sing me a beautiful song. . . .just like an orchestra. Then about halfway down the pass I could see the lights from the lodge, just like a beacon, and Elizabeth would be there waiting for me.

She never had to go looking for me but one time she had to go and look for Bill Black's outfit. He was the warden stationed at Cyclone Cabin on the Red Deer River. He and his wife were in there all one winter. This time Bill brought in his mother-in-law who had a club foot. It was her first time on skis and she did not manage them at all, so Elizabeth and I had to rescue her on a toboggan.

I went in there to Skoki Lodge about the first of February and worked until the first of June.

Elizabeth was a darn good friend and we remained friends. - Jim Deegan