Life of the Trail 4: Historic Hikes in Eastern Jasper National Park includes trails throughout the Jasper area, as well as routes in the White Goat Wilderness and part of the Bighorn Wildland, outside the national park itself. Today's boundaries are the Icefields Parkway (Highway 93) to the west, the David Thompson Highway (11) to the south, and the Yellowhead Highway (16) to the north. The main routes are fur trade routes, Duncan McGillivray's route along the Brazeau river and Poboktan Creek, Jacques Cardinal's route from Jasper to the North Saskatchewan River along the South Boundary Trail and over Job Pass, and Old Klyne's Trail over Maligne and Cataract Passes and along the Cline River to the Kootenay Plains. The fourth is a 20th-century route: the Skyline Trail.

Emerson Sanford, originally from Nova Scotia, first visited the mountains of western Canada in the summer of 1961. Eleven years later, he moved to Alberta, and has been hiking ever since. After beginning to backpack seriously with his teenaged daughters in 1990, he began to wonder who cut the trails and how their routing had been determined. Since then, not only has he delved through printed material about the trails, he has also solo hiked every historic route and most long trails between Mount Robson and the Kananaskis Lakes-over 3,000 km in the past five years! Emerson now lives in Canmore with his wife, Cheryl.

Janice Sanford Beck is the author of the bestselling No Ordinary Woman: The Story of Mary Schäffer Warren (Rocky Mountain Books). She has also written the introduction to the latest edition of Mary T.S. Schäffer's Old Indian Trails of the Canadian Rockies (Rocky Mountain Books) and, with Cheryl Sanford, recently researched the Mary Schäffer Warren portion of the Glenbow Musuem's new permanent exhibit called Mavericks.
Janice is presently masquerading as a flatlander, making her home in Saskatoon with her partner, Shawn, and their two children.