Abstract ID: 3.11634 | Accepted as Talk | Talk/Oral | TBA | TBA

Catharine Robb Whyte (1906-1979) was an American-born artist, operator of Skoki Lodge in Banff National Park, and later the founder of Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Alberta, Canada. Her lifelong travels and work extended to ski destinations in the Rocky Mountains, the Columbia Mountains, and the European Alps. What did skiing mean to Whyte? Tracing her journeys reveals the arc of a woman’s lifelong engagement with ski culture set against the evolution of skiing at various destinations from early backcountry ski lodges to alpine resorts and heliskiing in the twentieth century as made evident in how she represented and remembered skiing through art, letters, and travel stories. As a skier and traveller, Whyte demonstrates how skiers were transnational and cross-cultural active agents beyond standard boundaries. In particular, women were skiers as revealed by the use of archival sources to find and read the past to understand the lives of women better by searching for their tracks in the archives of skiing and adventure. Archival fonds, including letters, albums, and photographs, along with oral history interviews and artwork, are used to extract Catharine Whyte’s ski adventures across her lifetime. Based on analysis of these sources, critical examination reconstructs a woman’s journeys and experiences of skiing mountain landscapes. Reading her life story through art, travel writing, and personal stories, contributes to the larger history of women in skiing and mountain communities, highlighting the importance of skiers and mountain sport in the globalization of the Alps and the Rockies.