Home Social Landscape Featured Articles Myrtle Raivio: Alberta’s First Woman Guide and Outfitter

Myrtle Raivio: Alberta’s First Woman Guide and Outfitter

by Annette Gray

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However, ensuring the safety of others meant that Myrtle frequently put her own life on the line. Her son, Clarence, recalled one such incident in the spring of 1957, when she narrowly escaped drowning. Clarence, a teen-ager at the time, was working with his mother guiding a group of geologists in the country south of Chetwynd, British Columbia. Because the geologists needed rock samples from a fairly large area, it fell to Myrtle to get her charges safely across two rivers, the Sukunta and the Pine. The spot Myrtle chose for the crossing was just above the confluence of these rivers. She assigned the men and supplies to boats, while she, alone, planned to swim the horses across the Sukunka to a gravel bar. Once there, she intended to rest the horses before swimming the more placid Pine River.

“I told Mom it wouldn’t work,” Clarence recalls. “It was spring and the Sukunka was running deep and fast, but Mom was determined.”

Myrtle started into the water, riding her saddle horse and urging the other seven head of horses along as she went. Seconds later, all eight horses were down, being swept along by the current to where the Pine tumbled into the Sukunka. Clarence still shudders as he remembers the scene of horses struggling in the giant whirlpool made by the meeting of the two rivers—heads bobbing, feet thrashing as the frenzied animals fought their way to shore—but, to everyone’s horror, there was no sign of his mother.

Presently her body surfaced some distance downstream and a boat went to her rescue. When pulled from the water she was unconscious—more dead than alive—having been struck on the head by her horses’ flailing hooves. Yet, a few days later Myrtle was back on the trail, directing the camp as if nothing had happened.

Did she enjoy her work? To use Myrtle’s words, she said, “I wouldn’t trade my life for any other. Sure it’s hard work and this fall the weather’s been miserable. But I just love it.”

Yes, except for days of wet snow and the occasional complaining camper, Myrtle’s career was fashioned to her liking—a career cut short by death on August 8th, 1982 while she was awaiting heart surgery.

At her passing, a neighbor paid Myrtle this tribute. “If you had seen her in that pretty blue serge suit, with white hat, shoes and gloves to match, the day she and brother Carl climbed on board the plane to Wisconsin, you would have thought the same as I, that Shorty, call her what you may, indeed she was the “Lady Guide of the Foothills.”

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Aspenland II: Life and Work of Women in Central Alberta: a publication of the Central Alberta Regional Museums Network and the Central Alberta Historical Society, Spring 2003, edited by David Ridley.