A crowd-funding campaign for Wildflowers, a new documentary exploring Mary Schäffer Warren’s historic backcountry adventure to Maligne Lake near Jasper in 1908, has now met and exceeded its $25,000 goal, which was set to give the film the post-production treatment its creators felt the story deserved.
The Indiegogo campaign will be left up until Jan. 17, to get the filmmakers as close to their stretch goal as possible, which would allow them to create the “dream version” of the project.
This project is now nearing its final stages, but represents over three years of work since the idea for the story was first pitched during the Banff Centre’s Adventure Filmmakers Workshop in 2020 by Kimberley-based filmmaker Trixie Pacis.
While there have been books about Schäffer, the Pennsylvania-born naturalist, writer and photographer best known for being among the first non-Indigenous people to explore Maligne Lake, Pacis wondered why the story hadn’t been told in a documentary format.
The idea began to develop when Pacis discussed it with her friend Meghan J. Ward while they were hiking. Ward is an outdoor adventure writer and a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. It just so happened that she had been immersed in Schäffer’s story for nearly two decades.
Originally from Ottawa, Ward first moved to Banff in 2005 and soon came across Schäffer’s story, which she found to be incredibly compelling — the things Schäffer accomplished 100 years ago were things rarely, if ever, done by women.
Ward and Pacis were interested in the fact Schäffer’s story has not travelled far beyond Banff and the Canadian Rockies, where she spent the last decades of her life and where her story is well preserved and celebrated. Pacis said she thought the story has national historical significance and the power to inspire people from all around the world.
They began to delve deep into the wealth of material about, or by, Schäffer. This includes a large collection of lantern slide photographs from Shäffer’s explorations and a 1912 edition of Schäffer’s own book Pacis managed find on eBay to surprise Ward with in the backcountry on the first leg of their project.
As they dug into this material some themes began to emerge and the documentary began to take shape.
These include reinvention and the healing power of being deep in the wilderness. Schäffer had lost her husband and parents and, in her mid-40s totally re-defined her life and delved into writing, art, photography and of course exploration.
Ward says she sees Schäffer as source of inspiration that anyone has “the permission we have to reinvent ourselves at any stage in life” and called her a “true trailblazer and inspiration for modern-day women, creatives and people from many walks of life.”
Ward is also now entering her 40s and part of the documentary involved a carefully planned, two-leg journey to “meet Mary.” The first leg was a horsepacking trip into the Skoki Valley in Fall 2022, recreating one of Schäffer’s earliest horsepacking experiences in 1904.
The second leg, in August 2023, was the main expedition and saw Ward venture into the Maligne River Valley on foot and by canoe, a 55-kilometre trip.
Through these experiences, Ward said she went from being solely a writer of the film to becoming its protagonist. This is important in and of itself, as women and especially middle-aged women are underrepresented in the outdoor filmmaking space.
It was because of this that it was important to Ward and Pacis for Ward to be seen in the film as a relatable figure to other women, and for the team who made the film to be made up of women. The team behind Wildflowers is made up of 95 per cent of women coming from diverse cultural backgrounds.
Another theme that emerged is tackling the time and the voice from which Schaffer told her story. In an Instagram Live Q&A on Jan. 11, Pacis and Ward discussed how Schäffer’s life “overlapped a complicated era” in the history of Canada and the Canadian Rockies, a time of extreme upheaval and persistent atrocities carried out upon Indigenous peoples.
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The filmmakers began wrestling with themes of settler heritage, decolonizing narratives, and taking a hard look at history as it has been told.
Pacis said exploring this story provides an opportunity to “revisit history with a more nuanced perspective.”
In Schäffer’s 1911 book “Old Indian Trails” recounting the 1908 expedition, she acknowledges those who explored and occupied those lands before she explored them, and never claimed to have discovered anything herself. However, her work does only give one perspective or side of the story, Pacis says.
Another theme emerged after the filmakers compared Schäffer’s words and images with their real-life sources.
“Comparing her photographs and accounts along the way revealed tremendous change, ranging from vanishing glaciers to rising tree lines and the absence of teepee poles,” Pacis said.
There were a lot of challenges in telling this along the way, beyond the complex logistics of planning the excursion and the difficulties in procuring grant funding in a market rife with many other worthy Canadian projects.
Ward broke a toe ten days before the first leg of the trip and was in pain for the duration of the 40-kilometre horse-packing trip.
She reflected that the suffering one feels on a long journey into the backcountry is part of what makes it so special, and helped her connect to Schäffer’s story even more.
Pacis has played rugby for the Philippine Woman’s National Rugby team since 2009. Having played for her country nine times, she was really keen to play for a tenth time before retiring. Unfortunately, scheduling complications during a qualifying tournament meant her team had to play six games in one day and partially due to fatigue, she took a step after a tackle that resulted in a partially torn ACL, sprained MCL and potential meniscus damage.
This all happened five weeks before the expedition. After trying to film an interview in Banff, it became clear she would be unable to go on the second leg of the expedition as was originally planned.
“It was really heartbreaking that I wouldn’t be hiking in Mary’s footsteps in the way that I had envisioned for years, but we very quickly found a director of photography who was very beautifully aligned with our vision and that was such a relief to know that my injury wouldn’t impact the overall film,” Pacis said.
She said that the project always came first, but the team quickly devised a Plan B, which had Pacis canoeing in from the Maligne Lake Docks and then joining the support crew who brought the canoe to the ladies who were hiking. From there she met up with the rest of the expedition for its last two nights. Those days were mostly paddling, with a kilometre-and-a-half stretch of backpacking Pacis did with a knee brace.
The Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign was launched after much research and consideration in order to bring on the editor and colourists, a composer for an original score, and potentially a graphic designer, to align the finished product with the vision its creators had for it, to the best of their ability.
“We wouldn’t be at this point without everyone’s contributions,” Ward said. “It’s a big leap of faith launching a campaign like this, so it’s nice to see [175] people there willing to catch us.”
To support and learn more about the film, visit https://igg.me/at/wildflowersdoc/x#/