“Behind the Ranges offers a timely intervention into public debates about how to respond to histories of conquest and exclusion – in the mountains and elsewhere. This definitive history of early mountaineering in the Canadian Rockies brings the long-obscured contributions of Indigenous communities, settler labourers, mountain guides, and women climbers into view.”

Peter Hansen, author of The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment

“Beautiful and occasionally enchanting, Behind the Ranges makes for an original and significant contribution to scholarship on mountaineering history and literature in the Canadian context and beyond.”

Danielle Inkpen, author of Capturing Glaciers: A History of Repeat Photography and Global Warming

“With Behind the Ranges, Zac Robinson and Stephen Slemon expertly map colonial explorers’ fantasies of mythic peaks and terra incognita juxtaposed with real accounts of Indigenous people’s stewardship in the Rockies. The result is a crucial step in highlighting the ‘vast and deep understory’ that persists beneath North American mountaineering.”

Katie Ives, author of Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams

“In elegant prose, Robinson and Slemon foreground erased histories, showing how Canadian mountaineering achievement was enabled by unacknowledged labour and ways of knowing. A fascinating account of how human projection shaped one of the world’s most distinctive mountain ranges, this is essential reading for mountaineers, geographers, historians, poets – indeed, anyone who has ever admired the Rocky Mountains.”

Helen Mort, author of A Line Above the Sky: On Mountains and Motherhood

“The history of mountaineering in the Canadian Rockies has largely been seen and written through a colonial lens, passing over the contributions of Indigenous people, labourers, and women. Behind the Ranges is a fascinating, important, and welcome reframing of this story.”

Carine Salvy, executive director, The Alpine Club of Canada