Pilgrimage honours Rockies trailblazer
Step by step, Marisa Grassi experiences a piece of her family’s history.
On a rainy Sunday morning in July, she and a delegation from the village of Falmenta, Italy, ride a bus to the coveted Lake O’Hara, put on their rain gear and make their way to Lake Oesa. They start along the Lake O’Hara shoreline trail then hike up a series of switchbacks.
“Grassi Ridge,” said Grassi, stopping and pointing to a locally named ridge between Yukness and Wiwaxy peaks in Yoho National Park.
The delegation, joined by a diverse group of locals that includes Canmore town councillors and museum board members, takes a few photographs before continuing through a scree slope and a small forest.
They then climb up a steep, rocky outcrop on a set of stone steps — a rock stairway built by Grassi’s great uncle, Lawrence Grassi — and arrive at their next stop: A bronze plaque honouring his trail-blazing work.
They continue on the wellconstructed trail he built to the turquoise-coloured Lake Oesa.
The pilgrimage to the lake was part of the local launch of his official biography, Lawrence Gras- si: From Piedmont to the Rocky Mountains, by York University professors Elio Costa and Gabriele Scardellato.
It also included a special celebration during the annual Miners’ Day festivities and a visit to Grassi’s former home in Canmore, where the house itself has been replaced but the backyard has remnants of one of his rock stairways.
Back on the Lake Oesa trail, one of Grassi’s best known, the Italian delegation stops and sings a song in tribute to Grassi at the bronze plaque on the way back down before they head off to a garden party in Field, B.C.
“I am very moved by everything I’ve experienced,” Marisa Grassi said in Italian, through a translator, at the party. “It feels like a dream.
“I had no idea that he had this kind of place in history.”
Her great uncle’s place in the history of the Canadian Rockies started in 1912 when he — then Andrea Lorenzo Grassi — moved to Ontario from the village of Falmenta in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy.
Four years later, he ended up in Canmore where he worked as a coal miner.
Grassi became known as a guide, mountain climber and builder of hiking trails such as Grassi Lakes in Canmore and Lake Oesa in Yoho National Park, where he worked as an assistant warden in the 1950s after retiring from the mines.
He died in Canmore in 1980, leaving behind trails, lakes and mountains bearing his name.
Grassi’s legacies, according to the authors of his biography, are the trails he built throughout the Rockies.
“The one that we’ve just been on, Lake Oesa, which is phenomenal,” said Scardellato, who teaches Italian studies. “He not only hiked up that high and then built these things — and not just that one, but most of the trails in the Lake O’Hara basin received his touch.
“He modified and altered and made better a lot of those trails.”
Costa, a language professor, added that Grassi’s legacy is even greater in Canmore.
“He represents the spirit of a community because he gave himself to the community,” he said, pointing to the well-used trail he built to Grassi Lakes as an example. “Canmore still breathes the spirit of Grassi in many ways.
“He represents the coal-mining past and he represents this community spirit.”