Former Banff Superintendent's Memoir Earns Recognition at Mountain Book Competition

Kevin Van Tighem started writing his life story for his children. Then he realized the stories he wanted to leave them were connected to a larger one: Alberta's relationship with the land.

The result is Understory: An Ecologist's Memoir of Loss and Hope, published by Rocky Mountain Books in 2025, which draws on his conservation career, including his years as Banff National Park superintendent, to look at how people relate to the places and living things around them.

Bow Valley Insider previously covered Understory in 2025. The memoir has since earned recognition as one of five finalists in the Environmental Literature category at the 2026 Banff Mountain Book Competition, part of the Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival, which wrapped up Nov. 8.

"I was blessed with some of the opportunities that were offered to me and the experiences I got to have," he said. "You know, your life is a series of stories. I've got some good ones, and that was really what I built Understory around."

His earlier books include Heart Waters: Sources of the Bow River and Bears Without Fear, exploring landscapes and wildlife familiar to Bow Valley readers.

Van Tighem, who served as Banff superintendent from 2008 to 2011, said he often wondered why the same conservation problems keep coming back unresolved.

"My act of hope is in writing books and putting them out there and trying to change some of the conversations we have. If those conversations change in a more sustainable direction, then that will create more hope."

For Van Tighem, Banff shows both what conservation can accomplish and where national parks fall short.

His own view of parks shifted over time. As a youth, he associated them with tourists and rules. Later he explored their backcountry, then built a career working in them.

He now believes parks should do more than give visitors experiences to consume. They should help people connect with nature and go home changed by it, he said.

"These should be essentially Canadian temples," he said. "These are places where we go to be enlightened and to find ways to improve ourselves, but they aren't, and they need to be."

Van Tighem sees progress too. Looking back at development pressure in Banff decades ago, he described a park struggling to control growth. He joked that the park bird was the building crane.

He credits Parks Canada's development policies with helping bring that growth under control.

"We found the brake pedal, and to a large degree, we found the steering wheel, and got the park back on track," he said. "If we had stayed on the track we were in the 1970s, this place would be a disaster. It would be Niagara Falls."

He also points to the growing role of Indigenous peoples in park management, and to efforts to rebuild relationships damaged by exclusion. Van Tighem described southern national parks as part of a colonial approach that treated landscapes as though nobody already lived in or belonged to them.

In Understory, Van Tighem recounts helping negotiate a 2010 agreement with the Stoney Nakoda First Nations. Parks Canada's 2012 announcement describes the agreement as a step toward working together on cultural and natural resource management.

Helping rebuild that relationship remains a career highlight. At a 2019 pipeline hearing before the National Energy Board, Elder John Snow recalled the superintendent approaching him in 2008 or 2009 and asking, "What can we do?"

Van Tighem recalls leaving a ceremony marking the agreement aware that his own attachment to Banff differed from the Elders' belonging to it. He knew the park well, but had never experienced exclusion from it.

"I could never really know these mountains in the same way as those Elders did," he writes.

Beyond the progress made in conservation and Indigenous relationships, crowding worries him. He said it undermines the connections parks should offer, particularly in front-country areas and at popular destinations.

"The park is finite, but the demand for park experience is infinite."

But the relationships he writes about in Understory also form away from crowded viewpoints, through familiarity with a place and the living things in it.

Near the end of Understory, Van Tighem writes about an old cottonwood beside the Oldman River his family calls the goose tree, after geese took to nesting there.

He describes the wildlife it sheltered, the tipi rings nearby and his family's repeated walks beneath its branches. His family's story is one of many rooted in that stretch of river.

In the book, he anticipates the river eventually taking it. A flood washed the tree away in spring 2026.

"I built quite a relationship with that tree over the years, which continues even though it's a log jam now."