I took
the long way around.

Crowsnest Pass sits on Treaty 7 Territory. The Blackfoot Confederacy, including the Piikani Nation, along with the Ktunaxa and the Tsuu T’ina, have lived with and moved through these mountains and the plains below them for thousands of years. Any story about running here should start with them.

Long before anyone called it ultrarunning, the buffalo runners were doing the hardest endurance work this land has ever seen. They were young men chosen for stamina and nerve, then methodically trained for years to serve their people. These highly revered warriors would infiltrate the massive herds wearing bison calf hides and moving the way a calf moves, drawing the attention of the matriarchal leaders of the herd and encouraging them to follow. Behind them, buffalo runners disguised as wolves would strategically push and guide the stragglers to keep the herd together. Collaboratively, the team of buffalo runners would continue moving those herds, slowly and without spooking them, across kilometres of open prairie into pre-determined drive lanes marked by hundreds of stone cairns. This work could run for days without any opportunity for a break. When they got it right, a nation ate through the winter. If they got it wrong, their people would go hungry.

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Estipah-skikikini-kots, sits about eighteen kilometres north and west of Fort Macleod, and it is the site where that knowledge is most evident. This site was in use around 5,800 years ago and stayed in use until roughly 1850. The cliff itself is about ten metres at the drop, and the bone bed beneath it runs about twelve metres deep! That is about 5,500 years of buffalo harvesting to keep a nation alive. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1981, and the interpretive centre is there in large part because Joe Crowshoe Senior, Aapohsoy’yiis, a Piikani ceremonial elder, spent years making sure the story would be told and that these spaces could be visited by the public. The site is a testament to the ingenuity, skill, and endurance of the buffalo runners and the people they served.

The story does not end there. Within a single generation the herds were gone, and the nations who had built their whole way of living around them were pushed onto reserves and into poverty and hunger. That grief is still carried, and the people carrying it are my neighbours, friends, and family. Kerry M. Scott’s A Contemporary Winter Count tells that history from the inside, in paintings and words, and the read is worth your time. You will learn that the buffalo runners did not disappear. Their descendants are still here, and they are still running for their people.

In 2024, Elder Morris Little Wolf of the Piikani Nation gifted me a Blackfoot name: Ikkaayayi Sahkómapii, which translates as Swift Runner Boy. I carry that with a great deal of gratitude and care. I am also a supporter of the Buffalo Runners Society.

I run on this land as a guest and I try to act like one. I aim to learn this history because I respect the people who were here long before me, and I want to look after this place the way they looked after it. The legacy is still going. I would like to be a part of the community carrying it forward.

Your capacity to handle hard things is not fixed. It is trainable, and there is real biology behind that: a principle called hormesis, which describes how the body and nervous system rebuild stronger after the right dose of stress.

The Mountain Method builds on the concept of hormesis, shaped by the skills I learned across thousands of kilometres of trail and more than twenty years of work in high consequence environments, and distills it into three pillars you and your team can put to use.

Twenty to sixty minutes, story-driven and free of buzzwords, delivered with the same positive, energetic approach I bring to a 4:00 AM start line.