Alpine Club of Canada, 1996, 1st edition. 140 pp, 100+ b/w photos. Used large softcover. Very Good.
Bruno Engler was born in Lugano, Switzerland, on Dec. 4, 1915. After training as a mountain guide and professional photographer. Bruno Engler arrived in Canada in 1939 at the age of 24, where he was naturally drawn to the Canadian Rockies. After working as a ski instructor for Jim Brewster at Sunshine Village, he obtained his first guiding job at Chateau Lake Louise where he worked with the legendary mountaineers, Ernest Feuz and Rudolf Aemmer. In the mid-1940s, Bruno taught survival and mountain warfare for the Canadian army and upon returning to the Rockies to teach skiing, organized the first Veteran’s Ski Race - an annual event over which presided for many years.
In his long career, Bruno worked as a ski instructor and coach, climber, mountain guide, actor, cameraman, photographer, as well as one of the Canadian Rockies' great story-tellers and enduring characters.
In over 35 years of guiding, Bruno climbed with such renowned mountaineers as Frank Smythe (who in 1934 reached 8,600-metres on Mount Everest without oxygen), Tony Cromwell and Georgia Englehard, politicians Pierre Trudeau and Peter Lougheed, and Canada’s Governor-General Roland Michener, whom he accompanied to the summit of Mt. Michener during the preparations for the 1982 Canadian Mount Everest Expedition.
In the mid-1950s, Bruno created Alpine Films, which offered cinematography and location/mountain safety consulting to the film industry. Bruno worked with Disney, Universal Studios, the National Film Board and both Canadian and American television networks. He photographed such Hollywood stars as Jimmy Stewart, Paul Newman, Charles Bronson and Margot Kidder, many of whom remained his friends. And during over 60 years of still photography, Bruno compiled an unprecedented collection of magnificent black and white photographs, which represent a remarkable portrait of a period of intense change in Canada’s National Parks.
In 1996, The Alpine Club of Canada celebrated his extraordinary life by publishing Bruno’s first book, A Mountain Life: The Stories and Photographs of Bruno Engler (Edited by R.W. Sandford). Bruno Engler died in Banff on March 23, 2001.
