07/15/2026
Castle Mountain is a picturesque spectacle: imposing, sometimes golden, and undeniably regal along the north side of the Trans-Canada Highway between Banff and Lake Louise.
Unbeknownst to most travellers below, a little mountain hut sits about halfway up the south face, on a wide ledge between the lower and upper cliffs.
You have to relinquish the mountain’s iconic profile to pinpoint the exact location, but there’s been a hut up there — in one form or another — for nearly six decades, providing temporary shelter to members of the climbing community.
In 2024, the original Castle Mountain Hut was decommissioned by the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC). Their Capital Project Manager, Tom Fransham, remembers the day the old hut was taken apart on-site and sectioned out by helicopter.
He had left the site early and was in the staging area in a parking lot below, where he was helping transfer huge chunks of the dismantled hut’s walls from the chopper’s cargo netting to a trailer.
“As we shifted this one segment, a piece of paper fell out. I picked it up and read it,” says Fransham. It was a handwritten note signed by 15 carpenter apprentice students and their instructor, part of the Construction class who built the hut at SAIT during the 1963/64 academic year.
“This note was from the year before I was born,” says Fransham. “I was super thankful for the team who had thought to leave this piece of history and that, somehow, it hadn’t blown away during the helicopter ride down the mountain.”
It’s funny how things can work out. And how the very end of a thing can take us all the way back to its beginning.
“It’s a bit of a time capsule to recognize the people involved, isn’t it,” said Fransham.
“These days, the trades I work with as Project Manager are finishing buildings on a daily basis, so it’s no longer standard practise to leave this kind of thing behind. But it definitely makes sense for unique construction projects in unusual places.
“I’m kind of kicking myself for not having thought of that for the new construction [Castle Mountain (Currie) Cabin].”
The SAIT connection.
Back in 1956, Dick Lofthouse (1932 – 2016) arrived at SAIT to teach Chemistry, a position he held for the next 30 years.
As an avid mountain climber, a skilled mountain rescue leader, a founding member of the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides and an active member of the Calgary Mountain Club (CMC), he realized in the early 1960s that the Club’s plan to build a shelter was a potential project for students in the Architectural Technology and Construction Technology programs.
The resulting structure, while sturdy, was a simple design created by students with direction from the Club. Plans for building one prefabricated hut morphed into building two huts, ensuring ample student work throughout the Winter term.
One hut was installed above Moraine Lake and, when the Club secured a location on Castle Mountain for the second hut three years later, Dick Lofthouse was there to help with the installation.
His son Ian Lofthouse (Computer Technology ’85), an outdoor enthusiast himself, remembers his dad’s description of the experience.
“The hut was about half the size of an ATCO trailer. That’s an easy thing to throw on a flat-deck truck, but not so easy to fly up a mountainside, while it’s hanging from a helicopter, in the wind.
“They had to knock it right down to the panels to transport it, which was no easy task,” Ian says. The construction class had built this hut to last. “These things had been glued and screwed.”
The challenge of dismantling a hut that was never meant to come apart was made worse by the fact that Dick’s CMC crew did not have the proper tools. “Dad’s team had hammers and that’s all. They had to take this thing apart forcefully, ripping out screws and the like.”
Putting the hut back together on the mountainside would prove no less violent. A screwdriver or two would have been most helpful, but they had none.
“They basically had to knock out screws with their piton hammers and then bash them back into the wood like nails.”
Not ideal.
“My understanding is the hut was a bit leaky for the first little while until the Club managed to get a crew up there to properly screw it together and do some waterproofing,” says Ian.
But despite this difficult beginning, the delicate sheet of signatures stayed safe, hidden in the insulation where the students had stashed it. And although it may have acquired some battle scars, this original Castle Mountain Hut went on to provide shelter to climbers for 57 years.
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📷: Tom Fransham and Peter Hoang via The Alpine Club of Canada
