About Rocky Mountain House Mountaineer

Rocky Mountain House Mountaineer

Overview

The Mountaineer is the community weekly newspaper of Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, a town of the upper North Saskatchewan River valley in west-central Alberta, and of the surrounding Clearwater County district. Published locally by The Mountaineer Publishing Co. Ltd. from 4814 – 49 Street in Rocky Mountain House, the paper is the hometown journal of record for a community whose identity is bound up with the fur trade, forestry, agriculture and the eastern slopes of the Canadian Rockies. It remains listed as a member of the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association (AWNA), is represented to advertisers by Ad Canada Media, and continues to serve as one of the newspapers in which Clearwater County advertises its public hearings.

Rocky Mountain House takes its name from the rival Hudson's Bay Company and North West Company fur-trade posts first built at the site in 1799; the explorer David Thompson used the post as a base for his mapping expeditions from 1807. The modern town, at the junction of Highways 11 and 22, is a service centre for Clearwater County and a gateway to the David Thompson Country. The Mountaineer's news territory is that town and county.

History

The Mountaineer's early decades are illuminated by an Alberta History journal profile of Grace Schierholtz, one of the most colourful figures in Alberta weekly journalism. Grace and her husband Bill — an Ontario native who became one of Alberta's leading newspapermen — were the personalities behind the paper in its formative era. Grace Schierholtz became famous across the province for tall tales and folklore stories, but she pointedly did not print her most outlandish inventions in The Mountaineer; those she freelanced to the Calgary Herald and the Edmonton Journal. The Mountaineer itself, the profile records, was "much like papers of the time, with the staples of the weekly paper: comings and goings, town council meetings and results of school exams," and it acted as a cheerleader for the town, campaigning among other causes for a highway west from Nordegg to the Jasper–Banff highway. Grace Schierholtz also wrote on matters of substance: she defended "foreigners" at a time when many viewed them with suspicion, wrote long explanatory articles about the non-treaty Cree and Chippewa people living west of Rocky Mountain House and their resistance to going on reserves, and called for the legalization of sweepstakes. Away from the paper she was a Red Cross volunteer and a leader in the local Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire chapter that helped create the town's first public library.

By the middle of the twentieth century a provincial economic survey of the town recorded The Mountaineer as its weekly newspaper, with a circulation of 510 — small numbers that nonetheless made the paper the community's printed record. The paper's association standing grew with the century: Lawrence Mazza of the Rocky Mountain House Mountaineer received the AWNA's Bill Draayer Award in 1990, the association's recognition of outstanding personal contributions to the progress of the weekly newspaper industry in Alberta.

Programming and Content

The Mountaineer covers the standard brief of a prairie community weekly: town and Clearwater County council business, schools, local business, agriculture and forestry, sports, and the social record of births, celebrations and obituaries, together with classified and display advertising and community announcements. Its community pages have included a "What's Up" announcements section listing club meetings and events, and an annual baby register inviting families to record the year's newborns, with entries drawn for a gift certificate courtesy of the paper. Its pages have also carried the region's distinctive heritage — a 2009 Mountaineer feature on the legend of a buried cannon at the Rocky Mountain House National Historic Site, with photographs by staff photographer Stu Salkeld, was preserved in newspaper databases as an example of the paper's historical storytelling. Like other small weeklies, the paper serves a formal civic function as well: Clearwater County's published procedures state that its public hearings are advertised in the local newspapers, "including the Mountaineer and Western Star," and a county land-use bylaw rewrite in 2023–24 planned its print advertising in the Mountaineer alongside regional titles.

The paper's quality has been recognized nationally. On May 31, 2012, the local Member of Parliament, Blaine Calkins, rose in the House of Commons to praise Rocky Mountain House's "gold medal-winning newspaper, The Mountaineer, which just won first place in the Canadian Community Newspaper Awards as the best all-around small community weekly paper." In November 2015 the Alberta legislature's Hansard recorded Laura Button as the Mountaineer's editor when a constituent delegation was introduced to the assembly.

Audience and Reach

The Mountaineer's market is Rocky Mountain House and Clearwater County. The most detailed measurement of the paper available is dated but instructive: a readership presentation prepared by Ad Canada Media from the ComBase 2008/2009 study recorded a market population of 10,702 and found that 65 per cent of Rocky Mountain House adults read any of the last four issues of The Mountaineer, a net readership of 6,926 adults; 90 per cent of local adults read some community newspaper, and the study found the paper reached three-quarters of the market's women. Those figures, which are the paper's own industry's measurements from that period, underline the depth of penetration a hometown weekly could achieve in a market of this size. More recently, Alberta Blue Cross's newsroom recorded in July 2024 that its National Drowning Prevention Week release was carried as a news story in the Rocky Mountain House Mountaineer's print edition — evidence of the paper's continuing print publication and of its role as a channel through which provincial public-information campaigns reach the community.

Digital Presence

The Mountaineer's long-standing website was rock-e.ca, the address printed in its pages for community announcements and advertising bookings. That domain no longer serves the newspaper: it now returns a domain registrar's placeholder template, and the paper has no functioning news website of its own. The Mountaineer is consequently best understood as a print-centred publication. Regional news about Rocky Mountain House is also published by larger neighbours — the Red Deer Advocate's pages have carried a dedicated Rocky Mountain House section in recent years — but the Mountaineer remains the locally published paper of the town itself, and its association and industry listings, including the AWNA's current member listing and Ad Canada Media's roster of Alberta titles, continue to carry it as an operating weekly.

Ownership and Organisation

The Mountaineer is published by The Mountaineer Publishing Co. Ltd., the locally based company whose imprint has appeared in the paper's pages, with its office at 4814 – 49 Street in Rocky Mountain House and telephone (403) 845-3334. Industry listings have recorded Tuesday as the paper's publication day. Its publishers and editors have been figures within the provincial weekly industry — from Bill and Grace Schierholtz in the paper's early decades, through Bill Draayer Award winner Lawrence Mazza, to editor Laura Button, who held the editor's chair in 2015 — and the paper is a member of the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association, the trade association of Alberta's community newspapers.

Contact and Availability

The Mountaineer is published weekly in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, by The Mountaineer Publishing Co. Ltd., 4814 – 49 Street, Rocky Mountain House, AB T4T 1S8, telephone (403) 845-3334. Copies serve Rocky Mountain House and Clearwater County, and the paper continues to be named by Clearwater County among the local newspapers in which statutory public hearing notices are advertised.