This year’s Heritage Open House, planned for Saturday (Aug. 10), offers a broad range of activities to help honour and appreciate the history and heritage of Canmore and the Bow Valley.
The Heritage Open House, hosted by the Canmore Museum and Geoscience Centre and the North West Mounted Police barracks, offers activities at both facilities from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Museum representative Rachel Meloche said the NWMP commemorative association will be at the barracks throughout the day, along with the barrack’s head gardener, who will be on hand to talk about future plans for the heritage garden.
The museum is also seeking a name for the cardboard Mountie that stands outside the barracks.
“Our Mountie at the barracks has been standing on the porch since 2004 and we thought it was time he had a name,” Meloche said, adding the public is invited to submit names.
Museum staff will each choose a name from the submissions and those names will be put onto a list. The winning name will be chosen by public vote at the barracks Aug. 3-9 with the winning name released Aug. 10 during the open house.
The person who submitted the winning name will receive a “Mountie prize pack and everlasting glory,” Meloche said.
The museum, meanwhile, will host a coalminers’ café featuring a few of Canmore’s miners sharing their experiences in the mines. National park wardens will also be on hand during the open house to talk about national parks and the history of Parks Canada.
Meloche said the museum also plans to offer mini-historical walking tours of Main Street to explore the significant stops between the museum and the barracks.
New for this year’s open house, and as a way to better understand what Canmore means to residents and visitors, especially post flood, the museum will unveil a new interactive community art project.
“Your Canmore…” A Community Art Mosaic features a six-foot wide Bristol board panel with the Three Sisters separated by a grid of business-card-sized rectangles.
Meloche said blank business cards are available at the museum and everyone is invited to draw a small, colourful scene on one side that describes “Your Canmore” with a sentence on the back that starts with “My Canmore is . . .”
Each card will be attached to the mural until it is full. A list of all the sentences will be compiled and from that, Meloche said, the museum hopes to get a better understanding of what Canmore means to residents.
“The idea behind it is to get the community involved and to talk about Canmore. This is an idea to find out what Canmore really means to people,” she said. “What we’re hoping to do is show what Canmore is to everyone.”
The mural will be on display until August and then it will go into the museum’s collection.
