A. L. (Peter) Withers was a national park warden in Jasper from 1920. He owned one of the two pairs of skis in town, and during the winter of 1921 he used his skis to make his winter patrols [1]. Withers appears in a 1921 photo of a Jasper hockey game [2].

In 1924 he accompanied Allen Carpé [1894–1932] and Rollin Thomas Chamberlin [1881–1948] in climbs in the Cariboo Mountains, including first ascents of Mount Titan (now Mount Sir Wilfrid Laurier), Mount Challenger (now Mount Stanley Baldwin) and Mount Albreda [3, 4].

In 1930 Withers was one of a group of five Jasper men who skied to Banff, leaving Jasper on 14 January 1930 and following what is now the Icefields Parkway. Joe Weiss, Vern and Doug Jeffery, and Frank Burstrom were his partners. During the previous summer they had travelled by horse to several cabins in Jasper and Banff and stored bags of food for the trip. Near Saskatchewan River Crossing they were met by two Banff wardens who had snowshoed out to look for them. The trip was a bit easier after that as they had broken trails to get them to Bow Lake and then to Lake Louise and Banff. They arrived just in time for the Banff winter carnival on 4 February [5].

In March of 1930, Withers assisted in packing the party of Russell Hoadley Bennett [1896–1981] of Minneapolis, Clifford White [1902–1964] of Banff, and Joe Weiss of Jasper on their “attack on Snow Dome,” which failed “because of faulty planning conjoined with protracted bad weather” [6].