For instance, it is a big supporter of the annual Banff Mountain Film & Book Festival. Club legacy From its origins in Winnipeg more than a century ago to the current, the Alpine Club of Canada has altered slightly. As the Club's founders expected it, the ACC has played a crucial role in shaping both the Canadian territory and the Canadian identity. As A.O.Wheeler wrote it in 1953, "The Club is a permanency and in its 47 years of existence has done more than any other single institution to open up our mountains and bring revenue to the Parks and to Canada, both as a Club as such and from the explorations of its individual members, Canadian, British and American". Indeed, the Club played a key role in the progression of the Canadian national park system, especially because of its longevity and its strongly rooted values, which enabled its members to always strike a balance between preservation and use. The author, Pearl Ann Reichwein, highlights the same idea, fifty years later: "Since creating its charter almost 90 year ago the ACC maintained extraordinary continuity as witnessed by the Canadian Alpine Journal, published annually. Conceived with a wide-ranging agenda beyond the scope of a simple mountaineering club, the ACC has remained an agile and long-lived national organization". The Canadian Alpine Journal The ACC publishes the annual Canadian Alpine Journal, "the oldest and most respected publication of its kind in the country". The Canadian Alpine Journal was established only a year after the ACC had its first general meeting and has been published over 90 times in the last century. According to the ACC website, the journal provides the reader with "articles and images that reflect the ways that Canadians approach mountain culture, history, sport and science". The Journal was and still is published every year, collecting route descriptions, records of adventures, mountain photography, geographical and natural science observations, poems, songs, cartoons and obituaries remembering Club members. Whilst the Journal is an annual publication, the Club also publishes The Gazette, a newsletter released three times a year, one for the spring, summer and winter season. The year 2006 saw the publication of the Centennial Gazette, a special issue celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of the ACC. In the ceremony's opening speech, Mike Mortimer, the Club president in 2006 declared: "Clearly the Centennial was an opportunity to look towards the future – we