Jeromy Farkas's long, strange trek to becoming Calgary mayor
CBC
It might confound some Calgarians that their new mayor likes saying he gained much of his leadership ability from a 24-week solo hike.
To best understand, journey in your mind to the Mather Pass, some 3,680 metres above sea level in California’s Sierra Nevada. On a rock cliff with barely enough room for two people, with three people stranded there.
It’s one of the more gruelling stretches of the Pacific Crest Trail, the Mexico-to-Canada trek he embarked on months after losing the 2021 Calgary mayoral race. Jeromy Farkas was confident he and his newfound hiking friends could shortcut through the pass.
A towering wall of ice and snow lay ahead of them, and they straight-shot toward it — as the morning sun began to turn their path to slush.
After one slip too many, he conceded defeat. “The mountains laugh at my ego and arrogance,” he wrote in an online journal.
Farkas was marooned on a cliff face for about 12 hours, along with Heisenberg and Bookie (they all used trail nicknames — he was Pathfinder, a moniker Farkas has carried with him since). Melting ice for drinking water, watching large rocks and ice chunks fall past their narrow perch, and doing loads of reflection — on his life on the trail and as a sure-headed city politician who’d tasted failure in that arena, too.
“The experience shook me. I still feel the embarrassment and shame for bringing things so close to the literal edge,” he’d write in the Calgary Herald.
“That failure — no, my failure — was the best teacher. I resolved that it would never happen again.”
He’d make it safely through Mather Pass and finish the hike.
Then, last week, he overcame another life-defining failure.
After shedding much of the combative conservative persona he had in four years as a city councillor and then 2021 mayoral candidate, Farkas won the top job on his second pass.
Farkas, 39, did so by carving a narrow electoral path through a canyon of more clearly progressive and conservative rivals. He became the first person to overcome a sitting Calgary mayor since 1980, before Farkas was born.
Now, another towering challenge stretches out before him — leading Calgary, a 1.6-million-person city teeming with pressures in housing, infrastructure and more. He’ll have to navigate through it with a mostly new council.
And success this time, according to past colleagues and new allies alike, will likely depend on Farkas proving he isn’t the guy who failed before.
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