[3][4] In 1890 she married Dr. Charles Schäffer, an amateur botanist, whom she had met the previous year at Glacier House, the Canadian Pacific Railway's hotel in the Selkirk Mountains.

[6] In 1904, Schäffer returned to the Canadian Rockies with her friend Mary "Mollie" Adams[3][7] determined to complete a botanical guide that her husband had started.

As recorded in Mary's book, Old Indian Trails of the Canadian Rockies, a map drawn by Samson Beaver led to the first recorded visit to Jasper's Maligne Lake in 1908, which Mary describes as “an entire string of pearls.” Throughout her travels she continued to take photographs that she would hand-colour upon her return home and use to encourage others to travel in the Canadian Rockies.

Knowing full well that media attention awaited her return to Edmonton, she struggled through an initial false start followed by a loss of the surveying spool overboard.

Dr. Dowling encouraged her to send her measurements and map, complete with the names she had given various features around the lake, to the Geographical Board in Ottawa.

[16] Janice Sanford Beck is the author of “No Ordinary Woman: The Story of Mary Schäffer Warren” (Rocky Mountain Books, 2001).

Her latest works, “Life of the Trail 1” and “Life of the Trail 2”, are collaborations with Emerson Sanford that retrace the footsteps of early travelers (including David Thompson, Sir James Hector, and Mary Schäffer) in and around eastern Banff National Park and northern Yoho National Park.