Jasper Wildfire 2024: What Happened in Jasper

Madelin Houck
Aug 29, 2024
7 min read

My first tourism job was in Jasper, at the scenic Maligne Lake. In my first week on the job, we were advised to have a go bag ready in case we got evacuated. Maligne Lake had been evacuated before, when a fire ravaged the north bank of Madicine lake, successfully cutting off road access. Some of the more senior staff still had memories, but that didn’t dissuade me from dismissing the advice as a little paranoid. Looking back, that was remarkably naive.

Town of Jasper Alberta 1910, Jasper National Park History — Jasper, Alberta circa 1910, 3 years after the area was designated a forest reserve. (From the Jasper Museum Collection)

Jasper National Park has been a giant tinder shed for years, and we all knew it. Look out across the mountains on a sunny august day and you can taste the dryness in the air, see the dead forests that the mountain pine beetle had left in its wake, and often even taste smoke in the air from fires further afield. In the summer of 2022, the year after I first set foot on the shores of Maligne Lake, a large wildfire tore through the Athabasca River Valley along Snaring Road to the east of the townsite. The CBC r eported that while the fire didn’t threaten the townsite, it did cut off power for several and burned 6000 hectares of forest. The same article also notes that before the park was protected in 1907, the forest burned often, every 40 to 60 years!

The municipality of Jasper was prepared. In a plan begun in 2003, late fall and early spring marked the beginning of the prescribed burning season. I recall most of these fires burning to the north and east of the town, forests were thinned and a firebreak was in the works. Overall 1000 hectares of forest had been removed. Parks Canada’s stated mission was to reintroduce fire to the natural landscape and to restore a landscape that made it harder for large wildfires to occur. Those fires that did occur would be easier to control. The municipality is a fire smart community. There are a lot of places in Western Canada that can’t say the same.

The Situation

Jasper also had a lot of factors working against her. Sitting at the confluence of three valleys, the townsite is located along natural migration paths for wildfires. These valleys also channel winds which anyone in the park during a winter storm can attest to. There was also the mountain pine beetle scourge that had left Jasper’s forest red with dead trees. While still standing, all these trees are really doing is drying out until they either fall and decompose, or burn. The problem was particularly visible from the town itself, and unsurprisingly was concentrated south of the town where the larger of the two fires currently raging in the park sparked.

The mountains in Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada — Rishav Banerji, “The Mountains” taken Jasper Alberta, 2018

But it’s not just natural risk that drove the conditions in the park just before ignition. Historically our forest management practices created an environment ripe for big fires. A focus on extinguishing little fires has changed the landscape. Areas that would have been sparsely populated by trees and dominated by grasslands had become thick forests full of tinder where bigger fires could grow.

Three years after Jasper became a national forest reserve (1907), the government expelled the multitude of indigenous groups who called Jasper home. These groups included the Anishinaabe, Aseniwuche, Winewak, Dene-zaa, Nêhiyawak, Secwépemc, and the Stoney Nakota and a small population of Métis. Besides the obvious moral concerns of such an action, these indigenous groups were experienced managers of the forest and had been practicing small burns for centuries, a fact which both Parks Canada as well as several other forestry management authorities officially acknowledge on their official websites.

Finally, climate change has brought a wave of hot and dry weather. Increasing droughts and heat domes not only create paper-dry forests but they generate the thunderstorms that lead to ignition.

Overall, due to poor forest management in the last century Jasper and the surrounding valley have changed a lot, The valleys became blanketed first in a living forest and then a pine beetle graveyard and the quality of the trees as well as the biodiversity of more fire resistant species have suffered.

Environmental Impact of the Jasper Wildfire

The land itself has been majorly impacted. Trees in the path of the mammoth fire burned, undergrowth is gone, and wildlife has been displaced. Despite all this, the Jasper wildfire doesn’t constitute an ecological disaster but rather a natural evolution of the ecosystem, one we’ve been suppressing through fire-fighting for the last century. Jen Beverly, associate professor with the University of Alberta’s department of renewable resources, stressed this viewpoint to CTV. “This is not a catastrophe from an ecological perspective.” Was her professional assessment of the momentous change in the valley’s forests.

Wildfire and smoke like the ones that have ravaged Jasper National Park in recent years — Photo by Malachi Brooks of the Calwood Fire in Boulder, Colorado.

Anyone who has lived in regions where wildfires are common can vouch for this. Personally, I picture the July fields of fireweed in the Medicine Lake burnscar, which turns the hills pink for a few weeks each year. More open landscape allow foliage to take over, while new trees take their time recreating the canopy. Among these plants are edible species which foster the park’s populations of moose, elk, deer, and bears. These spaces also make excellent hunting grounds for wolves and raptors. When trees do recover, it’s the aspens and birches that are the first to rear their heads, creating some desperately needed biodiversity in a forest that has been dominated by the hardy lodgepole pine.

All this to say, don’t worry about the animals and the forests around the park, they will be fine. Instead, save your concern for the people and the locals that work so hard every year to welcome tourists and travelers to the park. They need your concern a lot more than the land.

What Lessons Can We Learn from Jasper?

So what can we learn about fighting and preventing fires after the Jasper wildfire? Well, first of all, even in communities that are relatively well prepared, we are a solid century behind when it comes to large fire-prevention work. West Kelowna Fire Chief Jason Brolund addressed the UN last year after the disastrous West Kelowna Fire in 2023. He described the increasing scale of the fires he was seeing in BC and called for more funds to be allocated to fire prevention over fire fighting.

Controlled burns like the ones that take place in Jasper National Park every year. — Controlled burning in Sequoia National Park. Photo taken by James Fitzgerald, 2019.

Experts cite climate change as one of the driving forces that have spurred this recent wave of abnormally flammable summers, and they’re right of course. They’re calling for more aggressive action to fight climate change and warning that there will be more destruction ahead if nothing is done. When I look at the last few years in BC, from fires to floods, I can’t help but agree.

Yet even the most aggressive action on climate change will not stop another Jasper from happening next year. We need funding, and lots of it, so that communities can take greater and more expansive action to prevent fires from reaching their towns and homes. Last summer the city of Yellowknife hastily built massive fire breaks around their city as 20,000 residents fled their homes. These firebreaks were dotted with hoses and sprinklers and set up by local contractors under a state of emergency. This year, the city of Whitehorse took more proactive measures, building the country’s first permanent firebreak out of trees. They removed more flammable species of trees and replaced them with fire-retardant species like aspen. The CBC described the approach as “an ambitious design incorporat[ing] contemporary wildfire research as well as Indigenous traditional knowledge.” The project has a budget of $1.85 million, funding provided by the Yukon government and the Government of Canada and plans to clear 365 hectares while planting nearly half a million trees. Innovative and preventative solutions like these are untested but hopeful innovations for the future.

Meanwhile, prescribed and cultural burns have continued picking up steam in Western Canada. It offers a useful tool for areas ravaged by mountain pine beetle and places where there is a lot of dry timber close to towns. Prescribed burns reduce the natural risk factors in a landscape and represents an indigenous stewardship practice that has been proven over centuries and that the land has clearly suffered without. Executing prescribed burning offers the opportunity to work with and learn from the traditional understandings of the people who have lived on this land since time immemorial. Governments ought to increase funding to this kind of project and municipalities ought to take on such projects as matters of community safety.

Logging can also be an effective tool for managing wildfires. There are times that prescribed burns are just not possible, and in scenarios where entire sections of forest have been decimated by parasites, diseases, or other mass-death events the fuel that remains may need to be removed. The massive patches of pine-beatle affected trees in Jasper helped fuel the firestorm that took the western half of the town. These timber-patches to the south had been apparent for years and yet nothing was done. Parks Canada walks a fine line between conservation and safety but could the fire have been better controlled if some of that fuel was removed? Could Parks Canada have employed fuel management solutions that avoided removing the dead trees but helped prevent the crown fires that created the wall of flames that hit Jasper?

Finally, municipalities in remote and fire-prone areas should look to Jasper’s lead when it comes to emergency preparedness. On the night of July 22nd, 2024, after under an hour of evacuation alert, 10,000 residents and 15,000 tourists safely evacuated the town. For most of the evacuation, only the yellowhead highway going to BC remained, along which the nearest town is Valemont, nearly 100km away. I recently met a couple who had been traveling through Jasper and had been evacuated themselves. They described the evacuation as a relatively calm affair and were impressed by their fellow evacuees. Even with the slow pace of traffic, they noted, no one chose to drive in the oncoming traffic lane. Jasper had an evacuation plan in place, and even with limited routes, everyone got out safely.

Municipalities must have plans in place as well as a robust communication strategy so that residents know the plan before a threat emerges and a way to get word out while a disaster is taking place. Jasper was prepared, is your town?

The residents of Jasper are a dynamic and strong people. I want to invite any readers who are from Jasper or other areas that have recently been evacuated to comment below what you wish others knew about fire prevention or the wildfire threat.

Disrespectful conduct will be moderated.

Sources

1 Comment

madiehouck

Aug 29, 2024

My heart is with the residents of Jasper and everyone else who lost their home this summer to wildfires. I also want to take a moment to acknowledge those still evacuated to their home and wish them the best. We need to implement more protective measures so our communities and businesses don’t burn and at the end of the day, everyone can go home to find their house still standing.