Requiem for Jasper, Alberta, Canada the town may be gone by morning
Jasper is evacuated, firefighters are working through the night
*Note: As of 11:04 AM, it appears that Jasper is apparently completely burnt to the ground.
It is a sad day for Jasper, Alberta, Canada, a stunning location and a beautiful little town.
I have been through Jasper in both the summer and winter. The national park and the city are outstanding. Jasper sits just 50 kilometres or so before the Alberta Rocky Mountains give way to the foothills. The town is the first or last stop depending on whether you are heading into British Columbia (BC) or from BC into Alberta. You must pass through Jasper or Banff, which resides 260 kilometres to the south.
A herd of elk are at home in the middle of town and congregate near the train tracks on a grassy boulevard. Tourists passing through love Jasper’s quaintness.
My few experiences with Jasper
My first trip through Jasper was at age eight in 1974 when our family took a Greyhound bus to visit family in Entwistle, Alberta (AB), 270 kilometres east. Entwistle is located 90 kilometres west of Edmonton. You can get there by driving on Highway 16 or the Yellowhead Highway as it is also known. The highway runs west to east right across the province. Between Jasper and Edmonton, you pass through towns like Hinton, Edson, Evansburg, Entwistle, Niton Junction, Nojack, and Wildwood. You pass by Wabamun Lake and now Stony Plain and Spruce Grove are getting devoured by Edmonton, the capital city, where big money decisions are made about budgets for line items such as fire prevention.
People are calling out the current conservative government for reducing spending on firefighting because it is apparently “not needed.”
Edson nearly bit it last June as the wildfires crept toward town. A few are burning outside of town right now.
Anyway, I passed through Jasper on several other occasions. At ages 13 and 14, I had the pleasure of skiing for weekends at Marmot Basin with school. After skiing 10 Wednesdays in a row on a manmade hill near Edmonton called Lake Eden, we would have a seasonal grand finale to Jasper — a weekend of quality snow on what to us were very long runs.
Years later, I had very much wanted to do the Jasper to Banff Relay race. The towns are connected by a north-south-running highway of the Bow Valley Parkway and the Icefields Parkway. The trip includes 260 kilometres of everything.
Vistas with stunning mountains, expansive views, of ice-capped peaks and forests of pine. There can be a risk of snow at the top of a pass and heat at the bottom while on the same run. There were 15 stages, meaning you need a few vehicles or a bus for your team. It was a popular race.
Grizzly Bears on the highway were also a risk, as were Big Horn Sheep, Elk, White Tailed Deer and Moose.
The race photos that my running friend Lawrence showed me were beautiful.
One of the last times I went through Jasper and its park was when I took my own family there. We did a big circle drive from Victoria, through Vancouver to Kamloops to Jasper, then Edmonton, and southward through Red Deer, Calgary and east to Drumheller — the badlands where the dinosaur bones are everywhere. Then back westward through Calgary to Banff and Kamloops to Vancouver and Victoria again. It is a 2500-to-3000-kilometre drive and the most beautiful part was the Rockies and heading toward Jasper and through Jasper National Park.
Jasper, Alberta, Canada
The town was established in 1813, as Jasper House. It was first a fur trade outpost of the North West Company and later the Hudson's Bay Company.
Jasper Forest Park was established in 1907. It was renamed Jasper National Park in 1930. By 1931, Jasper was accessible by road from Edmonton on Highway 16.
The park is big at 921.9 square kilometres. It’s beautiful and full of bears and other wildlife.
Fewer than 5000 people live in 1700 homes. They may all be gone by the time you have read this.
Already several buildings have been completely engulfed.
According to one member on X with the handle, “Fort Mac Exclusives,” The Jasper fire is very intense.
“The Jasper fire is so intense that it's creating its own thunderstorm, with lightning detected south of Hinton. Ash is being pushed into the atmosphere, even falling in Calgary!”
Calgary and Jasper are 400 kilometres apart.
There has been $32 billion collected for carbon taxes by the federal government from the people of Canada. That money is not being used for firefighting. Additionally, the government of Alberta has greatly reduced its funding of Wildfire Preparedness Programs.
One firefighter wrote on X, that as of midnight, they expect to lose 70 per cent of Jasper.
The UCP Government have a short memory. It was on May 3, 2016, that a wildfire swept through Fort McMurray, AB and caused the largest evacuation in Alberta’s history, $9.9 billion in damages and razed 2400 homes, leaving 8,800 people homeless.
Now the lack of spending and allocation of carbon tax dollars has come home to roost.
R.I.P Jasper, you were a legendary town in a beautiful area nestled into the Rockies just on the inside edge of Alberta.