Losing Jasper

For 25 years, summer for my family meant Jasper. It’s been almost 20 years since we last left it, in a scorching heat wave, but memories came pouring back as wildfires approached the town and then apparently destroyed it this week.

Most of the memories, of course, were of the park, not the town: picking wild strawberries with our little daughters at Tekarra Lodge; nearly colliding with a bison on the Celestine Lake Road; my wife shooing a black bear away from a picnic table; doing a “Seton walk” near the Palisades Centre, which meant standing motionless by a rock until the local ground squirrels decided I was harmless and climbed up on the rock to check me out. Local friends took us kayaking on Jasper lakes, and we paddled the Athabasca River in a voyageur-sized canoe.

Losing Jasper is a very personal loss for everyone who’s lived or visited there — especially the happy few who got out of their cars and actually ventured more than 100 metres from the road.

But all Canadians will feel its loss economically and politically.

According to the Jasper National Park annual report for 2023, the park saw an all-time high of 2.48 million visitors. The park’s operating budget was $25.5 million, derived mostly from entry fees, camping fees and land rents. It was supplemented by $46.4 million for special projects including wildfire management and reforestation.

It’s hard to find how much visitors spend while in the park, but it’s likely in the hundreds of millions. Tourism Jasper estimated in 2023 that a two-week power outage due to the Chetamon wildfire had cost over $10 million in visitor spending the previous summer.

The scale of what’s been lost

The losses this summer will of course be far greater, and will last for months, if not years, as the town rebuilds.

Jasper townsite is also a truck and train transport nexus. Canadian National runs freight trains from Prince Rupert, B.C., through Jasper to the Prairies and eastern Canada. An estimated 1.7 million vehicles drive through the park each year, with disastrous effects on wildlife. (I well recall driving west towards Jasper and seeing a huge grizzly running along the edge of Highway 16, looking for a gap in the traffic.)

Given the scale of destruction, the rail lines and Highway 16 will see sharply reduced traffic, with freight being diverted to the Trans-Canada Highway and other rail lines. Shipments will be delayed or simply cancelled, increasing costs for shippers and consumers alike.

The TMX pipeline has run through Jasper since it began operations in 1953, and it’s now been twinned to increase delivery of crude oil and bitumen to Burrard Inlet. On Wednesday, TMX issued a news release saying, in part:

“We continue to work with the Town of Jasper and Jasper National Park to safely monitor the pipeline, at this time there is no indication of damage to our infrastructure, and the pipelines continue to operate safely.

“To ensure we are supporting local emergency services, we are using our own firefighting equipment that was placed in Jasper and bringing in water to supply our equipment and continue to deploy our sprinkler system to protect our facilities.” If TMX fails, the consequences could be very long-lasting — and very unpleasant for the Alberta oilpatch and for the federal and provincial government supporting TMX.

Plenty of blame to go around

Even without TMX, the destruction in Jasper will be politically bitter. No one misses the irony that the scale of this fire is due to the oil and gas emissions that we assiduously promote. We can expect energetic quarrels over who cut budgets for firefighting and prevention, and by how much.

And we can also expect careful avoidance of the reason for the scale of modern wildfires: the continuing increase in burning fossil fuels and pumping ever more CO2 into the atmosphere. Instead of confronting the climate issue, politicians will comfort themselves with Canadians’ ability to evacuate en masse from Jasper without casualties, as in Fort McMurray.

A Jasper resident once told me that the region’s forests were destroyed by wildfires in the 1890s; the eternal-looking forests that now mantle its mountains are only about a century old. Ordinarily, we might expect another century of gradual restoration of those forests, but not in a time of global heating. As glaciers melt and rivers dwindle, Jasper will more likely turn into semi-arid scrubland, perhaps with pockets of “old growth” that have escaped fires and beetle infestations. The consequences for wildlife will be catastrophic, making current road-kill levels look insignificant.

Perhaps, just perhaps, Jasper will be the disaster that forces us to real behavioural change on climate. But if it does not, we can hope that the next disaster will be the clincher.

And there will assuredly be next disasters for the rest of our lives.