Fire crews work to put out hot spots in the Maligne Lodge in Jasper, Alta., on Friday July 26, 2024.AMBER BRACKEN/The Canadian Press
The news called it “the monster of Jasper.”
The raging wildfire started when lightning ignited drought-stricken vegetation in and around Jasper, Alta., first beneath a power pole about five kilometres north of the community, then three more times just south of the town. Over the next two days, those fires would merge and grow, while falling embers sparked new ones, perpetually expanding the wildfire’s reach. The wall of flames reached up to 100 metres tall, and some parts of the fire developed into smoke columns, which generated internal winds of more than 180 kilometres an hour.
The Jasper Wildfire Complex, as it became known, would eventually burn more than 33,500 hectares. It took 850 wildland firefighters and thousands of additional personnel until September 7, 2024 – 47 days in all – to get the fire under control. It was a massive, complicated and dangerous undertaking that put Dean MacDonald, program advisor of the national fire management program for Parks Canada, on the scene as one of the incident commanders.
“We had to establish control lines,” he says. “That’s where it’s safe for people to get in. What we’ll often do is create a line further out, [beyond the perimeter of the fire] and we’ll do what’s called back burning. So we’ll burn off between the line and the fire. Because often, embers from the fire spot ahead can create a new perimeter – and it can be kilometers, like in Jasper.”
That’s just one of the things that makes fighting wildfire so difficult, not to mention dangerous, Mr. MacDonald says. They burn differently than the structural fires in urban areas. They’re hotter and drier, and can grow or change direction based on even the slightest shifts in weather. And, climate change is making them worse.
In Canada, which is home to more than a quarter of the world’s boreal forests and is “warming twice as fast as the global average,” per the federal government, wildfires are not only more frequent, they’re also getting bigger and hotter. What’s more, as the national population grows and urban areas continue to expand into wildlands, most wildfires eventually become something different: “wildland-urban interface” fires, which require different firefighting techniques.
All of this comes with a massive cost. According to the Climate Institute of Canada, 2023 was this country’s most destructive fire season ever, “with fires consuming 16.5 million hectares – more than double the previous record and nearly seven times more than the historical average.” The second-worst wildfire season in Canadian history was 2025, with more than 6,000 wildfires burning more than 8.3 million hectares across almost every province and territory. Of course, in addition to the human cost and environmental impacts, there’s also a literal dollars-and-cents cost. Jasper was one of the most expensive fires in Canadian history, with insured damage estimated at $1.23 billion.
But that’s not what Mr. Macdonald is thinking about when he’s coordinating the response to these disasters. In the moment, his priorities are clear.
Incident commander Dean MacDonald, seen at Wood Buffalo National Park in 2015, has spent his career managing complex wildfire responses in some of Canada’s most challenging terrain.Simon Hunt/Parks Canada
“We call it values at risk,” he says. “Human life, right off the bat. [Then] critical infrastructure, meaning that if it goes down, it affects a massive area. If we lose the hospital, the town’s done for three years. If we lose the schools, the town’s done for two years, because no one has a place to put their kids. If we lose the water treatment plant, which took two years to build and how many millions of dollars, then there’s no clean water. Then you get the houses and people’s vehicles and such.”
Human life doesn’t just mean civilians; his strategy has to be safe for firefighters to execute. Helicopters can’t effectively put out a wildfire once it’s grown to a certain size, because by then it’s so hot that the water they drop would just evaporate before it reaches the ground. That means he and his fellow incident commanders determine where his crew must focus to stop the fire from growing based on where resources are needed the most, the qualifications and training of each crew – and whether it’s even safe to send firefighters to those inflection points.
Thankfully, Mr. Macdonald is familiar with Jasper National Park. He spent almost a decade there, first as a fire crew member in the 1990s. Back then, he was working along Jasper’s mountain frontier, where primary access to wildfires was by air. In the spring and summer, he and his team would rappel down from hovering helicopters to suppress fires before they consumed trees, vegetation and wildlife.
“People had never set foot in some of these areas, because you’re in the middle of nowhere,” he says now.
After a handful years as a first responder, he ran fire programs for Parks Canada’s field units, which are the administrative divisions the agency uses to manage the country’s protected areas. From there, he became an incident commander, a strategic role that involves developing the firefighting strategy as well as coordinating all the teams, managing resources and communicating with government officials and media. It’s this role that brought him back to oversee the coordinated response to the Jasper Wildfire Complex in 2024.
After three decades, Mr. MacDonald knows the science of wildfires as well as anyone can. He’s seen huge changes in approach; early on, the focus for fire crews was on suppressing all fires, based on the logic that every single tree and blade of grass has a dollar value. But now, the National Fire Management Program incorporates Indigenous perspectives on land stewardship and there’s a much better understanding of the role fire can play in maintaining a healthy ecosystem, and how the land itself can support firefighting efforts.
“[Now,] we’ll take the fire to natural features of the landscape, as opposed to building a big bulldozer line right across a sensitive habitat,” he says. “We can take the fire to the creek bed or to a road. That’s actually a more natural fire break [and] the fire was actually doing that naturally. It might just burn to that creek, or to that lake. So, let it do that.”
But perhaps his biggest lesson is the importance of people. While he’s thinking about control lines and resource allocation, his focus is also on protecting his team while they’re on the ground and when they’re back home, whether that’s from the long-term physical and mental health impacts of their jobs, or from what he describes as “negativity” from people who don’t understand how crews focus their efforts or why they couldn’t save a home, car or prized possession. He says some firefighters even receive death threats.
“My job as the commander is to shield my staff from everything else,” he says. “I want you to go do your job. What do you need for support? I’m going to shield you from that.”