Colette Kaufmann was inside her store, Rocky Bear Gifts & More, knitting a blanket on a cold winter afternoon. Through the window behind her, the Rocky Mountains were dusted with snow and smudged with tendrils of black, slivers of the 32,000 hectares that burned around and through Jasper National Park and the town of Jasper, Alta., last July.
“I don’t think I can handle talking about it today, hon,” Ms. Kaufmann said. “But just look up. The mountains will always be here.”
On the stereo, Neil Young crooned like he was joining the conversation. “I was lying in a burned-out basement with the full moon in my eyes,” he sang. Ms. Kaufmann hummed and harmonized. Her partner, Karl Peetoom, arrived and joined her, whistling.
It will be the 12th blanket Ms. Kaufmann has made for people who lost their homes in the fire. Arguably she could use one, too, since she and Mr. Peetoom escaped with little more than the clothes on their backs, losing their house and a lifetime of treasures and cozy blankets.
And even though there are upsides – their business survived, and Mr. Peetoom sometimes feels lighter and freer without all that stuff – there is still plenty to mourn. That’s where the blankets help.
“I’m healing just making them,” Ms. Kaufmann said. “I get more out of it than the people I give them to, probably.”
Ms. Kaufmann and Mr. Peetoom had been watching the mountains evolving out their store window for decades. They had seen the ravages of the pine beetle, the years of drought. And they, like most other people who pay attention to such things, knew what would come next.
“The next part of the equation is fire,” Ms. Kaufmann said. “It’s bad, but it’s part of life.”
Fire is part of life, especially now, especially in Jasper, though increasingly everywhere else, too.
For 100 years, the approach in Jasper National Park had been to fight it, to put the fires out, to ignore what the Indigenous peoples in those lands always knew: The cycles of nature need to run through.
Down the street, at the Lostlands Café, Kim Stark was on hold with her bank. The branch in town had been destroyed, and the new location was still getting up and running. Ms. Stark’s replacement credit card had gotten lost in the mail, and since the transit number for the branch no longer existed, well, it was a whole thing. Just one example of how everything is connected or, in a town pulling itself together after a disaster, disconnected.
“Even for a positive person, it just seems one step forward and, like, three back,” she said. Hold music droned from her phone. “It’s whatever. It’s fine.”
The café is one of four businesses Ms. Stark owns in Jasper. A self-described single parent by choice with three daughters under 5, she lost her house in the fire, and currently has only one business up and running while she navigates insurance and banks and the multitude of other unexpected challenges that have arisen in the weeks and months since the blaze.
As a volunteer firefighter, Ms. Stark was one of the last locals left in town as the fire roared into Jasper on the evening of July 24. About 25,000 people had evacuated by then, and Ms. Stark was one of the few who felt the heat of the fire up close, one of the first to face the reality of what they were all about to lose.
The months since hadn’t been easy, but as she looked across the street at the frozen mountains, she found it all interesting, beautiful. She’d been staring at those same mountains for 33 years, and now her eyes traced new bumps and rolls, features that had, for so long, been hidden under a canopy of trees.
“Fire is not good or bad. Fire just is. It’s part of the landscape,” she said. “As my daughter said, ‘It was naughty because it ate our house.’ But in the landscape, it’s not naughty. It’s what fire does.” Some trees have cones that need fire to release their seeds, she noted. “So it is natural. But it’s just because it burned down my house that I don’t like it.”
Volunteer firefighter Kim Stark lost her home in Jasper, and three of the four businesses she owns are still closed because of the fire. Still, she says she appreciates what the fire has revealed.
It always seemed like a fire from the west would get them. That dense blanket of mature trees lining a narrow valley, an uninterrupted corridor of forest where the wind rushes right into Jasper. But it was a fire from the south that came barrelling in new and urgent on the evening of July 22, hotter and faster than anyone anticipated.
Landon Shepherd, a fire and vegetation specialist for Parks Canada who would become incident commander of what is now known as the Jasper Fire Complex, was heading into Lake Edith for a swim when he first heard sirens.
It had been a busy fire season. Fires had been burning around Jasper all month, scary but under control – nothing the wildfire crews couldn’t get on top of. But now, a series of lightning strikes were rapidly igniting new blazes. Mr. Shepherd texted a colleague to see whether he should come in. He got one word back. “Yes.”
Things worsened even as he drove to the Parks Canada operations compound. The fire to the north of town was encroaching on the highway, and there were new fires in the south. As crews scrambled to get campgrounds and work sites evacuated and see whether any air tankers were available, Mr. Shepherd sprinted out to a helicopter to get eyes on what was coming. From the air, he could see how big the fires to the south were, and how fast the winds were pushing them.
The area around Jasper was filled with tourists and visitors, the town’s population swollen from 5,000 to 25,000 as it does in the summer months. Mr. Shepherd had been working with wildfire for more than three decades. He knew how difficult it would be to evacuate all the people at the campsites and trails and beaches, all those families scattered around and enjoying themselves, not knowing what was coming.
“Seeing the fire I was flying towards, I thought, ‘This is going to be my first multicasualty event for a fire. We’re not going to get families out of the campground in time,’ ” he said. “I thought we were going to lose people that night, and we didn’t. Actually, it helped me for the rest of my time on this fire, because I went through the worst in my mind.”
Landon Shepherd stands at the base of Mount Edith Cavell, surveying the new landscape after what he calls a 'firestorm-type event.'
There had been tornado warnings in the region, and the fire that roared toward Jasper created winds so powerful it ripped healthy trees right out of the ground. Mr. Shepherd later counted 270 rings on one, a tree that had lived through other fires and blowdown winds and mountain weather, but nothing like the forces that were unleashed that summer. This was something that doesn’t really have a name, but that Mr. Shepherd refers to as a “firestorm-type event.”
In those conditions, a 3,200-kilogram metal construction container was picked up and tossed into the Athabasca River. A bear-proof garbage bin was ripped right out of a concrete slab and sent flying into the trees. Massive chunks of burning debris swirled high in the air like sparks from a campfire.
Although the airflow within the fire hasn’t officially been classified as a tornado, Mr. Shepherd said a research team is investigating rotational air movement in the pattern of the fallen, burned trees.
That ferocious blaze tore through the forest to the east, gathering energy as it headed toward Jasper Park Lodge. To the west, it raged up Whistler Mountain before collapsing into itself, sending embers raining down from the sky into Jasper, where the 32 members of the Jasper Fire Brigade, along with other firefighters from communities nearby, were desperately trying to save the town.
On one side of the valley, flames licked 30 metres above the forest canopy. On the other, Mr. Shepherd recalls, was “something so angry, just this swirling mass of dark smoke with glows of red inside it,” a “dark red, sort of Hollywood apocalyptic kind of scene.”
Six months later, Mr. Shepherd stood atop a pile of concrete construction slabs, surveying that same land at the base of Mount Edith Cavell. It was a grand mountain vista, as awe-inspiring as it had ever been, though in a different way. Now, broad swaths of blackened tree trunks dashed the landscape, like burned pick-up sticks tossed to the ground.
Mr. Shepherd sometimes brings members of the fire brigade to that spot, to show them evidence of the wild fury that ripped toward them and assure them “this wasn’t a fair fight.” He knows it would have been far more likely, given what they faced, that the whole town would be lost.
“It’s outstanding that didn’t happen,” he said.
Mr. Shepherd says he’s incredibly proud of the work that was done in and around Jasper, but when he begins to speak of the success he always comes back to the death of Morgan Kitchen, a 24-year-old firefighter who was killed by a falling tree on Aug. 3.
“There were so many challenges with the fire. The highway and railway and a community and pipelines, and people’s connection to the place … having that as a backdrop was a lot,” Mr. Shepherd said. “Given what was happening, I felt like we were doing such an amazing job, and Morgan’s death – it’s not that it takes that away, or changes my mind about that – but suddenly I didn’t feel like I could celebrate it anymore. And I still don’t. It doesn’t feel worth it.”
Despite the early reports – when images of the historic St. Mary & St. George Anglican Church and the Petro-Canada station burning made it seem as if the entire town was lost – most of Jasper still stands, at least for tourists. A visitor who trains their eyes only on the commercial streets may not even notice there’s been a fire in town. Stores and restaurants and hotels are open, waiting for tourists that are trickling back too slowly, perhaps thinking, wrongly, that it is too soon, that their presence would be unwelcome, or that there is nothing left at all.
In reality, it was mostly homes that burned – more than 350 structures in all, about one-third of the buildings in Jasper.
Security fences now surround the remains of those houses, ashy pits dotted with rusted benches and barbecues, front steps that go nowhere, white picket fences framing holes in the ground. The devastation itself is a record of the way the fire roared and raced, where it jumped and ravaged, licked, spared, destroyed.
When Girlie and Syd Tan's house burned, they had no tenant insurance to start over again. Now, they rent another house down the street, the only house on the block still standing.
Girlie Tan and her 18-year-old son, Syd, live on Patricia Street, in the one house still standing on an entire block of burned wreckage. They rent the house, which the fire miraculously did not touch. It stands six doors down from their former home, which burned to the ground.
“It’s hard,” said Ms. Tan, who came to Canada from the Philippines in 2020. “You have to go day by day to let go. And yeah, I’m thinking, just appreciating what we have.”
They don’t have much. Her previous landlord wrongly told her she didn’t need her own insurance because he had the home covered, so she’d cancelled her policy. She and her son lost everything. The Mount Robson Inn, where she worked, also burned down, leaving her out of work. Unable to find a full-time job since, mother and son have been surviving with assistance from the Red Cross, friends and people in the Filipino community.
Ms. Tan keeps the windows of the home closed and covered so she doesn’t have to look outside at everything that burned. It hurts too much to think about it.
Sometimes when she walks by, she stops and looks at the wreckage that was their home. There’s a red mug in the rubble she thinks was hers, but she can’t go in to get it.
Many people have left Jasper since the fires, and Ms. Tan worries she and Syd may have to go as well. They only have their current place for six months, until April, and she doesn’t know where they’ll live after that. People she knows have invited them back to Saskatchewan, but they don’t want to leave.
“Jasper is home,” she said. “Our heart is still in Jasper.”
