In the gymnasium of Jasper Junior/Senior High School last week, near the base of mountains covered with charred trees, the graduating seniors were enjoying a moment they will never forget, and one many worried wasn’t going to be possible.
Nearly one year ago, as wildfires forced the Alberta town to evacuate, the sad thought for many of those in suits and gowns up on the stage – most of whom have known each other their entire lives – was that they would not be able to spend their last year of high school together.
“Last summer, after we’d been evacuated from home, there was a period of time where many of us had to come to face the fact that we may not have a home to come back to,” Oliver Noble, this year’s grad president, said in his speech at the graduation ceremony.
“What makes a moment like this so unique and important is not simply the occasion, but who we managed to spend it with. The fact that all of us as a class still ended up here after having to reconcile with the idea that we might not be able to do so, with this group of people in this place, should put into perspective what it means to be celebrating in the way that we are today.”
Tyler Young-Pearson, a graduating student at Jasper Junior/Senior High School, has lived with the risk and uncertainty of wildfires his whole life. He and his family were forced to evacuate from the Jasper wildfire last year.
“We’ve been surrounded by the risk of a wildfire pretty much our whole lives,” Tyler Young-Pearson, one of the graduating seniors, said of himself and his classmates.
In 2011, a wildfire took out approximately one-third of Slave Lake, a town a little more than a four-hour drive north of Jasper.
The Fort McMurray wildfire, which prompted the largest evacuation in Alberta’s history, destroyed nearly 2,400 homes and buildings in 2016.
Then, more fires, with increasing frequency and close enough to be worrisome: Lytton, B.C., in 2021, West Kelowna in 2023.
Nestled within Jasper National Park, an 11,000-square-kilometre expanse of pristine wilderness in the Rocky Mountains, the town of Jasper is home to just fewer than 5,000 residents. More than two million people visit the park each year to hike and camp, to see wildlife and to marvel at the mountains.
For the tourists who travel there, it is the picture-perfect home of the Canadian wilderness.
For those who live here, it is a place where you keep a bag packed with important documents ready to go at a moment’s notice, because a wildfire is a matter of when, not if.
But nothing could have prepared the graduating seniors for what came to town on the afternoon of July 22, 2024.
That Monday, a fire was reported near the Jasper Transfer Station, north of town. Within less than an hour, three more fires were spotted south of Jasper. Just before 7 p.m., gusting winds up to 30 kilometres an hour merged the three fires in the south and pushed them toward town, with flames 50 metres high.
Inside the Jasper Brewing Company, where 17-year-old Jackson Irwin was busing tables, a nervous energy began spreading amongst the diners.
“People were running outside looking at the wind because it was a massive windstorm,” he said. “There was dust and smoke and ash flying everywhere. It was insane. There were umbrellas flying everywhere.”
Graduating high school senior Jackson Irwin was busing tables at Jasper Brewing Company when he first heard news of the wildfire in July, 2024.
Jackson’s mom, Shelly Irwin, a teacher in town, has known since about 2017 – the year after the Fort McMurray wildfire – to have all her family’s important documents ready to go at a moment’s notice.
“When the ash started falling on us, it was, this is going to happen,” she said.
Tyler Young-Pearson, one of Jackson’s classmates, was at home when his mom called from the restaurant where she was having dinner.
“Tyler, things are bad,” she said. “Go fill up your car with gas.” By then, it was raining ash.
He filled his tank, came home and started packing. “I grabbed my childhood stuffed animal. I grabbed my skis, my golf clubs, some gold cufflinks from my grandfather.”
By then, panic had begun to set in.
“All hell was breaking loose,” Tyler said. Cars were racing up and down the street outside his house, the fire getting bigger and bigger.
High school student Starla Ferland was among the Jasper residents forced to flee the wildfires last July.
Soon enough, though, traffic ground to a halt, with so many cars trying to evacuate.
Tyler looked outside and saw a friend stuck in traffic in his car.
They walked to the friend’s house so that he could pack more things.
The friend poured two shots of Buffalo Trace Kentucky straight bourbon whisky into two plastic cups. By then, Tyler knew he wouldn’t be driving that night – his parents had decided that because his car had fire insurance, they’d leave it behind.
The two friends toasted to their childhood homes, both of which they expected to be swallowed by the fire.
“It was kind of a send-off,” Tyler said. (His friend’s house was destroyed by the fire; Tyler’s survived).
Starla Ferland, another Jasper student, was at home packing keepsakes and photo albums.
“I definitely regret not grabbing more clothes,” she said.
As dispersed as they were that night, every student of Jasper High was connected digitally, sharing messages and images on group chats on their phones.
Emmett Lent was at home with friends from town and pals from Hinton, a community about an hour’s drive northeast of Jasper.
“We’re all hanging out watching TV, and then the texts are rolling in with photos of houses on fire. Everyone was just sitting on their phones waiting for the next update,” he said. “We had group chats that previously had been used for planning get-togethers and parties, but had then been transformed into like, ‘Hey, my dad sent me this photo of this guy’s house on fire.’ “So it’s like, “Oh no, that’s my house and it’s on fire.’”
By 10 p.m. an evacuation order was issued for the entire park, including the town.
Fears of the immediate present soon gave way to worries about the future – specifically, their senior year of high school together in the fall.
“Eventually the gas station blew up. And that’s kind of when we felt like we really wouldn’t be able to go back and have our whole class there,” Oliver Noble said.
That worry would grow and expand over the coming weeks for many students and their parents.
Emmett Lent and Oliver Noble’s families had both evacuated to Hinton. The two have been best friends their entire lives. One day, Oliver told him he had talked to his parents, and mentioned he might be going to Toronto or Calgary to live with extended family and finish high school.
“That was pretty sad, thinking I won’t be able to graduate with my best friend,” Emmett said.
The Jasper wildfire, 32,000 hectares in size, destroyed 358 of the town’s 1,113 structures, most of them homes. The school, along with the hospital and waste water treatment plant, were saved.
Of the 184 students at Jasper Junior/Senior High School, 47 of them lost their homes. That included five of the graduating seniors.
It was the biggest wildfire to hit Jasper in 100 years.
For the kids in town who had been excitedly anticipating their grad year, none of whom had yet turned 18, it was the second “once-in-a-century” catastrophe of their lifetimes so far.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, Jasper, like most everywhere else, obeyed social-distancing rules. That meant that year’s graduating class was not able to celebrate together, with the school instead doing small, individual ceremonies for each student.
Nancy Robbins’s son was one of those seniors. When the fire hit, one of her first thoughts was of her daughter, Daisy McLeod, not being able to enjoy a proper graduation.
“I was like, are you kidding me?” Ms. Robbins said.
Like many small communities, Jasper is a place of long traditions, and high school graduation is no exception.
Amid the chaos and confusion of the wildfire evacuations in 2024, lifelong best friends Emmett Lent and Oliver Noble worried they wouldn't be able to graduate together. A year later, they both received their diplomas at the Jasper Junior/Senior High School graduation ceremony.
Each spring, after a ceremony at the school, students, parents, extended family, teachers and staff head to the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge for dinner and speeches.
“It’s quite a ceremony,” principal Mark Crozier said.
Some of the parents of this year’s seniors celebrated their own grad nights at the lodge.
It has hosted celebrations every year for the past 40, with one exception: the first year of the pandemic.
“It’s one of the more special moments of your life,” Christine Oeggerli, a mother of one of the graduating seniors said of the event at the lodge.
Last year, when the evacuation order was lifted in mid-August and families began returning to town, parents, teachers, administrators, sports team coaches and so many others banded together, determined to give kids a senior year as close to normal as they could manage.
“It was a top priority for us,” said Leslie Currie, assistant principal at Jasper Junior/Senior High School. “The fear of losing the memory markers in the year, those foundational moments – that’s what the kids were afraid of,” she said, adding that everyone was committed to making sure that did not happen.
A message of hope hangs on a temporary fence surrounding an empty lot on Geikie Street in Jasper.
The start of school was delayed by two weeks to deal with smoke damage. But then things were up and running – the ski program for the juniors, finding volunteers for basketball and volleyball and track, getting a yearbook started, organizing school dances.
“We really tried to hold on to those social experiences because we just know how important connection is in their little world,” Ms. Currie said.
Terry Lanigan, who owns a ready-mix concrete company in Jasper, has been coaching the girls’ volleyball team for a decade. He remembered how devastating it was for the seniors on the team who forfeited their season because of the pandemic.
He lost his house in the fire, but when the evacuation order lifted, he got on the phone.
“I got a hold of the parent group and I said, ‘Listen, I’m going to give these kids whatever kind of season we can get,’” he said.
The first tournament of the season was on the first weekend of September. The team’s jerseys were in Mr. Lanigan’s garage when it burned down, so the girls wore T-shirts with their numbers written with tape. (Soon enough, a company in Hinton made new jerseys for the team, the words “Jasper strong” printed on them.)
A mom from the opposing team handed Mr. Lanigan $300 in cash for the girls who had lost homes.
Similar acts of generosity followed as the season progressed.
“The Drayton Valley team had this huge care package for my girls, you know, Amazon gift cards, Tim Hortons cards, Starbucks cards, candy mugs,” Mr. Lanigan said.
The residents of Drayton Valley, south of Jasper, had had to evacuate their homes because of an out-of-control wildfire in 2023.
As important as a normal year was, there could be no such thing.
Early in September, the local school division hosted an online presentation on trauma awareness for parents.
In February, students were invited to attend a seminar in town on postwildfire mental wellness for teens, which covered managing anxiety and coping with grief and loss.
“Their whole teenage years have been racked with worry. You’re concerned of the unknown. You go through a pandemic to wildfire to your house burning down,” Shelly Irwin said.
For her son, there is who he was before the fire and who he is after.
“My house burned down. It’s kind of like all my childhood was there, so I guess you could say that my childhood kind of comes to an end like that,” Jackson said.
Those who didn’t lose homes have often struggled with survivor’s guilt.
“When you’re walking to school, it’s sad because you’re seeing all of these people, your friends and coworkers and the people you’ve grown up with who have lost their homes,” said Daisy McLeod. “A lot of us struggle with the guilt of when somebody asks you if your home is up and you get the privilege of being able to say ‘yes.’”
That guilt was hard to ignore when fundraising for the graduation ceremony.
The bottle drive that the school usually does had to be cancelled because the bottle depot was destroyed in the fire. But the cookie-dough fundraiser went ahead.
“Our class really struggled with that one because it was hard to go up to people and ask them to buy a $25 tin of cookie dough when they were really struggling,” said Annika Oeggerli, a senior and the class secretary. “We ran into lots of people who said, ‘I wish I could buy it but I still don’t have my fridge yet.’”
Then there were moments of just plain weirdness.
Tyler Young-Pearson was used to walking home at night after parties or hanging out with friends. One night after the fire, walking home from hanging out with buddies, he felt something was off, but at first, he couldn’t put his finger on it.
Then he realized it was the darkness. This stretch of road had always been illuminated by street lights and the warm glow coming from living room windows. All that light was gone now, taken by the fire. Just this eerie darkness left.
After the pandemic and the wildfire disrupted previous years, graduating students from Jasper Junior/Senior High School worried they wouldn’t get to graduate together — but the school and community worked hard to give them a sense of normalcy.
As challenging as the school year has been, the graduating students managed to perform well above the provincial average on their standardized exams – getting the highest grades, in fact, of all five high schools in the division.
Next fall, some of the graduating class will head off to university. Others are taking gap years.
Wherever they go, they will take with them the lessons they have learned from the past year.
“We learned to really cherish what we have and not take anything for granted. We also learned how important support from your friends is during hardship. It definitely taught us to appreciate each other and what we have more,” Daisy said of herself, Starla and Annika.
When I asked Jackson Irwin what he had learned, he paused for a moment.
“I think what I learned this past year is that a good community is essential for recovery.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the name of Tyler Young-Pearson, a graduating student at Jasper Junior/Senior High School.