Cavell Road, the main access point for Mount Edith Cavell and its surrounding area, will be closed from Sept. 8 until Feb. 15 next year, first for roadwork and then to help protect woodland caribou during the winter months from wolves, according to Parks Canada.

Funding for the roadwork was announced earlier this year as part of Canada’s Economic Action Plan that put aside $10 million for roadway improvements in Jasper National Park (JNP) and the Town of Banff.

A windy and narrow road that stretches for about 14 km, the improvements are long overdue said Marrian Lee, highway manager for JNP.

With the assistance of Okanagan Aggregate, who Lee said are very experienced in this field, Lee and her crew are aiming to have the road paved and drainage completed before the first snow fall this winter.

“Paving can’t happen once it snows. We’d continue to work next spring,” she said about the prospect of an early snowfall. However, if all goes to plan, her work will be completed by mid-October.

One of the most important improvements for the road will be ditching, she said, which will help control the effect of water on the heavily used road.

“Water is the enemy of roads, so by ditching you get the water away from the surface,” she said.

“Basically, it’s just single scoops – sort of a metre-and-a-half maximum in ditch width on the mountain side of the road.”

As well as ditching, the road will be slightly increased in width in some places to make the road safer for drivers, she added.

However, this will only be marginal, so the footprint of the road does not increase.

“There will be some slight widening in just a handful of spots... so that it won’t be narrower than six metres (in any section) and that’s basically the existing footprint of the road,” she said.

Once Lee and her associates have finished their work, the road will remain closed to decrease the likelihood of wolves travelling up the road which would follow snowmobile and ski tracks to hunt woodland caribou.

For Layla Neufeld, caribou biologist, and Mark Bradley, wildlife specialist for Jasper National Park, it’s an important step that must be taken to protect the Woodland Caribou from an unusual predator.

“This is not an extremely common behaviour that we’re trying to stop, but from a caribou point of view – if you’re losing an extra one or two caribou out of a population of one hundred and you start doing that every winter, that adds up,” explained Bradley.

The pair say that wolves travel up Cavell Road once, maybe twice a month during the winter months. Wolves are believed to have killed at least five caribou last winter.

According to Bradley, the tracksetting and overall use of the road in the past has meant that the wolves have had easier access to the caribou’s wintering area, because (unlike caribou) wolves don’t like to travel through deep snow and will use human trails or roads.

“It’s about decreasing the efficiency of wolves getting up into the alpine,” he said.

“It’s an efficiency gain for them to be on a trail or a road,” he added, “instead of once a month maybe they go twice a month.”

Neufeld said that the February date was a compromise between protecting the caribou and visitor experience.

As nobody can predict the amount of snowfall, generally by February, the snowfall on Cavell Road would be consolidated, which means wolves can easily travel up the road. However, prior to this the snow would be too deep and the wolves are less likely to travel up if there are no tracks set by humans.

As for future closures, Bradley and Neufeld said it was dependent on the success of this year’s closure and upcoming consultations as part of the Parks Management Plan Review.

“It’s going to be some difficult decisions for everybody to balance the decisions of ecology and visitor use,” said Neufeld.