FireSmart program thins forest behind Jasper Park Lodge

Plumes of smoke were visible around Jasper Park Lodge last week as Parks Canada’s FireSmart crew set to work.

Over the past few weeks, thousands of homes in California were destroyed by wildfires, exactly what the firesmart program is supposed to prevent here in Jasper. Selectively thinning the forest, by taking out trees, such as spruce, which are not very fire resistant, and “promoting the trees that are the most healthy and most adapted to fire,” such as the douglas fir, which has a thick corky bark, will help prevent unstoppable crown fires, said Alan Westhaver, project manager for the FireSmart/ForestWise program.  

“A key role of Parks Canada is to restore and maintain fire in this ecosystem, but at the same time we recognize that there’s a whole bunch of potential conflicts with that,” Westhaver said.  

The geographical location and topography of Jasper make the town site vulnerable to forest fire.  Located “at the confluence of three major valleys” and in “wall-to-wall shag carpet,” combined with wind funneling through the mountains, creates a situation where the only way to prevent catastrophic fire is to work on the fuel side of the equation, said Westhaver.  

“We’re not looking at this from a logger point view,” stated Westhaver, “we’re looking at this from an ecosystem point of view” and “we’re getting a lot of recognition” for it.  According to Westhaver, hundreds of managers from across the world, including Europe, Australia, the U.S., Japan and Scandinavia, have all come to Jasper to learn from the firesmart program in the hopes of providing an insurance plan for their vulnerable communities.  

Generally, the goal of FireSmart is to reduce the fuel that feeds fires, while maintaining and restoring the ecology of the park to its natural conditions.  According to Westhaver, Parks still has “really good fire suppression capability, but we’ve gradually been turning that into using fire instead of suppressing it,” he said.  “For many decades, it was Smokey Bear all the way.”

The way fire starts - whether man-made or natural - has little to do with how it is dealt with.  “It’s the type of fire and fire itself and the affect it has on vegetation” that’s important, he said.  “If you’re a pine tree, what does that fire mean to you?”