Sitting atop the Jasper Tramway, Jasper’s Fire Chief Greg Van Tighem, Jasper National Park Firesmart program manager Alan Westhaver and a group of the best firefighting minds in western Canada look over the beautiful scene that is the town of Jasper.

As they look at the dense, green forest that surrounds the town, one thing becomes clear – there is a very likely chance for a wildfire to come through the town.

Fast forward half a decade, and Van Tighem and Westhaver are still together, working on the third stage of five in the Firesmart-Forestwise program to get the town ready for a potential wildfire. Today, smoke billows through the town as campgrounds are thinned and firebreaks are created.

From an aerial view one can see the three valley’s join near the town, providing continuous fuel to the south down Highway 93, up the Maligne Valley and up the West Valley past Stone Mountain. With the shape of those mountains funneling towards the townsite, if a major fire happens, it would come towards Jasper at an immense force.

So a plan was made.

Because the forest surrounding the town is so thick, tree thinning is necessary to space out the trees, bringing a fire down to the ground at a manageable level rather than the top crowns of the trees.

Taking out those trees takes away from the intensity of the fire, which helps prevent one of the most dangerous aspects of a wildfire – embers.

“It’s not just the fact that the fire’s going to roll into town like a tidal wave – that is what most people have in their mind - but ironically that’s not why probably 90 per cent of the homes burn down. It’s not the tidal wave that gets you, it’s that column of gas and air called a convection column,” says Westhaver.

That column is lifting not only hot air and gas, but tons and tons of embers. Whole embers, fragments and entire trees can be lifted and carried for kilometres in the wind, dumping a blizzard of embers on the townsite, Westhaver explains.

Last winter a crew worked on the steep slopes behind town with a specialized bug-like machine that could walk on the steep slopes. This winter, that project is being completed, while another project, the Whistler’s Campground project, will also be underway this year.

With between 2,000 and 3,000 people at the campground during a busy summer day, a wildfire coming through the area or a camp fire left to get out of control could be deadly.

The thinning of trees in that area is equally as important, says Westhaver. “There is very little we can do about a fire up here running through the crowns except wait for it to rain. So the thinning is critical to reducing the fire intensity and allowing fire fighters to go there safely.”

The current project, which residents have taken notice of, is the third project of getting to the patches of forest dotted around town that were missed because they were in too sensitive areas to do with machines.

The fourth project is the continuation of burning piles of debris leftover on the forest floor from last year. Piles of debris around Jasper Park Lodge, Lakes Annette, Edith and Trefoil, and some areas on the bench will be burning, causing minor smoke disturbances in town depending on wind conditions.

The fifth and final stage of the Firesmart-Firewise project is one that won’t take place until next winter, but an equally important one to give the town a real advantage when a wildfire happens from the south or west of town.

“When there’s a wildfire..we don’t want to wait until the fire gets right here to start fighting it. We’ll want to be doing things all the way from the B.C. border or well south of the town to help start steering the fire and help diverting it away from the townsite, so that the smoke column might be dropping its embers elsewhere. And what we need in order to do that, is some very narrow, almost goat trails -  kind of lines in the sand -  way out far from the townsite, kilometres from the townsite, places where we can actually go and actually start fighting fire with fire,” Westhaver says.

Fighting fire with fire, explains Westhaver, is a popular wildfire firefighting technique that involves finding a bare line – a river, elk trail, or human-made tree-cut line – which a fire can be lit on one side, the same side of an approaching fire. When a fire is coming towards the town, it is sucking air into itself to feed it. Lighting a line of fire ahead of an oncoming fire will allow the line of fire to burn into the oncoming fire, leaving no fuel leftover for the wildfire.