Wildfire season is among us again in Jasper, and although it happens every year, the dry hot season that is prime for fires spreading through the national parks’ forest is getting longer.

Typically in June, Jasper gets a lot of rain. This year, according to fire and vegetation specialist for Jasper National Park, Dave Smith, there were 12 days in June when the area was in extreme fire danger and eight more days in high fire danger.

Smith says they got lucky, with no wildfires until the 1.5 hectare fire south of Jasper in the Whirlpool Valley. But Smith says there is more to come. “The real fire season for us, where it’s actually real wildfire season, starts around now, historically.”

Proof of that is the Mount Cumnock fire, which started this past Saturday night (Aug 1) that has spread from 17 hectares to 194 in three days.

According to Smith, Jasper has been in a drought for the better part of ten years and it’s just starting to manifest itself now in forest health.

“People see all kinds of dead trees, especially if you drive down the south highway now, you’ll see along the side of the road, all kinds of dead trees. People often think, ‘oh, that’s the mountain pine beetle killing these trees.’ But it’s not. It’s drought,” Smith says.

For more than 80 years Parks Canada has been fighting forest fires with the notion that fire is bad for the ecosystem and wildlife, eliminating virtually all forest fires in the national parks up until the early 1980s.

As a result, the forests are overgrown, old, and not as healthy, and have provided an abundance of fuel that can spread fire through the dry valleys of the park and potentially into high human use areas.

Since 1985, Jasper National Park fire officials have been doing prescribed burns, usually in the spring and fall when it is not as dry and hot, and have been controlling the wildfires that happen during the summer to keep them from spreading to the town, high density infrastructure areas and high human use areas.

Because of the intensity of wildfires in Jasper’s dense forests, the fire goes deep into the ground - 50 to 60 centimetres - and can spread quickly and be hard to see.

“The only way to get after a fire that goes underground is to get in there with our crews- dig it up. Pour water on it, pour water on it, dig it up again, pour more water on it, basically mix it all around until we make sure the fires out,” says Smith.

He says when they think a fire is out, they send a crew out every day for about a week to make sure it is out completely.

Smith would like to let all fires burn so nature can run its course and the forest can recycle as intended, but, “because we’ve put these forests (fires) out for so long, we have these old forests, the potential for a severe fire, a fire that damages the organic layer, damages the source of the seed, damages the roots that should create new vegetation, there’s a real potential that we can damage that.”

Still, the fires are essential for forest re-growth. Any place where there is a fire in the backcountry and it can’t go anywhere, Smith’s only concern is if there are people out there.

“We have a mechanism in place to know where people are because people should have backcountry permits and that type of thing. So what we would basically do, is we would find out who’s back there, go get them out, and then we would monitor the fire. We would be in there every day, we’d be watching the fire behaviour, taking measurements and predicting where it would go. But in those places, the likelihood of it escaping is zero. We can just let the ecological benefits of fire run their course,” he says.

Fifty per cent of wildfires are started by lightning, with the other half being human-caused, although Smith says this time of year, with the number of people in the area, it’s likely that a fire will be human-caused. Every night a crew flies around the town site looking for illegal campers and fires, and Smith says they find quite a few. He says they are quite diligent in looking for illegal campers around town, especially when we are in extreme fire danger.

“Fortunately people have learned and are really good at reporting fires. I would say that we detect 60 per cent of fires that are burning, but the other 40 per cent we learn about them through people reporting fires,” says Smith, adding that it is crucial that people make sure their fires are out, to the touch with their bare hand, during this extreme fire season. “If you see anything even you think might be a suspicion of smoke, you can call dispatch, you can call 911, and let dispatch know. That’s what we do for a living this time of year.”