Companies are reporting `millions of dollars’ in lost revenue after blazes
This article was written by Lauren Krugel and was published in the Toronto Star on September 3, 2025.
Fewer tourists are coming to Jasper, Alta., than usual this year, but it’s not for a lack of people eager to visit the picturesque Rocky Mountain town.
Numbers are about as good as they can be, considering about onefifth of the town’s overnight accommodations burned when a ferocious wildfire swept through last summer, said Tourism Jasper CEO Tyler Riopel.
“There’s about as many people visiting Jasper this summer as we have overnight accommodations for, so I say it’s a win,” he said. “We’re seeing between a 16 and 20 per cent actual visitor number reduction overall, and that is 100 per cent directly attributed to the loss in fixedroof accommodations and campgrounds.”
Spots that are available are almost entirely full, Riopel said, adding the squeeze is likely to last into next summer as the town’s rebuild continues.
Visitors seem to be spending less when they’re in the town in shops and at attractions, but Riopel isn’t sure whether that’s a widespread trend.
There’s still plenty to do in the national park, he said. That includes more than a thousand kilometres of hiking trails, whitewater rafting, the SkyTram gondola, the golf course and boat cruises on the turquoise waters of Maligne Lake.
“Jasper is such an intriguing place to be right now. Parks Canada has worked really hard to ensure that there’s a few fire impacted forests that people can walk through,” Riopel said.
Though summer may be peak tourist season in Jasper, Riopel said winter will also be important as people come for skiing and other winter activities.
As the Jasper recovery continues, tourism operators affected by wildfires elsewhere this year are struggling.
Northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba have been particularly hard hit, which has taken a toll on outfitting businesses that cater to hunters and fishers.
Roy Anderson, acting CEO of the Saskatchewan Commission of Professional Outfitters, said his group is surveying members to quantify the financial impact.
“We’re talking millions of dollars in terms of lost revenue at a minimum,” he said.
Many businesses serve a small number of repeat customers — mainly Americans — willing to splurge to hunt big game. Those clients book well in advance, so operators have to prepurchase supplies and staff up ahead of time, leaving little flexibility when unexpected disruptions arise.
Anderson said early in the spring, concern centred around Canada-U.S. trade tensions and any knockon effects on crossborder tourism.
“It wasn’t maybe as impactful as we thought it might be,” he said. “And then we moved right into the reality around the wildfires.”
Fires burning close to a camp or hunting area would of course require trips to be cancelled for safety reasons. But even in unaffected areas, highway closures, air travel disruptions and bans on offroad vehicles have had big impacts, Anderson said.
He’s calling for a discussion with government officials about how to deal more proactively with the fire threat in future.
“We know this may be a unique year, but it might not be,” Anderson said.
Anderson said government could reconsider the scope of allterrain vehicle bans, perhaps having some allowances for commercial operators or in certain zones. Sparks that come off the machines can trigger fires when a forest is tinder dry.
Tourism Saskatchewan is still determining the impact.
“Anecdotally, some operators have experienced losses, while most have remained fully open. In addition to the fires themselves, evacuation alerts and highway closures contributed to disruptions, including cancellations and reduced visitor traffic in some areas,” said Alexa Lawlor, a spokesperson for the provincial agency, in an email.
“Many accommodations stepped up to provide emergency shelter for evacuees and firefighting personnel, and we are deeply grateful for their contributions.”
The Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada has been hearing from members that it’s been a particularly tough summer, said chief executive Keith Henry.
The effects have been felt right across the country. Some visitors have cancelled because they didn’t want wildfire smoke to ruin their experience. Full closures of wilderness areas in Atlantic Canada have caused business to evaporate overnight.
Operators in northern Manitoba had been “expecting a really exceptional year,” said Henry.
“Their business is down 30 per cent.”
Wildfires haven’t been the only challenge though. Labour disruptions at Air Canada have also caused wouldbe travellers to put off their trips.
Tourism is a major economic driver for Indigenous communities, Henry added.
“Indigenous tourism is so much more than economics. It’s cultural revitalization, it’s local employment, it helps families, it help the artists,” Henry said. “We don’t want to lose faith in what we’re trying to build and what we’ve been building for many, many decades now. We’re going to continue to work really hard to make sure it survives and thrives.
“We’ve just got to figure out how do we adjust to these kinds of external factors that seem to have such downstream impacts on us?”
Officials racing to fend off future blazes as Rockies face another year of drought conditions
This article was written by Matthew Scace and was published in the Toronto Star on May 20, 2025.
Looking out over a budding meadow with blackened tree stumps on the edge of Banff National Park, Cliff White points to a dark thicket of trees where the empty plot ends.
“The next fire in here is going to be incredible,” says the former Parks Canada fire management coordinator, standing in the expansive Carrot Creek fire break.
The meadow was shorn more than 20 years ago by Parks Canada to slow wildfires in their tracks before reaching Banff and Canmore.
But it’s a fraction of the dense, naturally fireprone forest blanketing the Bow Valley, where fear is growing that a shower of embers, like those that destroyed a third of the structures in Jasper, Alta., last summer, could hit Alberta’s most popular tourist destination.
The Rockies are facing another year of drought conditions. The snow melted several weeks earlier than normal, and the snowpack is lower than it was in 2023, the year of Canada’s recordbreaking wildfires, said John Pomeroy, a hydrologist who lives in Canmore.
“Canmore’s watching with great trepidation,” said Pomeroy, also a university professor.
In the race to mitigate the damage from future fires, stewards of Alberta’s parks have turned to loggers to create fire guards like Carrot Creek. The areas are designed to starve a fire of fuel and create enough empty land for embers to fizzle out on the ground.
This year, Parks Canada hired an Indigenous logging company to raze several hectares of land near Banff. Profits of that timber will be used to maintain the land, said Jane Park, fire and vegetation specialist for Banff National Park.
Each fire break represents the start of a new ecosystem that Parks Canada will need to maintain.
“We can’t just let nature do its thing and just have wildfires kind of go willynilly,” said Park, standing among large slash piles in one of Banff ‘s newest fire breaks.
Though hotter and drier summers have triggered the most damaging wildfire seasons in recent years, decades of fire suppression have made forests throughout the Rockies thick tinderboxes.
Fire is part of the natural life cycle for many of those trees, which carry seeds inside their pine cones that are only released when they’re on fire, Park said.
Prescribed burning, a traditional Indigenous practice, was stopped more than 100 years ago but restarted in the 1980s when Parks Canada discovered it had allowed the forest to grow out of control, Park said.
In Banff, it’s already been a topsyturvy summer for its small fire department. Fire Chief Keri Martens said the dry and hot start to May was nerveracking, but recent rainy conditions gave her room to breathe. “The anxiety level certainly starts to rise,” she said of the early summer season.
Tables inside Banff’s fire department are covered in large maps, one of them with the roughly 300 homes with roofs made of combustible materials like cedar shake, which would be most at risk of catching fire from embers.
Another identifies areas where a wildfire could trigger emergency measures, including the evacuation of more than 9,000 residents and more than 20,000 tourists who inhabit the area over the summer.
Martens said the Jasper fire is likely behind an uptick in locals who have enlisted the town to remove flammable trees from their properties and equip their homes with sprinklers.
As for White, he said park staff are making good progress on building fire breaks. But he hopes the model for managing forests can be altered to give people affected by fire more control over the area.
“ We can’t just let nature do its thing and just have wildfires kind of go willynilly.
JANE PARK FIRE AND VEGETATION SPECIALIST FOR BANFF NATIONAL PARK
This article was written by Jana G. Pruden and was published in the Globe & Mail on January 28, 2025.
A destroyed forest blanketed by snow remains after wildfires roared through Jasper National Park and part of the nearby town last summer. Although the airflow within the fire hasn’t officially been classified as a tornado, researchers are investigating the rotational air movement in the pattern of fallen, burned trees.
Colette Kaufmann was inside her store, Rocky Bear Gifts & More, knitting a blanket on a cold winter afternoon. Through the window behind her, the Rocky Mountains were dusted with snow and smudged with tendrils of black, slivers of the 32,000 hectares that burned around and through Jasper National Park and the town of Jasper, Alta., last July.
“I don’t think I can handle talking about it today, hon,” Ms. Kaufmann said. “But just look up. The mountains will always be here.”
On the stereo, Neil Young crooned like he was joining the conversation. “I was lying in a burned-out basement with the full moon in my eyes,” he sang. Ms. Kaufmann hummed and harmonized. Her partner, Karl Peetoom, arrived and joined her, whistling.
It will be the 12th blanket that Ms. Kaufmann has made for people who lost their homes in the fire. Arguably she could use one, too, since she and Mr. Peetoom escaped with little more than the clothes on their backs, losing their house and a lifetime of treasures and cozy blankets.
And even though there are upsides – their business survived, and Mr. Peetoom sometimes feels lighter and freer without all that stuff – there is still plenty to mourn. That’s where the blankets help.
“I’m healing just making them,” Ms. Kaufmann said. “I get more out of it than the people I give them to, probably.”
Ms. Kaufmann and Mr. Peetoom had been watching the mountains evolving out their store window for decades. They had seen the ravages of the pine beetle, the years of drought. And they, like most other people who pay attention to such things, knew what would come next.
“The next part of the equation is fire,” Ms. Kaufmann said. “It’s bad, but it’s part of life.”
Fire is part of life, especially now, especially in Jasper, though increasingly everywhere else, too.
For 100 years, the approach in Jasper National Park had been to fight it, to put the fires out, to ignore what the Indigenous peoples in those lands always knew: The cycles of nature need to run through.
Down the street, at the Lostlands Café, Kim Stark was on hold with her bank. The branch in town had been destroyed, and the new location was still getting up and running. Ms. Stark’s replacement credit card had gotten lost in the mail, and since the transit number for the branch no longer existed, well, it was a whole thing. Just one example of how everything is connected or, in a town pulling itself together after a disaster, disconnected.
“Even for a positive person, it just seems one step forward and, like, three back,” she said. Hold music droned from her phone. “It’s whatever. It’s fine.”
The café is one of four businesses Ms. Stark owns in Jasper. A self-described single parent by choice with three daughters under 5, she lost her house in the fire, and currently has only one business up and running while she navigates insurance and banks and the multitude of other unexpected challenges that have arisen in the weeks and months since the blaze.
As a volunteer firefighter, Ms. Stark was one of the last locals left in town as the fire roared into Jasper on the evening of July 24. About 25,000 people had evacuated by then, and Ms. Stark was one of the few who felt the heat of the fire up close, one of the first to face the reality of what they were all about to lose.
The months since hadn’t been easy, but as she looked across the street at the frozen mountains, she found it all interesting, beautiful. She’d been staring at those same mountains for 33 years, and now her eyes traced new bumps and rolls, features that had, for so long, been hidden under a canopy of trees.
“Fire is not good or bad. Fire just is. It’s part of the landscape,” she said. “As my daughter said, ‘It was naughty because it ate our house.’ But in the landscape, it’s not naughty. It’s what fire does.” Some trees have cones that need fire to release their seeds, she noted. “So it is natural. But it’s just because it burned down my house that I don’t like it.”
It always seemed like a fire from the west would get them. That dense blanket of mature trees lining a narrow valley, an uninterrupted corridor of forest where the wind rushes right into Jasper. But it was a fire from the south that came barrelling in new and urgent on the evening of July 22, hotter and faster than anyone anticipated.
Landon Shepherd, a fire and vegetation specialist for Parks Canada who would become incident commander of what is now known as the Jasper Fire Complex, was heading into Lake Edith for a swim when he first heard sirens.
It had been a busy fire season. Fires had been burning around Jasper all month, scary but under control – nothing the wildfire crews couldn’t get on top of. But now, a series of lightning strikes were rapidly igniting new blazes. Mr. Shepherd texted a colleague to see whether he should come in. He got one word back. “Yes.”
Things worsened even as he drove to the Parks Canada operations compound. The fire to the north of town was encroaching on the highway, and there were new fires in the south. As crews scrambled to get campgrounds and work sites evacuated and see whether any air tankers were available, Mr. Shepherd sprinted out to a helicopter to get eyes on what was coming. From the air, he could see how big the fires to the south were, and how fast the winds were pushing them.
The area around Jasper was filled with tourists and visitors, the town’s population swollen from 5,000 to 25,000 as it does in the summer months. Mr. Shepherd had been working with wildfire for more than three decades. He knew how difficult it would be to evacuate all the people at the campsites and trails and beaches, all those families scattered around and enjoying themselves, not knowing what was coming.
“Seeing the fire I was flying towards, I thought, ‘This is going to be my first multicasualty event for a fire. We’re not going to get families out of the campground in time,’ ” he said. “I thought we were going
to lose people that night, and we didn’t. Actually, it helped me for the rest of my time on this fire, because I went through the worst in my mind.”
There had been tornado warnings in the region, and the fire that roared toward Jasper created winds so powerful it ripped healthy trees right out of the ground. Mr. Shepherd later counted 270 rings on one, a tree that had lived through other fires and blowdown winds and mountain weather, but nothing like the forces that were unleashed that summer. This was something that doesn’t really have a name, but that Mr. Shepherd refers to as a “firestorm-type event.”
In those conditions, a 3,200-kilogram metal construction container was picked up and tossed into the Athabasca River. A bear-proof garbage bin was ripped right out of a concrete slab and sent flying into the trees. Massive chunks of burning debris swirled high in the air like sparks from a campfire.
Although the airflow within the fire hasn’t officially been classified as a tornado, Mr. Shepherd said a research team is investigating rotational air movement in the pattern of the fallen, burned trees.
That ferocious blaze tore through the forest to the east, gathering energy as it headed toward Jasper Park Lodge. To the west, it raged up Whistler Mountain before collapsing into itself, sending embers raining down from the sky into Jasper, where the 32 members of the Jasper Fire Brigade, along with other firefighters from communities nearby, were desperately trying to save the town.
On one side of the valley, flames licked 30 metres above the forest canopy. On the other, Mr. Shepherd recalls, was “something so angry, just this swirling mass of dark smoke with glows of red inside it,” a “dark red, sort of Hollywood apocalyptic kind of scene.”
Six months later, Mr. Shepherd stood atop a pile of concrete construction slabs, surveying that same land at the base of Mount Edith Cavell. It was a grand mountain vista, as awe-inspiring as it had ever been, though in a different way. Now, broad swaths of blackened tree trunks dashed the landscape, like burned pickup sticks tossed to the ground.
Mr. Shepherd sometimes brings members of the fire brigade to that spot, to show them evidence of the wild fury that ripped toward them and assure them “this wasn’t a fair fight.” He knows it would have been far more likely, given what they faced, that the whole town would be lost.
“It’s outstanding that didn’t happen,” he said.
Mr. Shepherd says he’s incredibly proud of the work that was done in and around Jasper, but when he begins to speak of the success he always comes back to the death of Morgan Kitchen, a 24-year-old firefighter who was killed by a falling tree on Aug. 3.
“There were so many challenges with the fire. The highway and railway and a community and pipelines, and people’s connection to the place … having that as a backdrop was a lot,” Mr. Shepherd said. “Given what was happening, I felt like we were doing such an amazing job, and Morgan’s death – it’s not that it takes that away, or changes my mind about that – but suddenly I didn’t feel like I could celebrate it any more. And I still don’t. It doesn’t feel worth it.”
Despite the early reports – when images of the historic St. Mary & St. George Anglican Church and the Petro-Canada station burning made it seem as if the entire town was lost – most of Jasper still stands, at least for tourists. A visitor who trains their eyes only on the commercial streets may not even notice there’s been a fire in town. Stores and restaurants and hotels are open, waiting for tourists that are trickling back too slowly, perhaps thinking, wrongly, that it is too soon, that their presence would be unwelcome, or that there is nothing left at all.
In reality, it was mostly homes that burned – more than 350 structures in all, about one-third of the buildings in Jasper.
Security fences now surround the remains of those houses, ashy pits dotted with rusted benches and barbecues, front steps that go nowhere, white picket fences framing holes in the ground. The devastation itself is a record of the way the fire roared and raced, where it jumped and ravaged, licked, spared, destroyed.
Girlie Tan and her 18-year-old son, Syd, live on Patricia Street, in the one house still standing on an entire block of burned wreckage. They rent the house, which the fire miraculously did not touch. It stands six doors down from their former home, which burned to the ground.
“It’s hard,” said Ms. Tan, who came to Canada from the Philippines in 2020. “You have to go day by day to let go. And yeah, I’m thinking, just appreciating what we have.”
They don’t have much. Her previous landlord wrongly told her she didn’t need her own insurance because he had the home covered, so she’d cancelled her policy. She and her son lost everything. The Mount Robson Inn, where she worked, also burned down, leaving her out of work. Unable to find a full-time job since, mother and son have been surviving with assistance from the Red Cross, friends and people in the Filipino community.
Ms. Tan keeps the windows of the home closed and covered so she doesn’t have to look outside at everything that burned. It hurts too much to think about it.
Sometimes when she walks by, she stops and looks at the wreckage that was their home. There’s a red mug in the rubble she thinks was hers, but she can’t go in to get it.
Many people have left Jasper since the fires, and Ms. Tan worries she and Syd may have to go as well. They only have their current place for six months, until April, and she doesn’t know where they’ll live after that. People she knows have invited them back to Saskatchewan, but they don’t want to leave.
“Jasper is home,” she said. “Our heart is still in Jasper.”
Firetorn Jasper is entering new year with hope, anxiety
This article was written by Jack Farrell and was published in the Toronto Star on December 28, 2024.
About 5,000 residents and 20,000 visitors were safely evacuated before a wildfire breached the western edge of Jasper and destroyed 350 homes and businesses, including 820 housing units. Months after the fire, debris is still being cleared — lot by lot.
JASPER, ALTA. This year, Kim Stark’s kids took responsibility for decorating the family Christmas tree.
Ornaments include toy cars, puzzle pieces, string and a pair of binoculars — things her three young daughters had handy after the family lost their home in summer’s devastating Jasper wildfire.
“I have the most wonderful tree on the planet,” said Stark. “It’s part of our story and part of who we are.
“If (the kids) are happy, I’m happy.”
Stark is part of the fabric of the Jasper townsite, a 10year member of the fire department and owner of a coffee shop and bakery. Her family, plus three furry pets and a fish, are living in a condo as they navigate rebuilding their home. “(The kids) miss our house, and we talk about our house,” said Stark. “We make sure we go to our neighbourhood, so that it doesn’t become somebody else’s neighbourhood.”
Stark and other residents are anxious and nervous for the future following the fire that hit the town July 24.
About 5,000 residents and 20,000 visitors were safely evacuated before the fire breached the western edge of town and destroyed 350 homes and businesses, including 820 housing units. The Insurance Bureau of Canada pegged the damage at $880 million.
Months after the fire, debris is still being cleared — lot by lot.
Locals including Stark are quick to say things could have been worse. But anxiety over temporary living situations and what may be a long and slow rebuild process has many residents and municipal leaders feeling unsettled heading into 2025.
For Sabrina Charlebois and David Leoni, the top concern is the Alberta government’s $112million modular housing project. It’s to put up 250 prebuilt rental units in the town and rent them to those displaced by the fire.
Social Services Minister Jason Nixon said the first homes should be ready by late January or early February, with the rest in April. The majority are to be multibedroom suites to accommodate families.
“If we can get all of our approvals on time, we definitely are on time to be able to build in the context of what we promised,” Nixon said.
It’s complicated, he added, given there are layers of government with an Alberta town in a national park.
Charlebois was born and raised in Jasper. The fire destroyed her childhood home, which her late father built, as well as the salon where she worked. “It’s better than nothing,” she said of the housing project, noting at least 2,000 residents were displaced so demand could outnumber the new units.
Charlebois, who has been staying in a hotel, said it’s understandable projects like this take time. But “we’re six months into this, and there’s no homes for anyone.”
“My fear is not finding a place to live, because I have to be out of my hotel by the spring,” she said.
Leoni, a dentist and former Olympic biathlete, and his family also lost their home, as did seven staff at his clinic. He said the April cutoff date Charlebois is facing also applies to his staff staying in hotels.
“Hopefully that’s concurrent with the provincial government’s opening of these modular units that they’re putting in, because we’re going to lose staff,” said Leoni.
“Without them I can’t do anything.”
The clinic needed to replace $160,000 worth of equipment and required a toptobottom scrub before appointments resumed in October.
Leoni estimates his patient list is down onethird because of the fire. Whether those patients return remains to be seen.
Charlebois and Leoni both said their anxiety is heightened when they consider the unpredictable nature of the town’s tourism economy and how it could complicate the pace of rebuilding.
It’s a Catch22: residents need houses in order to rebuild and restart the economy, but they can’t restart the economy without tourists. And tourists require services, which require workers, who require housing.
Bill Given, the town’s chief administrator, said he’s optimistic the municipality can “thread the needle.”
But he has his own anxieties when it comes to rebuilding, namely the complexity of Jasper operating under both federal and provincial oversight.
“An associated risk of that is that individual agendas from different orders of government overtake the public interest in delivering on what Jasper needs,” Given said.
“I think there’s also a risk, maybe somewhat smaller, that private interests overtake the broader public interest.”
Jasper Mayor Richard Ireland, who lost his home in the fire, said they have to find a way.
“Failure is not an option for anybody,” said Ireland. “We have one chance to get this right, and that’s what we have to do.”
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