‘We have to go’: The inside story of Jasper under siege by wildfire

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In Jasper on Fire: Five Days of Hell in a Rocky Mountain Paradise, journalist Matthew Scace delivers a gripping account of a town under siege by nature’s most ferocious force. On July 24, 2024, the serene beauty of Jasper was shattered as wildfires, fuelled by relentless winds, converged on the community. Published by Sutherland Quarterly series and set for release on Jan. 21, this exclusive excerpt offers an unflinching look at a battle for survival in the heart of the Rockies.

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The several dozen people still milling around Jasper on Wednesday morning knew that a wildfire was approaching the town. The question was when would it arrive? The answer was painfully unclear. The models that had spit out projections expecting the flames to roll by on Friday were discarded early that morning. The south wind that had scattered ash over town 36 hours earlier had returned.

The fires south of town had merged from three separate blazes into a single monster, and it was moving toward the jagged peaks of Mount Edith Cavell, another of Jasper’s trademark attractions, also popular among hikers, and Marmot Basin, the local ski resort only 12 kilometres from town, as the crow flies. It was creating a thick, lumpy, white and grey tower of smoke that soared far above the mountain peaks. It looked no different from a bulging rain cloud, apart from its unusual tint, and the bright and expansive blue skies around it. The wind was pushing the fire toward Jasper, but the smoke was rolling up into the tower, not into town as it had the night before. The north fire was meanwhile raging out of control, but rolling away from the townsite, aided by the same winds that were carrying the southerly blaze toward Jasper.

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Firefighters continued laying down hoses and punching sprinklers into the ground throughout that morning. Their pace quickened with the conditions. They threw down as many sprinkler lines as possible and flipped switches to make sure the hoses were functioning. Many returned home at points in the day to pack their belongings, then settled in their cars behind the firehall to wait. A perimeter of sprinklers was mounted around them, creating a safe zone should the fire hit town.

There was little they could do but wait. The fire would arrive in its own way, in its own time. There were many eventualities and considerations to take into account. And there was only one certainty: “We would never abandon or leave,” says the fire chief, Mathew Conte.

The fire kept high-ranking senior officials guessing in those final hours. At 1:30 p.m., Parks Canada communicated in a public release that the south fire had passed Marmot Basin and was around nine kilometres away. It had expanded to more than 26,000 acres and windy conditions were expected. Rain, a more effective firefighting agent than any water bomber, was also expected to arrive that night.

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As the fire sat near Marmot Basin, the officials modelling its progress believed it would creep rather gradually toward town. The moment of impingement was still a moving target, potentially even a day away.

But in mid-afternoon, the fire unilaterally moved up its timetable. Aided by winds exceeding 100 kilometres per hour, the inferno began advancing on Jasper at a steady10 km/h clip, burning whole stands of trees to a crisp in seconds. Flames flared well above the treetops, by some estimates 100 feet high.

Somehow the inferno bypassed the Marmot Basin ski hill, the most important winter tourist destination in Jasper National Park. Becker’s Chalets weren’t so lucky.

Becker’s Chalets is a family-owned collection of log cabins between the Icefields Parkway and the Athabasca River, five kilometres south of town. Built in 1940 and originally known as Becker’s Bungalows, the rustic resort became world famous in 1953 when Marilyn Monroe checked in for the filming of The River of No Return. Her fiancé, baseball star Joe DiMaggio, joined her, and hordes of photographers followed in their wake. On Wednesday afternoon, Becker’s Chalets was consumed by fire.

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Only 30 minutes later, the inferno had reached Jasper’s doorstep, eating every campground, cabin, and trail in its path. Somewhere between 3:30 and 4 p.m., an air-raid siren blared across Jasper and ordered all wildfire fighters to huddle at the firehall.

Around that time, Jasper Mayor Richard Ireland was on a Zoom call with Christine Nadon, the municipality of Jasper’s incident commander and head of the unified command, and Landon Shepherd, a Parks Canada fire specialist and the deputy incident commander, who was joining from within Jasper’s fire hall.

As the meeting progressed Shepherd suddenly left the call, going off-screen. Ireland could tell he had received some news. A few minutes later he returned. His focus was on Nadon.

“Christine, we have to go,” he said.

Nadon looked at him quizzically. “Right now?” she asked.

Shepherd reiterated that they needed to leave and had to get every firefighter out of Jasper as soon as possible. Wildland firefighters without equipment needed to go; police brought in to enforce the evacuation order and secure the town against looting also had to leave. Everyone out, now.

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Conte and his team, who were staying, had meanwhile summoned nearly every fire engine within a 400-kilometre radius to Jasper. As a town with few close neighbours, it unfortunately would take several hours for them to arrive.

By the time the Parks Canada firefighters had hustled out of town, all that were left was Jasper’s small team of volunteer firefighters, and a small crew of wildfire fighters. They stood largely alone, preparing to protect the town against the 100-foot flames at their front door. “When Parks (Canada) and the (incident management team) and their wildfire crews went, ‘OK, it’s time to evacuate,’ we said, ‘Well, we’re not going,’” recalls Conte.

“That’s not what we do,” adds deputy chief Donald Smith.

In extremis, firefighters could safely retreat to the firehall, which was sitting in an area replete with firebreaks. They’d wait out the fire as they would a bad thunderstorm and rush back out once the worst had passed.

The remaining firefighters were split into small groups of three or four. They careened around town in mobile units, dousing spot fires on structures. When Conte ordered them to turn on the sprinklers, they hustled to activate their systems, switching on hoses and testing to make sure their prep work was functional.

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All the while, Conte and Smith kept their eyes on the dense tower of smoke at the edge of town as it stretched into the stratosphere. They knew what it portended. They were waiting for a moment they had trained for, but had never experienced in all their decades of service.

When a fire is on a warpath, aiming headlong for structures, wildland firefighters will sometimes stop trying to use water to kill the flames and opt instead to fight fire with fire. Parks Canada had imported a fire-ignition specialist from the Yukon, considered one of the best in Canada. The specialist and Parks crews tried interrupting the wildfire’s ferocity; if their efforts made any difference, it was imperceptible in the moment.

Attempts to drop fire retardant were no more effective: ignition crews in the aircraft said the winds were so strong their heads were bouncing off the fuselage. “There was no evidence of environmental winds . . . these (were) fire-generated winds,” says Landon Shepherd, Park Canada’s vegetation specialist in Jasper and one of the leading incident commanders.

Early that evening, the smoke tower collapsed. The blue sky disappeared. For all intents and purposes, night had fallen five hours early in Jasper. A tsunami of blazing-hot ash and smoke engulfed the town. Howling winds bent trees sideways.

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“It was straight into the . . . I don’t know what you call it at that point,” says deputy chief Smith, words failing, giving a slight chuckle at their absence.

Brian Cornforth, fire chief for Parkland County, a rural municipal district outside Edmonton, saw the first embers rain down on Jasper. He thought it resembled an upside-down-fireworks show: the sky was shooting fireworks into the ground. The firefighters were showered with burning debris. Cornforth noticed small embers, including sizzling conifer needles, flying by, and larger pieces of the size of iPhones landing on lawns, roofs, and decks.

“Those embers were blasting us in our clothing,” he says. “At that point, you know that you’re going to have substantial loss.”

Wildfire warfare was underway. The blanket of smoke was limiting firefighters’ vision to no more than ten feet in front of them. “You couldn’t drive down the streets, it would peel the paint right off your vehicle,” says Smith.

There were 1,113 structures in Jasper. Despite efforts to guard many of them with sprinklers over Tuesday and Wednesday morning, crews were not able to clear every deck and porch. “A propane tank would explode, and then we’d have all that debris in the air,” says Cornforth. Each explosion sent more burning shrapnel into the air.

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The sheer volume of embers made it impossible to protect homes from the wildfire’s onslaught. The glowing shards latched on to any remotely flammable material they could find, including clogged eavestroughs, mulch, and plastic doormats. Once fire caught hold of a house, it would break windows like a thief and crawl inside within seconds. The wind sent flames screaming like blowtorches into every opening.

At some point early in the fire, Maligne Lodge, one of the first buildings to greet visitors entering the town from B.C., went up in flames. It became one of the first photos posted to social media, its cedar-shake roof and siding shimmering orange and yellow as the fire devoured it. A firefighter stood outside next to an engine, observing. The fire was inside, outside, everywhere.

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