Town famous for royal, Hollywood guests ravaged by wildfires

OTTAWA, Ontario – Queen Elizabeth II vacationed there, as did her parents before her. Hollywood’s royalty were regular visitors, too. Marilyn Monroe filmed scenes for “River of No Return” there, and “The Emperor Waltz” brought Bing Crosby and Joan Fontaine to its golf courses and tennis courts. The mountains of Jasper, Alberta, have also stood in for peaks around the world in other movies.

Above all, Jasper National Park represented Canada to the world and for many Canadians for more than a century.

Now, tens of thousands of acres of the park and its mountain town of Jasper are either burning in an inferno or have been reduced to rubble and ash. Parks Canada, the national agency, said that since two large-scale wildfires, which sent up a wall of flame more than 300 feet high, were whisked into the community on ferocious winds earlier in the week, 358 of its 1,113 buildings have been destroyed.

“The nature of this fire was such that it humbled the humans on the ground,” Richard Ireland, the mayor of Jasper, told reporters in Hinton, Alberta, on Friday. He added that he believed that nothing could have stopped the destruction and that all necessary preparations had been taken.

“We want to be in the mountains,” he said. “We want to be in nature. And that means our community is exposed to the threat of wildfire. There are lots of forested communities in Alberta that are exposed.”

The cause of the wildfires is still unclear.

In the vast mountain park, which attracts about 2.5 million visitors each year, the fire has consumed more than 140 square miles, Parks Canada said. About 20,000 park visitors and 5,000 Jasper residents were evacuated late Monday as ash began raining on the town in advance of the flames.

A team of researchers said last year that climate change has increased the risk of large wildfires in Canada, where the fire season typically runs from March to October. Earlier this year, Canadian wildfires also prompted air quality warnings in places including Minnesota and Wisconsin.

While Ireland said that he was “prepared for the worst” before he returned for a tour of the town, where the fire was still very much active, there were some glimmers of positive news Friday.

Wildfire fighters from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand are expected to arrive over the weekend to help battle the 577 active blazes in Alberta and neighboring British Columbia. They will join crews that have flown in from other parts of Canada, where wildfires have been relatively scarce this summer.

The Canadian National Railway restarted freight train service through Jasper on Friday, reopening an economically vital corridor between the Pacific Coast and the rest of North America.

Officials said that rain and cooler temperatures had allowed 158 firefighters who remained in Jasper to at least halt the fire’s advance, although no one had any opinion on when it might be brought under control there (hot and dry weather is expected to return on the weekend). And all the town’s water-treatment facilities, its schools, hospital and other important infrastructure have been saved, according to Parks Canada.

“It is a better day,” the mayor said. “I don’t want to say a brighter day, because I want it to get dark and thunder and lightning, rain like crazy.”

The worst-hit areas are largely residential neighborhoods on the west and south sides of the town, according to the parks agency. No one has died or been seriously injured because of the fires.

Ireland cautioned that when residents returned – still several weeks away, officials said – they might find that even if their homes or business buildings had been untouched by fire, they might nevertheless be severely damaged by smoke or water.

“It’s going to be difficult,” he said of the day when the town reopened to its citizens. “The pain that will be felt almost defies description. It is beyond comprehension.”

Jeff Morris, a driver and guide for a tour company in Jasper, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Canada’s public broadcaster, that posts on social media suggested that his house had been saved, while the rest of his subdivision had been destroyed.

It looks like almost an “apocalyptic nightmare,” he told the broadcaster, adding that he was already preparing to help neighbors sort through the remains of their homes. “I’ll help, wherever, wherever my hands are needed. We’ll put the town back together.”

Along with neighboring Banff National Park, Jasper was made a park in large part to promote tourist travel by train, which was initially the only way to reach the community. Claire Campbell, who edited and contributed to a scholarly history about what is now Parks Canada, said that the striking mountain scenery soon became an international symbol of the then-young nation.

“Both at the founding of the original Rocky Mountain parks right through to the present day, images of these parks have been exported internationally as representative of Canada by the federal government,” said Campbell, who is Canadian and teaches Canadian history at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. “In some ways, we see how the world sees us, and then we adopt that image, as well.”

Both parks dislodged Indigenous people from their lands and, until recently, shut them out of their operations.

Campbell said that Jasper, where Canadian National built a wood lodge surrounded by wooden cabins, always had a different reputation from Banff, where the Canadian Pacific Railway built an enormous, stone-clad hotel in the style of a French château.

“Jasper was the more rustic of the two and offered a more romantic, back-to-nature atmosphere,” she said.

The original Jasper Park Lodge burned down in the early 1950s. Its replacement, which opened in 1952 and is now known as the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge, survived the current fire, but four other buildings in the complex have been lost, the hotel chain said.

Ireland said that he had no doubt his town would rebuild.

“The mountains are still there,” he said. “They will be there and so will our community.”