Jasper, Alberta, made international headlines in March of 2024, when wildfires roared through the area and forced thousands to evacuate. Ever since, Jasper National Park and its surrounding town have been in mighty recovery mode, and now a handful of tours is leaning into the both the tragedy and the healing as a way to offer visitors a powerful new perspective on the area.
Recently, I jumped at a chance to check out these new offerings in Jasper, which sits at the north end of Alberta’s Icefields Parkway and is home to the towering Rocky Mountains, stunning glacier-fed lakes, and caribou, bears, and bighorn sheep.
I’d been worried about this special place ever since my last visit there, in March of 2019, when pine, spruce, and fir trees formed a thick curtain along roadsides, snowcapped mountains peeking up behind them in the distance. My sister and I had walked to dinner passing elk beside the road. When we checked into our cabin at Bear Hill Lodge, the owner asked if, by chance, I had brought a copy of the national newspaper with me from Toronto, because it’s not delivered up there. (Unfortunately, I hadn’t.)
What I found when I returned on a sunny afternoon this past September was a place that was rapidly rebuilding—offering lessons about not only nature’s resilience but also community spirit, particularly for a thriving local restaurant scene.
Revisiting the forest
I took part in a half-day Wildlife and Ecology of Fire tour, with stop one being a viewpoint just off Highway 16 looking toward Pyramid Mountain, one of the park’s most prominent peaks. At first glance, I was overwhelmed by the sight of trees turned to matchsticks, flowing from right to left, as if they had leaned under the weight of waves and then froze. But Jeff Hanson, the SunDog Tours guide who created the tour, asked our group to fix our gazes much closer to where we were standing.
A melted pay phone stand shows the power of the inferno; a Sundog Tours bus heads into Jasper National Park.
Photo by Maryam Siddiqi (L); photo by Amy Wheeldon (R)
The forest floor was green with saplings of aspen trees, grasses, and flowering forbs popping up from the black earth. “People think it’s all devastation, and I like to point out how Mother Nature rejuvenates,” he says. “We get to see everything coming back. We’re getting reconstruction, the animals are coming back. Fire is a natural process.”
We made a roadside stop closer to Mount Edith Cavell, with a melted pay phone stand at the edge of a scenic lookout. A short walk away, Hanson points out a massive boulder sitting on the edge of a river that was split in half from the sheer force of the fire’s heat.
But at another stop, Maligne Canyon Overlook, a wooden outhouse sits untouched despite its charred surroundings. “I call that the luckiest outhouse in Jasper. Literally everything around it is melted, burnt, and gone. And somehow that outhouse survived,” he says. “That just shows the absolute power and the randomness of the inferno.”
Fireside chats and an adapting food scene
I noticed another thing throughout the tour: new vantage points. I could see parts of the park previously unviewable because of the tree canopy. It was inspiring and perspective shifting: The familiar view may be gone, but its absence offers a new way of taking in the landscape.
The tour I was on was a variation of an existing SunDogs tour that used to focus on wildlife, but, like everyone and everything else in town, had to adapt. Although only 3 percent, or about 76,600 acres of the 2.7 million acre park, was affected by the fire, flames roared through the south end of town and some of Jasper National Park’s most visited sights. Valley of the Five Lakes, Maligne Canyon, and Edith Cavell Meadows, all popular day-use trails, remain closed.
Matricia Bauer is a Cree storyteller who leads beading classes and fireside chats through her Jasper company, Warrior Women.
Courtesy of Tourism Jasper
It was the largest fire in the area in 100 years. “In a way, we were anticipating it. And now that it’s here, it’s sort of like we can breathe a sigh of relief,” says Matricia Bauer, a Cree storyteller who welcomes visitors to Jasper through experiences at her company Warrior Women. She leads beading classes, plant walks, and fireside chats that include drumming and conversations about Cree traditions and culture. Today, these conversations inevitably include the fire, which Bauer welcomes.
“With the fireside chat, people are asking about it. With the plant walks, we’re walking through burnt areas discussing plots [of land] that didn’t used to be in the area. It changes the landscape, but also the people who are in Jasper,” she says, noting that it’s not just tourists taking a seat at her fireside chats. “I’ve had a really large uptick of domestic people from Jasper who are coming for, I think, healing as well.”
Necessity breeds innovation, of course, and the food scene is adapting, too. Although over a dozen restaurants in town were damaged or destroyed, there are many whose kitchens are busy. The Maligne Range’s dining experience is shaped around the whisky it makes, offering flights, guided tastings and a hearty-protein-focused menu—the crispy smoked pork belly bites are a must. Su Casa’s Mexican menu includes local touches like elk tacos topped with onion and guacamole.
The Maligne Range offers an innovative dining experience focused on hearty dishes; downtown Jasper.
Courtesy of Tourism Jasper
Hikes, frank discussions, and a hopeful future
Estelle Blanchette, who runs Jasper Food Tours, guides a hiking experience called Wildfire Peak-Nic, an evolution of a pre-fire guided 2.5-mile hike on Old Fort Point Loop that, along with views of the mountains, forest, and the glacier-fed Athabasca River, included a backcountry cooking demonstration and freshly made lunch. But since the fire, the winds have changed, so cooking is no longer an option; instead, guests now get packed lunches of hot soup and hearty panini from local café Lostlands.
“We talk about how the fire started, what the conditions were at the time, and what led to the fire. But most of the focus is on the regrowth, the benefits of the fires and how it has expanded habitat for certain species of mammals and birds, how the landscape has a healthy future,” Blanchette explains. “We’re witnessing nature in motion.”
Toward the end of Hanson’s tour, before he dropped our group back at the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge, just outside of town, he spotted some elk at the forest’s edge. We watched as they munched on grasses and forbs. They were back, roadside as they had been before, reclaiming their space.
Once I got to the hotel, I grabbed my sunglasses and hit the Lac Beauvert trail, a flat and peaceful route that cuts a path through the resort’s property. The first half of the two-mile walk was idyllic—thriving forest, the lake lapping against the shoreline, another tourist paddling in a canoe. Halfway round, the scenery changed dramatically.
While most of the hotel’s property was spared, the fire did hit the grounds and damage some operational buildings, suites, and forest. The path around the lake leads directly into some of that forest, and the aspen trees around me went from leafy to naked. But still my gaze was drawn upward to take in their towering presence. They, like the town and its people, still stood.
