Alberta mountain towns deal with ‘low-grade anxiety’ as wildfire season begins

Despite spring snow still dusting parts of Alberta, it’s now officially wildfire season, and with it comes once again the gnawing worry about which community will next be touched by nature’s fickle finger of destruction.

But in the Rocky Mountain towns of Canmore and Hinton, they aren’t waiting to find out.

Both say they haven’t forgotten the fate of Jasper in 2024, when fires torched a third of the mountain town’s structures and forced 25,000 to flee in the dead of night.

“Being a community, very much like ours … a tourist destination surrounded by trees … it could happen to you,” Canmore Mayor Sean Krausert said in an interview.

“It was just a reminder of how devastating wildfire is and it certainly was one of the motivators for us in the work we’re doing.”

Krausert said Canmore is in the midst of a multi-phase project to build a fireguard around the town. The fireguards clear a strip of land of trees and other foliage to stop a rampaging fire in its tracks by giving it nothing to feed on.

One fireguard phase has been completed on the south-facing slopes of the nearby mountains that get the most sun and are therefore the driest.

A second fireguard is well underway. On a ridge overlooking Canmore, the trees have been razed, leaving behind dozens of piles of debris, some up to 10 metres high, that will likely be burned next winter.

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A third project will see a 150-metre wide swath run 15 kilometres south down the valley.

“I think all of us who live in the valley as we go through wildfire season have some low grade anxiety,” Krausert said.

“I don’t think you can live in a valley full of trees and be comfortable given the wildfires in the last number of years.”

Work is going on in town, too.

Thirteen neighbourhoods are in the Canmore FireSmart program, which urges homeowners to, for example, clean pine needles out of their gutters and keep debris off the roof.

“A big part of the problem is actually the ember showers that travel two kilometres ahead of the wildfire,” said Simon Bagshaw, Canmore’s FireSmart coordinator. “They land on woodpiles, they land on conifer trees and even mulch that people have and those are the things that can ignite.”

In Hinton, a town an hour’s drive east of Jasper, they are building a five-kilometre firebreak around the community after the Jasper fire and a 2023 fire in nearby Edson that led to evacuations.

“We (Jasper, Hinton and Edson) are kind of the three sisters — and Hinton is the one in the middle that hasn’t (been hit by fire),” said Mayor Brian Laberge.

Laberge said the fireguards are not smooth process, especially when it comes to removing beloved groves.

“Landowners are going, ‘What the heck, I love my trees,’” he said. “You go to these guys who are living on an acreage, and now the government’s going to come and saw down all their trees?”

Wildfire expert Jed Kaplan said hotter summers, longer dry periods and warm winters due to climate change are making wildfires a constant risk, prompting steps to reduce the damage where possible.

“The mountain towns say between Calgary and Vancouver, those are the areas where I do think there are some concrete interventions that can be made,” said Kaplan, with the University of Calgary.

“We have to cross our fingers that a lot of these treatments can be completed before there is a big fire.”

Alberta Forestry Minister Todd Loewen said crews have already responded to 27 new wildfires this year.

In a statement, he said the big change needs to come with awareness as an estimated 60 per cent of wildfires are caused by human activity and the rest by lightning.

“Even small changes in behaviour can make a big difference,” Loewen said.