The Jasper wildfire was a fiery furnace, temperatures reaching almost 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt copper and gold. 

With such atomic obliteration, will we ever see the forest come back within our lifetime, certainly within mine?

In four days in August I would have my answer. 

There was a frosty silence in the car as we drove the busy QEII south.

It was the August long weekend and we were off on a three-nighter to try and climb Dormer Mountain on the eastern edge of Banff National Park. We had gone for supplies the evening before. As we climbed into the car with the groceries I said to Liam, “Can you believe it? The girl at the check-out said ‘have a nice day.’ Blimey! It’s nine-thirty at night and we’ve got robots telling us to have a nice day. Does nobody think any more?” 

Liam exploded. “You’re always complaining. They’re minimum wage workers, Dad, putting up with customers like you. How’d you like it?”

“Well at least I’d know the time of day. Two-and-a-half hours left and someone’s telling me HAVE A NICE DAY. I can’t believe it !”

Not for the first time, Liam said I was unhinged, carrying on like this.  

We hadn’t even driven out of the parking lot and already it was a full-blown shouting match. 

Later, when social media condemned “the man who stayed behind” and feigned such familiarity with his mental state, it had me wondering if they’d had a quick word with my son. Liam, of course, based his diagnosis on a lifetime of living with his father. 

We broke radio silence as we drove past Red Deer’s Gasoline Alley. “Liam. There’s a Fatburger here! I’d like to stop on the way back.” The driver mumbled that it might be a possibility. 

After Sundre the road turned to gravel. Warnings of bears; thick forest enclosed the homes we drove by. It made me shudder. How would they escape if the forest caught fire?

Nothing like fording a cold river to bring about détente. The trip started with an immediate crossing of Panther River “Boy! That was a close one. I almost fell in.” Liam said I should have crossed where he did because the river was wider and the current not so strong. We would cross the same river another three times on our way to the mountain.

Towards the end of the day black clouds came in. Soon lightning, the crash of thunder, heavy rain, and for awhile we sheltered under a big rock. But we needed a place to camp. We dropped down to the river, had two thigh-deep, dicey crossings before finding a flat spot to camp in the trees. After the tents were up we sat on a rotten log and fixed dinner. It was only as we were packing the grub ready for hanging that a nest of wasps appeared from the end of the log. We ran like hell but I still got stung three times on the ankle.

Next morning we swung round Panther Corners. A strange name and a strange and beautiful spot. Grassy knolls rose into the sky; one expected to see dairy cattle grazing the slopes. A rutted track with metal posted signs, Wagon Trail. This was outfitter country, horse camps and big canvas tents, wagon-trains bringing in the dudes. Yet this weekend Panther Corners was devoid of life. But this was grizzly country; you could feel it. It was not far from here that the hiking couple and their dog were killed last September. 

Once again we forded Panther River then Dormer River before setting up camp by a drainage coming off Dormer Mountain.  It rained long and hard in the night, another thunder storm. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about my friends in Jasper and what they had lost. Tony, and his hundreds of gorgeous Folio first editions; Andrew and Ann, and their great stock of homemade wine and the picture of the Tuareg which was my favourite among their works of art; Sandra, and her lovely garden with the peonies on the corner. All gone.

The rain had stopped by morning and tattered rags of cloud draped the peaks. We set off under a threatening sky; it didn’t look a good day to climb. We followed the drainage up then cut into a mossy forest, duff thick and soft under our boots. Then, by some hideous coincidence, we entered a forest, not burned to the ground as they say but burned standing straight up. Branches burned off, spikes of charred tree trunks stabbing the sky, blackened ugly ground slick from the rain, a reminder that our lives are never far from dreams—or nightmares. 

The rain started again. A rumble of thunder, we discussed what to do. Go on or pack it in? We sheltered under a tree, which was as useless as sheltering under a flagpole. We stood silent, looking around, taking in the beauty. Fireweed had come up, clumps of arnica, patches of luminous fire moss in green and orange, dandelions, grasses, fir seedlings, mottled tree trunks where bits of charred bark had flaked off—it was the Garden of Eden amid the Land of Mordor.

The rain lessened, we went on. We passed like ghosts between the burned trees. Daring to touch nothing; the slightest tremor could snap the top off and send a chunk down to split your skull in half. We slipped on the slick ground, we slipped on the moss that moved like a toupee on a bald head—no duff to hold it in place—I slithered on a steep slope, finally getting up by pulling on clumps of soaking-wet head-high grass. Liam stood at the top smirking down. “And I’m doing this on my day off? I AM mad!”

Eventually Liam shouted: “Dad! I’m out of the burn.” And so we were.

The wildfire was behind us now; it was rocks and boulders, the ridge above covered in cloud,  and a summit still hours away. My heart wasn’t in it. Liam asked if I wanted to go on. “Your choice, dad.” For the first time in 31 years of climbing together my head had had enough. “To hell with the mountain, let’s go home.” Unlike our friends we still had one. 

Back at camp the rain started and the thunder continued into the night. The two rivers came up another five inches and we were lucky to make the six crossings the next day.

Back in Edmonton I looked up the Dormer fire. We had figured, as we cast an eye around as we sheltered under that dripping trunk of a tree, that it was surely quite a few years ago. It was a prescribed burn, initially lit by Parks Canada on September 3, 2022. By October it had become an out-of-control fire and had moved into Crown land outside Banff National Park. That secret garden wasn’t even two-years old.

When I got back to Jasper I walked into a chunk of forbidden charred forest and kicked the top off a mound of grey ash. A seething mass of disturbed ants, like water bubbling from a broken pipe, crawled over the toe of my boot.

David Harrap // info@thejasperlocal.com