Parks Canada uses winter months to design wildfire resilient forest in Banff National Park

After a century of wildfire suppression, the forest in Banff National Park has grown into an ideal fuel source for wildfires. The evergreen trees are all an even age, undisturbed by fire, and have become so dense they choked out other species.

It's one of the big drivers behind why Parks Canada says it needs to return fire to the landscape, and strategically take away that fuel. 

In a controlled way, fire can be the nexus for biodiversity, and with warmer and drier summers in southern Alberta, cutting down that fuel load is essential to keeping those living in the Bow Valley safe from catastrophic wildfires. 

There's a sense of urgency, and it's a year-round job.

"There's a lot of modelling … to kind of understand what we need to do to make the valley more resilient, both in terms of reducing the impact to communities but also maintaining a more resilient ecosystem," fire and vegetation specialist Charlie McLellan said. "Certainly we need to keep doing this proactively. We can't stop given how the climate is changing."

Over in the Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay field unit, this winter's big project is on Protection Mountain, a site just off of the Bow Valley Parkway, 17 kilometres from Lake Louise. 

A scree slope coming from the mountaintop is a natural design feature that leads into the man-made fire guard, also known as a fire break.

A swath of trees has been cleared on this 1.5-kilometre-long section of land — a 33-hectare bald spot that McLellan said ensures if either side of the forest lights up, it doesn't spark another fire. He said it will protect Lake Louise and communities further downstream.

It looks out of place, all the heavy equipment and piles of logs a contractor is cutting to size and hauling off in trucks — keeping the proceeds of the timber is part of the contract.

"A lot of the revenue generated from that offsets the cost of our project," McLellan said. "Some of it will go back into the rehabilitation of the area and the restoration."

A clearcut forest doesn't seem like it would benefit wildlife. But McLellan said open space is part of the ecosystem, and it's preferable habitat for species like grizzly bears when foraging. 

"Unfortunately, a lot of the open areas right now in this area of the Bow Valley are associated with roads or campgrounds or the highway," McLellan said. "Those areas can also have increased chances of mortality for bears or human-wildlife conflict." 

And throughout the project there are efforts made to keep some habitat: tree-cut stumps left standing for birds' perches, wet habitat left intact and tree removal done using a different approach. 

A ground survey found a rogue few sprigs of young five-needle pine, or whitebark pine, which are being protected in hopes the endangered tree species will have a chance to grow. 

This project is a proactive one. Fire guards are built on the fly while there's an active wildfire threat, but McLellan said that's not ideal. Under pressure, they can't make all these wildlife considerations and strike an ecological balance. 

'All it takes is a lightning strike'

Driving into the Banff townsite, visitors can often smell the evergreen needles burning, and see Parks Canada crews at work piling up trees to burn near the roadside. 

With that same thick dense forest, especially on the town's southern border where north-facing slopes are stacked with treed fuel, the threat of a catastrophic fire is something fire Chief Silvio Adamo worries about. 

In his 35-year career, he's seen the launch of the town's wildfire mitigation program, which started in 2005, but he's also seen wildfire seasons get longer, with more sustained periods of risk.

"We're so vulnerable, and all it takes is a lightning strike or someone that's careless with a cigarette or some illegal campfire that is going on outside of our area — and we have a wildfire on our hands," Adamo said. "It can't just be about preparedness. We can be as prepared as we can, but we have to mitigate."

A safeguard he's advocating for and hopes Parks Canada can support is a high-volume, high-pressure water line around the southern perimeter of the town. This system, he said, would give fire crews access to water fed from the river to fend off embers on that vulnerable side of town. 

He said that's a new conversation and would be a significant project that would have complex environmental considerations. 

"It's work that needs to be done," Adamo said. 

For the Banff field unit's fire and vegetation crew, winter isn't a time to let up on wildfire management. Acting fire and vegetation specialist David Tavernini said Parks Canada has been increasing winter staffing and trying to do more to the landscape when there's snow on the ground. 

As important as large-scale fire guard projects are, Tavernini said the small-scale work is also making Banff's landscape more resilient.

"At the community level, especially in the past couple of years, is where a lot of our work has been focused," he said. 

There's active work on thinning the forest just off of Banff Avenue on the route into town, and ongoing work on the west side of Sulphur Mountain to complete another fuel break. 

But there's also prep work exploring wildfire risk models to establish which projects to take on in the spring and strategize on prescribed fire plans. 

As the season changes, from winter to summer, the crews shift focus, Tavernini said, from wildfire preparedness to wildfire response.