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The Jasper Wildfire Produced More Energy than a Nuclear Bomb
What happens when infernos become “unsuppressible”
The Jasper Wildfire Produced More Energy than a Nuclear Bomb
What happens when infernos become “unsuppressible”
WORDS AND PHOTOS BY JESSE WINTER
Published 6:30, MAY 30, 2026
When dawn broke over Jasper, Alberta, on Thursday, July 25, 2024, after a historic wildfire, it revealed the terrible cost of a hard-fought victory that, at first, was difficult to see through the lingering haze.
The southwestern end of town was a smoking ruin, with dozens of family homes reduced to ash-filled pits. Firefighters would spend days drowning basements. The Cabin Creek neighbourhood, which had taken the brunt of the ember storm, was almost completely gone. The historic Anglican church, which had sat at the corner of Geikie Street and Miette Avenue since 1928, was now just a lonely stone chimney reaching toward a grey and cloud-filled sky.
But as heartbreaking as those losses were, it could—and in some ways should—have been far worse. Of the town’s 1,113 structures, an incredible 755 were still standing. More than two-thirds of the town, and all of its critical infrastructure, had been saved in a battle against odds so long, it’s a miracle no one was killed.
Out in the valley, the destruction was even more intense. On the mountainside below Marmot Basin ski resort, one of the most important tourist draws in the national park, evidence of the fire’s savagery left Landon Shepherd, a wildland firefighter and a fire behaviour expert for more than three decades, speechless. Sometimes, if a wildfire burns hot enough, it can sterilize the soil, killing the micro-organisms, the seeds, the root structures, and the mycelium networks that fire-adapted ecosystems rely on to recover. At Marmot Basin, the soil wasn’t just sterilized; it was completely gone, burned to ash by thousand-degree heat and then blasted away by hurricane-force winds. Across a huge swath of mountainside where the suspected fire tornado touched down, not a single tree was left standing. It didn’t look like a wildfire at all. It looked like the site of a nuclear blast.
Other parts of the park now resembled an alien landscape. In areas around the Edith Lake cabins, where fuel treatments had helped tame the fire’s behaviour at least a little, some of the trees appeared to have developed leopard spots. This can happen when the temperature in a forest rises so fast that the sap in the trees boils before the tree burns. The boiling sap causes sections of the blackened bark to erupt in little jets of steam, leaving behind round pockets of white.
On the slopes of Signal Mountain and the Maligne Canyon lookout, an even weirder sight remained. When super-heated gases driven by the fire’s ferocious winds ripped through stands of fir and lodgepole pine, they stripped the bark from trees completely and bent them forward almost ninety degrees in smooth, graceful arcs. The extreme temperature differential between the windward and leeward sides of the trees caused their cell fibres to dry out at different rates, locking them in place. Experts call it fire freeze. Whole mountainsides of gleaming, white tree trunks now appeared frozen in time, cursed to stay bent forever before the fury of a phantom wildfire.
Faced with a fire like this, Jasper had been almost certainly doomed. The fact the town had survived at all was an incredible success—but one that was, at first, hard for many to recognize. As the fire ripped into town on Wednesday night, snippets of video and a few photos showing horrifying scenes began rocketing around the internet. They left thousands of people with the impression that the whole town had been destroyed, a perception that persisted for days.
With the wildfire itself still burning beyond the townsite, Parks Canada and the municipality struggled at first to meaningfully rebut this. Early statements by officials at a press conference on Thursday were vague, saying somewhere between one-third and one half of the town had been lost.
Professional press access could have helped provide crucial context, but journalists couldn’t get into town. Parks Canada largely refused to allow journalists into Jasper for nearly a month after the fire. Unlike previous fires, these restrictions continued even after the evacuation order was lifted and town residents were allowed to return. When asked about this by understandably frustrated........