Every Jasperite wants to get home

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When the notice to evacuate Jasper came, Taylor Booth only grabbed a handful of things: his cat, his Xbox, laptop, his DJ gear and some clothes.

He figured they’d be back home shortly. After all, Jasper had been threatened by forest fires in the past. Before, the town survived, a combination of Herculean efforts by firefighting crews and fortuitous changes in the weather.

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Not so this time.

“When I was packing, I wasn’t packing in the sense of like, ‘oh, sh-t, I’m gonna lose my house.’ I was packing in the sense of like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna be, you know, going away for two or three days and then we’ll be coming back,’” Booth said.

When it was time to go, having watched the “madhouse” in front of his home, Booth headed west, through the mountains to Kamloops, B.C. Thousands of others flooded into British Columbia, or escaped east toward Edmonton. Still others have been routed on a winding route to other cities — hundreds of kilometres away from home.

In one of the earliest videos circulating in the aftermath of the fire, Booth could see the home he shared with his roommates. All that’s left is the foundation.

He has lived in Jasper for 13 years, working in restaurants. The one he works at now also hasn’t survived — nothing is left but the stone fireplace.

“I was finally at a point in my life where I was financially stable. … That’s a very big thing with rent being so high and everything like that ” Booth said. “I had just made some relatively big purchases.”

In the past year, he had upgraded his home, with new bathroom fixtures and kitchen appliances. He’d bought a new television, gaming chair and electric scooter to get to and from work. That’s gone now and he’ll have to rebuild.

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Losses both material and emotional

Paul Burgess, the owner of Vicious Cycle and Snow, a Jasper gear shop that’s part of the Alberta chain Mud, Sweat and Gears, said the store is completely gone. “We obviously haven’t been allowed back in but there won’t be any stock that’s saveable,” he said.

The town itself sees, on a decent year, about 2.5 million visitors — not as many as Banff, but still one of the hottest tourism destinations in the country. In recent years, though, the business community has struggled. Tourism slumped hugely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other fires in recent years, while not so destructive to hearth and home, have also interrupted what would be busy seasons for tourism, sales and rentals. And this past winter, “the worst snow we’ve had in 30 years,” Burgess said, also affected Jasper business.

A bad snow year means less winter tourism.

“So it’s been awfully tough on the whole town,” Burgess said.

Avery Burgess, Paul’s daughter, is the manager of Vicious Cycle and Snow in Jasper. She avoided the evacuation, having already been en route to Edmonton for appointments. While she missed the stress of the flight from the city, it also meant she wasn’t there to grab any particular valuables before leaving. But she got lucky. The store may be gone — but her home is still standing, miraculously.

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“We were one of the lucky ones,” she said. “We were pretty sure that it was gone, it’s on the west end of town. So we got extremely lucky and we must have had some damn good firefighters there.”

She’s been in Jasper on and off for four years and has overseen, for the last two years, three full-time staff and two part-time staff at the Jasper store.

“We’ve always known in the back of our heads that (a fire) was less of an if and more of a when,” she said. “Unfortunately, it damaged us a lot worse than anyone ever could have imagined.”

For now, the job is to make sure staff feel supported. They’re like a family, often flitting between different stores in the province. And at some point, they’ll get back in to see what remains of the business, and get down to the process of rebuilding.

“It’s definitely taken a big chunk of our heart out,” Avery said.

Still, they haven’t seen in person what’s left — if anything.

“That might be a good thing right now, I think. A little time to heal and not have that in front of us is probably a blessing,” said Paul.

‘We’ve got to get out of here’

Ryan Titchener was asleep when the notice came that it was time to go.

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“My roommate actually knocked on my door, kicked my door in, if you will, and said ‘we’ve got to get out of here,’” he recalled. “You just grab what you need and go.”

There was time to grab the essentials: food, gas, water.

“I have a converted camper van … so I was able to jump in that, which had some stuff in it,” Titchener said.

The other thing he went back for was his guitar. And then it was out the door, fleeing westward towards Valemount, B.C., and leaving behind his adaptive ski gear and his kayaks.

“You’re just in survival mode. You’re not really thinking about all your little memorabilia and stuff like that and things that mean the most to you. That’s all gone,” Titchener said.

Other than the contents of his camper van, only one other major item survived: his electric mountain bike, which was in a shop in Canmore after a recent crash in Bragg Creek, Alta.

“I’m like, ‘OK, well, one of the last surviving possessions I even have is now this mountain bike, so I have to go get it,’” Titchener said. The shop told him that the repairs had been paid for.

It turned out they’d done it for free — because they knew he’d lost everything.

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For everyone in Jasper, what comes next is an unknown. They don’t know when they’ll be back or what the rebuilding process will be like. There are multiple GoFundMe fundraisers to help people out. A good proportion of the town was saved, although much of the western area destroyed was residential, the core of postwar houses where Jasperites lived.

“I think every Jasperite wants to get home, not just to see their homes and get some closure from that, but also, you know, recreate our town,” Titchener said.

“The most precious thing in that town was everybody’s lives and not a single one was lost. So the town will be rebuilt, but we didn’t have to mourn the death of anybody, and that was because of the efforts of everyone, co-operating, evacuating safely, and allowing the professionals to get in there and do their job.”

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