(p. A4) The loggers’ work was unmistakable.
Flanked by dense forests, the mile-long, 81-acre expanse of land on the mountainside had been stripped nearly clean. Only scattered trees still stood, while some skinny felled trunks had been left behind. A path carved out by logging trucks was visible under a light blanket of snow.
The harvesting of trees would be routine in a commercial forest — but this was in Banff, Canada’s most famous national park. Clear-cutting was once unimaginable in this green jewel in the Canadian Rockies, where the longstanding policy was to strictly suppress every fire and preserve every tree.
But facing a growing threat of wildfires, national park caretakers are increasingly turning to loggers to create fire guards: buffers to stop forest fires from advancing into the rest of the park and nearby towns.
“If you were to get a highly intense, rapidly spreading wildfire, this gives fire managers options,’’ David Tavernini, a fire and vegetation expert at Parks Canada, the federal agency that manages national parks, said as he treaded on the cleared forest’s soft floor.
. . .
Long-planned measures meant to protect against wildfires — like the fire guard in Alberta’s Banff park and other projects in the town of Banff — have taken on a greater sense of urgency.
. . .
The increased number of fires in sparsely populated areas of Canada has affected not only nearby communities, but also distant ones, with the intense smoke they have generated floating into southern Canada and into the United States.
. . .
In Banff National Park, which was created in 1885 and is Canada’s oldest, officials until 1983 hewed to a strict policy of fire suppression, rather than take significant steps to prevent or manage fires.
The result now is a landscape of dense forests dominated by conifers, which are extremely flammable.
Historical photos of the area before the park was established show a greater variety of trees and more open spaces, said Mr. Tavernini, the fire and vegetation expert at Parks Canada. Lightning and controlled burns by the local Indigenous people regularly thinned out the forests, he said.
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(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 29, 2024, and has the title “Logging in Canada’s Most Famous National Park to Save It From Wildfires.”)