Skyline Trail South - One Year After the Jasper Wildfire

Описание: One year after the firestorm that burned a third of the town and hundreds of square kilometres of forestland in the surrounding valleys and mountainsides, the recovery process of infrastructure reconstruction and natural regeneration is well underway. Although those processes will take many years, most of the backcountry trails are already open including the entire Skyline Trail except for the Wabasso Lake access.

There is a stark difference between the southern terminus depicted in this video that was unaffected by the fire, and the northern terminus that was at the heart of the firestorm. The wind speeds there, that must have been well in excess of hurricane force, and that were likely caused by fire tornadoes, not only burned everything in their path but literally tore many trees and their root systems right out of the ground. I have included before and after pictures of the northern trailhead at the end of this video.

For this trip, I just hiked the southern end of the trail, which was all I was able to book earlier in the season. Accordingly, I camped for two nights at Little Shovel campsite and day-hiked over Little Shovel Pass into Snowbowl and down to Jeffery Creek. Weather was mixed sun and cloud, with occasional light showers and heavy rain in the early evening of the second night; but the alpine flowers were near their peak, and with the usual stunning heather displays in Snowbowl. No large critters were seen, although I received an email to my phone just before hitting the trail advising of a nuisance female grizzly bear with two cubs on the trail... just what you want to hear right before setting out on a solo backpack!

On my last Skyline hike, an overnight return trip from Maligne Lake to Watchtower, I sat eating lunch at Little Shovel Pass for half an hour watching a wolverine cooling off on a nearby remnant snow patch. To see this, watch my part-2 video of the Watchtower hike in the Skyline playlist linked at the end of this video. A photo of that wolverine later appeared in BC Nature magazine. This was one of three wolverines that I have been fortunate to see in the backcountry: one was at a good distance (the usual way to see a wolverine) in Erg Mountain Provincial Park, this one at Little Shovel Pass in Jasper National Park at a medium distance, and one face-to-face (two metres) while bushwhacking off trail around an alpine lake in Sugarbowl-Grizzly Den Provincial Park.

A highlight of this trip was meeting two young women from New Hampshire and Washington respectively, who were accomplished long distance backpackers having hiked the 3,536-kilometre Appalachian Trail last year. They were the first AT through-hikers that I had met and they happily agreed to a photo to commemorate that. The next day I met a family and a couple from Maine and had some interesting conversations with them; and in between I met a guy from Cambridge in the UK who had hiked the famous John Muir Trail the year before. His plan, on reaching the southern end of the Skyline Trail was to turn around and hike it again in reverse, although I suspect he changed his mind and hitched or caught the bus back to Jasper as I didn't pass him on my hike out. However, on that hike out I did pass several small parties who were running the entire 42-kilometre Skyline Trail in a day (most people take two to four days), totaling 15 runners in all. The Skyline is a relatively easy mountain run (although the four-kilometre exposed ridgeline immediately north of The Notch can be problematic in bad weather) and seems to be increasingly popular for that activity.

All in, a pleasant short backpacking trip and reintroduction to the Jasper backcountry after the July 2024 wildfire.