Re: Wildfires in Jasper NP, Canada

On 7/29/2024 4:42 PM, Alan wrote:

On 2024-07-29 10:28, -hh wrote:

Tom Elam <thomas.e.elam@gmail.com> wrote:

On 7/24/2024 2:21 PM, -hh wrote:

Looks like Tom's trip might have some disruptions:
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<https://apnews.com/article/wildfire-canada-jasper-national-park-evacuation-167dcc0e03984672584f9770799c2fb8>
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-hh

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We did not get to go to ice fields up that way. The tour company
substituted a very nice local trip with lunch. Otherwise all went off as
scheduled. We had a great time. The train trip was the highlight. If you
go choose the Gold level.
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Glad to hear that you’re safe & relatively unaffected.
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We had found Jasper to be a cute town; seems apparently that the main drag
has been wiped out, which is a loss.  Ice fields up that way were
okay…didn’t leave a huge impression on us, since we’ve been to a few others
prior…”ice is ice” to a certain degree :-)

 Yeah.. ...our Dad took us to see most of the sights from Jasper down to Banff, and the ice fields were kind of cool...
 ...once.
 

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For trains, was on one today (two, actually) to go to visit an Edgar Degas
special exhibit. Learned that with one exception, all of his bronzes were
made posthumously, as they were his private working pieces made only for
developing his own paintings in his studio.

The whole trip for us was kinda cool, once. The eagles along the rivers were no different from our eagles along our rivers. However, the lower tree line in the Canadian mountains makes them more spectacular than the U.S. version.
We are really paying a price for disrupting the natural fire cycle. In 1983 I was out in Yellowstone for the first time. Observing the 100+ years of dead-fall lodgepole pine littering the forest floors it was obvious to me that if a fire ever got really going there would be no stopping it. In 1988 36% of the park burned. It was not stopped until autumn weather brought rain and snow. I was back 2 years ago and it is amazing how fast some areas have recovered.