Last summer, a wildfire started on Grizzly Ridge in Glacier National Park, near Rogers Pass. In just a few hours, the fire raced upslope, burning to the ridge top. In so doing, this fire burned one hundred hectares of timber and created a column of smoke ten thousand feet into the atmosphere.

Despite the impressive impacts forest fires can have, science indicates that wildfires in our local forests are natural and inevitable. Our local forests are adapted to fires that return more frequently than in the coastal rainforests, but less frequently than interior Okanagan forest. This rate of fire return is important to forest health, maintaining habitat diversity, forest insect and disease rates, rare ecosystems, and habitat for species at risk.

This presents a challenge to Parks Canada: forest fires are both natural and beneficial, yet they clearly have potential to have negative effects on people, property, and infrastructure. Parks Canada’s top priority in all management actions is the safety of people, property and infrastructure. Protecting rare habitat for species at risk is another objective. Keeping forests healthy by safely maintaining fire is a third important goal in National Parks.

Parks Canada is using prescribed burning to harmonize these fire management priorities. Prescribed burning involves the burning of pre-determined tracts of forests under controlled conditions. Although putting fires out is a valuable part of fire management, alone, it cannot mitigate forest fire risk in the long term. In particularly dry summers, some fires inevitably escape early control and become large and difficult to control. Prescribed burning is a proactive and cost effective fire management strategy that imitates a natural process, and promotes forest health.

During the Grizzly Ridge fire, a careful assessment of its location and of the weather showed Parks Canada that the risk of a large fire or smoke problems was very low. Rather than immediately using fire control measures to suppress this fire, Parks Canada staff seized the opportunity to use prescribed fire to burn a larger area. This burned area will also serve as a fire guard that can be used to control large fires in the future.

Watch for the upcoming, riveting Parks Canada film about the Grizzly Ridge Fire called The Burning Question.