In this episode, I look at the Canadian connections between the T.V. series Game of Thrones and western Canada. Think thrones, direwolves, and dragons! I also examine the new draft Fire Management Plan for Banff, Yoho, and Kootenay National Parks.
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Banff, Yoho, and Kootenay National Parks Fire Management Plan
Forest fires have been an ever-increasing reality in the mountain west. With warming climates, fire seasons are getting longer, summer droughts are lengthening, and decades of fire suppression are coming back to roost.
Way back in 1984, Cliff White wrote Banff’s first fire management plan. It was the first time that fire was looked at as a natural process that was not just inevitable, but necessary to the ecological integrity of the mountains.
Cliff was a pioneer in helping to change the attitudes toward forest fire that had been pervasive since the late 1800s. When Banff National Park was established in 1885, the first park wardens were fire wardens charged with keeping the scourge of wildfire out of our precious mountain landscapes.
The landscape that greeted these first wardens were very different from the ones we consider normal today. Instead of an endless forest of spruce and pine, there were stands of trees widely separated by grasslands.
These were forests forged by fire. Regular fires built a landscape that reflected the recurring character of fire in the assemblage of animals, plants, and birds that called the mountains home.
For the past two years, we’ve talked about fires in this podcast and I’ve tried to share a different view of fire as an integral part of the mountain landscape, and dismiss the old belief that fire was a force of destruction.
Ecosystems are defined as communities of plants and animals AND the natural processes that link them to each other and to the physical environment. The natural processes are forest fires, floods, avalanches, insect infestations, climate, and disease.
Of all of these processes that are integral in connecting plants and animals to the landscape, after climate, fire is the most prominent.
Cliff White’s 1983 management plan began to change our perspective on fire. Historically, fire played a consistent role in helping shape the ecology of the mountain west. Suppressing fires didn’t improve ecosystem health; on the contrary, it seriously hampered it.
Cliff White is still contributing to our understanding of fire ecology. In episode 68, I shared a presentation he delivered in Canmore detailing a strategy that would help us embrace fire as a rejuvenating force as opposed to waging a futile war against a necessary component of the ecosystem. You can listen to that talk at MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep068.
This new fire management plan integrates the many lessons that we’ve learned since Cliff’s first plan to help bring the mountain national parks to the forefront of forest fire management.
This new plan looks to accomplish three different goals:
- “protect the public and infrastructure as necessary;
- allow wildfire to fulfill its ecological role with minimal interference wherever possible; and
- conduct prescribed fires to offset the detrimental effects of fire suppression.”
The plan recognizes that decades of fire suppression has not only affected ecosystem health but also put public infrastructure at higher risk of wildfire.
Research over the past 20-years has shown that there are three main challenges caused by our historic mismanagement of forest fire:
- We have too many trees. Prior to programs of extensive fire suppression, forest fires were a much more regular visitor to the mountains. This meant that the landscape reflected the importance of fire. Trees occurred in stands rather than in dense forests. The stands were separated by meadows which supported large populations of bison, elk, deer, and bighorn sheep.
- There’s too much building on the forest-urban interface. One fire ecologist put it best when he stated that fires weren’t coming to us, we’re building in the fire zones. More and more new housing developments in many communities are being built in areas that are at a high risk of wildfire.
- Finally, with changing climates, temperatures are rising rapidly, summer droughts are becoming more prolonged, and this is reflected in longer and more intense fire seasons.
Fire is essential to the health of our ecosystems and the lack of fire has seen many species adversely affected. At the same time, we’ve allowed stands of trees to grow into dense forests with each tree touching its neighbour. When fires do occur, there is little to keep them from spreading over vast areas.
This new management plan looks for ways to allow fires to burn where possible while still planning for ways to integrate fire into more highly populated areas through prescribed burns. Other areas will rely on fuel reduction programs to help reduce the likelihood of wildfires in areas near communities and important infrastructure.
One challenge to the full implementation of a more welcoming approach to wildfire management has to do with the Species at Risk Act or SARA. This act provides added limitations to the application of fire as a management plan and, depending on the site, fire might be considered to be the destruction of important habitat, even though fire has been a natural part of that habitat for as long as the forests have been there.
Currently, only emergency fire suppression is considered to be exempt from SARA. Parks Canada is working to find a better way to achieve the goals of SARA while also allowing the goals of fire management to be met.
Another significant challenge to any fire management plan is the need for wider public acceptance of its presence as a natural part of life in a forested landscape. This means a strong focus on public education is essential in helping people to understand the difference between managed and unmanaged forests.
As Cliff White, in his presentation that I mentioned earlier, often states: “burn early and burn often!”. The endless, choking smoke that has characterized the last few summers is NOT reflective of managed fires.
When you suppress fire for decades, fuel builds up, and the resultant fires can burn extremely hot and long. Much of the smoke we see in these long fire seasons are the result of these extra hot fires burning right down to the humus, which smoulders for long periods.
Prescribed fires are planned so they burn out quickly, providing the benefit to ecosystem health and fire reduction, while not resulting in months of smouldering smoke. The idea of burn early and burn fast means planning fires in the early spring when there is still snow on the ground in some areas so the fires will burn, but won’t persist.
The landscapes of the Canadian Rockies include the four mountain national parks, along with numerous provincial parks and wilderness areas to create a protected corridor encompassing some 28,000 square kilometres.
Fire takes advantage of the physical layout of any landscape it encounters. The central Rockies are often characterized by deep forested valleys that run parallel to the prevailing winds. This allows fires to spread quickly as west winds fan the flames eastward.
In Banff National Park, river valleys like the Bow, Clearwater, Red deer, North Saskatchewan, and Panther, allow fires to quickly spread from west to east as winds fan the flames. In Yoho National Park, the Kicking Horse allows the fires to similarly spread and finally, the Vermillion and Kootenay Rivers in Kootenay National Park help fires move north towards the vulnerable Bow River Valley.
At the same time, the valleys have sun-baked south-facing slopes which can facilitate ignition and set up the potential for wide spreading fires. Add to this the fact that there is also a moisture gradient that runs from west to east. This means that any fires that start in the west find increasingly dry conditions as they spread with the west-east wind patterns.
If we add chinook winds to the equation, the potential for wide spreading wildfire increases dramatically. We often think of chinooks as a winter phenomenon, but these hot, dry west to east winds occur year-round – we just tend to notice them more in the winter. In California, the same winds are known as the Santa Annas and they are responsible for helping wildfires spread to vast areas.
If we have a lot of winter chinooks, it can leave our valleys exceedingly dry before the fire season even begins. With chinooks, snowpacks literally evaporate through sublimation, and by April, the landscape is primed for fire.
This can be a perfect time for prescribed burns. The fire-prone south-facing slopes are primed for fire, but there is still a lot of snow in adjacent areas. To experts like Cliff White, this is the time to burn.
One surprise to me while I was reading this new management plan had to do with the distribution of lightning. Lightning is one of the major causes of forest fires, but it isn’t evenly distributed. Just like the west to east movement of weather systems leaves the eastern slopes in a rain shadow, we also are in a lightning shadow.
The report lists an interesting statistic:
“most of the lightning fires in Banff Kootenay and Yoho are located west of the Continental Divide, in the Kicking Horse Valley (Yoho National Park) and in the Kootenay and Vermillion valleys (Kootenay National Park). In Banff National Park, lightning was recorded as the ignition source for 31% of all wildfires (1985-2017) but accounts for only 10% of total area burned. While in Yoho National Park, lightning accounts for 58% of all fires but only 3% of area burned. Kootenay National Park typically experiences the highest number of lightning-caused wildfires of all three parks, with 71% of all fires occurring from lighting accounting for 90% of the total area burned.”
This explains why the highway through Kootenay National Park has always been referred to as lightning alley. I’ve included a map showing the incidence of lightning strikes between Banff, Yoho, and Kootenay in the show notes to this episode at MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep078. It really says a lot when you see it so starkly displayed.
Earlier, I mentioned that there was a moisture difference when travelling from west to east, but there’s also a big difference when travelling south to north in Kootenay National Park. The park has an interpretive theme statement: “From cactus to glacier”, and the drive from Radium Hot Springs in the south towards Vermillion Pass in the north really showcases this disparity.
This also means that the southern end of the park has a longer-drier fire season than the north.
Our mountain national parks are dominated by three main ecoregions: the montane, subalpine and alpine. The valley bottoms, or montane ecoregion, are critical habitat for wildlife but only account for a very small part of the landscape. If you look around while you’re in places like Canmore or Banff, you’ll see a whole lot of vertical, but not a lot of horizontal. Those rare, low valley flat spots represent the Montane. It only encompasses around 3% of the landscape but contains most of the development. It’s the most critical wildlife habitat in the mountains, but unfortunately for the animals, we also like to live in the flat valley bottom.
As you move higher up the mountains, they get wetter and colder and so the fire danger is reduced. If you go high enough, you reach the treeline and any wildfire naturally runs out of fuel. If we look to the fire history of the mountain regions, the fire record shows higher elevation forests had much longer intervals between fires as compared to the lower montane valleys.
Now here’s the really interesting part of our fire history. While the eastern slope valleys like that of the Bow River have historically had few lightning-caused fires prior to the 1880s and the advent of European development and suppression of fire in the west, evidence showed frequent fires in the area regardless of lightning.
Evidence also shows that these fires burned during times when lightning strikes were not common and prior to the normal peak fire season. This disparity between logical fire season and actual fire records has led researchers to recognize the likelihood that early indigenous populations were using fire to improve wildlife habitat.
Human-assisted fires have been documented throughout the mountain national parks. What we can learn from these fires is that they were low-intensity fires during the spring when natural fires would have been rare. The report states:
“The incongruence between fire frequency and season of burning has been hypothesized to have been the result of anthropogenic burning by local indigenous people to draw game species into the valley bottoms for food. This strong linkage between a lowered fire cycle and anthropogenic burning is also evident in the short fire cycles (25-years) observed in the southern Kootenay Valley and the Columbia Valley portions of Kootenay National Park.”
These early fire friendly landscapes supported very different assemblages of animals than they do today. Banff is full of archaeological evidence of first nations occupation. There are sites dating as far back as 13,000 years. Where are these sites? They are exactly where you are today. These early visitors used the landscape the same way we do today. They followed the low valleys of the montane and hunted the animals that called it home.
So when they did visit, what was on their menu? Very simply the answer is bison and bighorn sheep. Frequent fires, assisted by these early visitors, meant that there was ideal habitat for bison and sheep. Archaeological sites show that of the remains of food animals left behind by these early people, 47% were bison and 37% were sheep. Deer and elk each represented a mere 7% and moose less than 1%. Bison and sheep were the main courses and both were highly benefitted by regular, low-intensity fires.
It’s important to note that these fires were small and generally timed so they would burn out quickly so that grasslands would regrow and provide excellent forage for wildlife. Essentially, they were following the same guidelines pioneered by Cliff White and now proposed by Parks Canada. Burn early and burn often.
Looking at the entire fire record though shows that overall, the huge, stand-replacing fires, were much larger in extent and were usually connected to lightning strikes. According to one study, 3% of lightning strikes accounted for 95% of the actual area burned. Historical data beginning in 1891 shows that 5% of all fires account for 95% of the total area burned in the past 120 years.
Our fire regiment has shifted from frequent low-intensity fires to infrequent high-intensity conflagrations. Our suppression of the natural role of fire has put extreme stress on our local ecology.
Here’s the part where you really need to pay attention! The past two summers have seen record fire seasons with smoke that choked the skies for several months. Yes, warming climates have spawned more fires, but that’s not the point. Are you ready? We, you and me, are the ones that created the conditions that blackened our lungs and left us choking
We suppressed every fire that started for more than 100 years. We literally changed the ecology of the entire mountain landscape. Where once there were stands of trees separated by grasslands which fed bison and bighorn sheep, we created dense monocultures of trees that have choked out the sun.
These dense stands of trees are now what we call fuel. Dense forests are not great wildlife habitat, they are merely fuel for fires that will make great wildlife habitat. If we think about forests as competition for sunlight, the denser the canopy, the lower the amount of sunlight able to percolate towards the forest floor.
Less sunlight means fewer shrubs and herbs that are important to wildlife.
As this new management plan compared its goal of bringing current fire cycles into line with historic ones, it’s apparent that most areas in the parks are still getting a failing grade. This is where prescribed fires become important. If the natural role of fire can’t match historic amounts without threat to infrastructure than prescribed burns can help.
It’s now clearly evident that fire is not a destructive force, but a force that is both historically prevalent and ecologically necessary. Flames stimulate forest succession and reset the clock. It opens the canopy, allows new growth (also known as food) to thrive and reduces the risk of wildfire in the near future.
Prescribed burns supplement these natural fires. It allows us to burn at times of the years where we can utilize the flames to reduce fuel and improve habitat while also reducing the risk of vast, long burning, smoke-producing fires.
Burn early and burn often. It’s a mantra that may become more and more important as we look to help fire become an integral part of the landscape again, as it was before we decided that fire was evil.
Where are we now in terms of fire risk? According to the report:
“A recent national assessment of fire risk and potential consequences rated Banff, Kootenay and Yoho national parks in the highest category (Level 1 Risk, Level 5 Consequences) based on the probability of fire occurrence and potential consequences with respect to public safety, potential infrastructure losses, and disruption of critical services. Level 5 consequence is defined as “major potential for loss of life; serious
injuries with long-term effects. Widespread displacement of people for prolonged duration. Extensive damage to properties (>10 houses) in affected area. Serious damage to infrastructure causing significant disruption of key services for prolonged period. Significant long-term impact on the environment.”
This is where we stand today. Looking forward, Parks has designated Banff, Yoho, and Kootenay based on three criteria; intensive, intermediate, and extensive fire management zones.
Intensive zones are places like the towns of Canmore and Banff where a fire can have huge impacts on local infrastructure, homes, and highways. Any fires in these zones will be intensively suppressed. Prescribed fires in adjacent areas and fuel reduction will be used to help reduce the risk of large fires moving through communities.
Intermediate areas represent those areas adjacent to the intensive management zones. Here the risks are lower for communities, but these areas also act as the buffer for those high-risk landscapes. The fire plan allows these areas to burn more extensively than areas closer to townsites but also looks to make sure there are hard breaks to ensure fires don’t spread beyond designated boundaries.
Finally, in those areas of the park where there are fewer risks due to wildfire, they are listed as extensive fire management zones. The name is a little misleading. In this area, fires are monitored and allowed to burn with limited interventions depending on their behaviours. They’ll be monitored and prevented from moving beyond certain boundaries, but the long-term goal is to allow more and more of the mountain parks to be refreshed by fire.
Fire, when it fulfills its natural role is NOT the negative smoke-producing or the lung-clogging force we’ve come to believe. It’s essential for allowing sunlight to percolate through the canopy and creating habitat for food plants to grow. The problem we are facing today is not too much fire, it’s too little fire in the past 100 years. If we can work towards replacing the natural role of fire, we can accomplish numerous goals at the same time.
More fires mean more food for elk, deer, moose, bears, and the newly reintroduced bison. We can reduce the risk of huge fires that threaten homes and communities. We can reduce the endless haze of smoke that we’ve begun to expect based on the past few Augusts.
When it comes to forest fires, they are the answer, not the problem.
Game of Thrones Connection to Canada
Well if you follow this podcast you’ll already know that I’m a sucker for dinosaurs. Just look at last weeks episode where I detailed the biggest, the scariest, and the most cuddly Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils. So If a T. Rex is awesome, then a dragon is even…awesomer
The final season of Game of Thrones premiered this week and many people are unaware of some of the ways this show is connected to Canada.
Are you a fan? If not, feel free to skip this story, but for those of you that are, there are a number of strong connections towards this phenom of a television show and western Canada. Just a few weeks ago, the producers, in an attempt to drive buzz to the final season came up with a great idea.
They placed 6 replicas of the Iron Throne in random locations around the world. Then they released cryptic hints to help people try to figure out just where these thrones might be hidden.
As it turns out, one of these thrones was hidden near Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia.
Producers left a video that had no clues, but simply a throne in front of a waterfall, and it was up to Canadian sleuths to track it down. I’ve included the video hint that showed the Canadian throne site in the show notes for this episode at MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep078. It’s a 3D video so once you play it, you can use your mouse to drag it in any direction to see it from different angles. This was all part of the clue.
The other 5 thrones were hidden in Puzlewood England, Castillo de Atienza Spain, Bjorklinden Sweden, and Beberibe Brazil.
How many other shows could inspire such global fandom to be able to pull something like this off?
As it turns out, the Canadian discovery involved a bit of secret sleuthing. It all began when a Tumbler Ridge couple, Kevin and Birgit Sharman received a call from a Calgary reporter that was hunting for the throne. Sleuths had begun to focus on Tumbler Ridge as a potential throne site and when the Sharman’s received the call, something sounded familiar.
They work with the Tumbler Ridge Global Geopark and when the reporter added details to her questions, they realized they might know the exact spot where the throne might be hiding. They played coy with the reporter, but they were on the scent now.
Ironically, while for the residents of Westeros in the television show, winter is coming. In Tumbler Ridge, winter was evidently over and the location chosen for the throne turned out to be too warm.
A Dawson Creek resident on Reddit that goes by the handle anathema wrote that he and a friend had already figured out the location and tried to get there. The location in the teaser video was at a waterfall 3 km from the highway, but as he put it in his post:
“So we get to the normal entrance point and the creek is flowing. The very creek the throne itself is on. We drive around trying to find another path in but it looks like the shortest would be about 1km of waist deep snow through dense forest. Not smart at night. So we give up for the evening. It turned out that we had the location dead on. The melting creek part dead on too. The throne had fallen through the ice into the water.“
Producers rescued the throne from the creek and moved it to an area right beside Highway 52, south of Tumbler Ridge.
As luck would have it, before anathema could return to the site, the Sharman’s had driven to the area and noticed the throne right beside the highway. The hike they had anticipated towards the waterfall in the video wasn’t necessary. The throne was right there.
At first, they thought they were too late. Show producers must have pulled it out after it had been discovered. However, the luck of winter leaving here while it is coming in Westeros gave them the win. As they pulled up, there was also a trailer parked nearby.
As Birgit approached the throne, a man intercepted her and asked why she was here? She replied: “To sit on the throne”, and immediately after, two characters dressed all in Westerosy style furs emerged from the trailer.
A crown was placed on her head and she officially became the first to discover this international throne. Hundreds of people visited the throne in the next few days before it was loaded back into the truck and back to some prop lot in Hollywood.
My girl Jules and I were soooooo close to jumping in our car and rushing up to Tumbler Ridge to see the throne. Not only are we rabid Game of Thrones fans, but Tumbler Ridge is one cool place to visit. In last week’s episode, the trackway that has first shown T. Rex hunting in coordinated packs like velociraptors is located near Tumbler Ridge. Throne or not, it’s a very cool place to visit.
This incident made me wonder what other connections to Game of Thrones Canada might also claim. As it turns out, two important connections jumped out: dire wolves and dragons.
In the first season of the show, the Stark family finds a number of orphaned direwolf cubs. As luck would have it, there was one pup for every member of the family, including John Snow, the illegitimate (or so it seemed) son of the patriarch Ned Stark, played by Irish superstar Sean Bean.
Each legitimate child picked their favourite wolf, and in the end, there was only one left. It was snow white, just like the last name given to bastards in the series, just like John Snow. John picked it up and christened it “Ghost”.
Little did fans know at the time, but Ghost would become a major character in the movie as John grows from a young man to a member of the nights watch and eventually to become King of the North. The wolf, Ghost, actually hails from Alberta and is an arctic wolf that goes by the name of Quigley. It’s trainer Andrew Simpson has trained animals for two decades and helped Ghost to become an integral part of the Thrones story.
Simpson has also worked on movies like The Revenant, Braveheart, and the series Vikings. While it remains to be seen what role Ghost will play in the final season, what is known is that Maisie Williams, the actor that plays Aria Stark in the series spent time in the Banff area in 2017 to film with, as a global news story put it, an “animal attraction”. One would not be foolish to assume this to be Quigley the arctic wolf.
Perhaps we’ll see Ghost playing an important role as the story unfolds in its final season this year. One thing we’ll surely see are the dragons of Daenerys Targaryen. Viewers of the series have watched the dragons as they hatched in season one and slowly grew to become the formidable creatures they are as the series heads towards its conclusion this year.
Now for a fair warning. If you are watching the series but you’re not caught up to the end of season 7, there are spoilers ahead, so stop listening now. Now really stop! You’ll be mad if you don’t see the crazy stuff that happens live on the screen.
Well, we all know that dragons aren’t real…at least not anymore (ok or ever). However they have been integral to the series and as the dragons played a more and more important role, they had to become just as real as any of the live actors in the series.
That all fell to a relatively unknown visual effects company out of Vancouver called Image Engine. They are becoming well known for being able to create incredibly realistic CGI characters and these dragons are their masterpiece.
They did a great deal of research before they began designing the dragons. They wanted to best understand how an animal like this might actually move. To accomplish this, they looked at animals that do exist. They looked at flight patterns of bats and eagles. They looked at wind in ships sails to see how it might affect the membranes in the dragon’s wings. The created a skeleton and a muscular system. When the dragon moves, everything looks absolutely real.
Drogon is perhaps the most perfectly designed dragon ever to hit the screen. This dragon has helped to make dragons real! Sure, it’s all just CGI but you tell me that when the dragons are torching the Lannister army in Season 7. Every time you look at this dragon, imagine it apologizing after it destroys armies…After all, it’s the Canadian thing to do.
Intensive zones are places like the towns of Canmore and Banff where a fire can have huge impacts on local infrastructure, homes, and highways. Any fires in these zones will be intensively suppressed. Prescribed fires in adjacent areas and fuel reduction will be used to help reduce the risk of large fires moving through communities.
Intermediate areas represent those areas adjacent to the intensive management.