Jasper

Despite being a native Albertan, I’ve never actually been to Jasper — in our part of the province Banff was the closer mountain town destination — but this still makes me very sad:

Queen Elizabeth II vacationed there, as did her parents before her. Hollywood’s royalty were regular visitors, too. Marilyn Monroe filmed scenes for “River of No Return” there, and “The Emperor Waltz” brought Bing Crosby and Joan Fontaine to its golf courses and tennis courts. The mountains of Jasper, Alberta, have also stood in for peaks around the world in other movies.

Above all, Jasper National Park represented Canada both to the world and for many Canadians for over a century.

Now, tens of thousands of acres of the park and its mountain town of Jasper are either burning in an inferno or have been reduced to rubble and ash. Parks Canada, the national agency, said that since two large-scale wildfires, which sent up a wall of flame more than 300 feet high, were whisked into the community on ferocious winds earlier in the week, 358 of its 1,113 buildings have been destroyed.

“The nature of this fire was such that it humbled the humans on the ground,” Richard Ireland, the mayor of Jasper, told reporters in Hinton, Alberta, on Friday. He added that he believed that nothing could have stopped the destruction and that all necessary preparations had been taken.

This certainly isn’t going to start happening less often as the planet continues to warm. Probably less than optimal that the current constitutional doctrine in the US is that 6 reactionary lawyers should be in charge of the EPA.