What is Jasper National Park?

Jasper National Park is Canada's largest Rocky Mountain national park at 11,228 square kilometres and the second Canadian Rockies national park, established on September 14, 1907 (originally as Jasper Forest Park, becoming a national park in 1930). The park is in the Alberta Rocky Mountains directly north of Banff and shares boundaries with Hamber Provincial Park and Mount Robson Provincial Park in British Columbia. The town of Jasper, the only urban municipality in the park, has a population of about 4,500.

Jasper is connected to Banff to the south by the Icefields Parkway (Highway 93 north), one of the world's most spectacular drives. The 230-kilometre route passes the Columbia Icefield, the largest icefield in the Rockies (about 230 square kilometres) and the source of glaciers feeding rivers that flow to the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans. The Athabasca Glacier, easily accessible from the parkway, has retreated about 1.5 kilometres since 1844 and continues to lose mass at an accelerating rate due to climate change. The Glacier Skywalk (opened 2014) is a glass-floored observation walkway over the Sunwapta Valley.

Mount Edith Cavell (3,363 metres), one of the iconic peaks of Jasper, is named after British nurse Edith Cavell, executed by German firing squad in occupied Belgium in 1915. Other notable peaks include Mount Columbia (3,747 metres, Alberta's highest), Mount Robson in adjacent BC (3,954 metres, the highest in the Canadian Rockies), Roche Miette, and the Pyramid. Maligne Lake, the second-largest glacier-fed lake in the world (after Cuicocha in Ecuador), is famous for Spirit Island. Maligne Canyon, less than 2 metres wide at points, drops 50 metres deep.

The 2024 Jasper Wildfire (the Jasper Wildfire Complex), which began on July 22, 2024 and burned about 33,000 hectares, destroyed about a third of the town of Jasper including more than 350 structures and forced the evacuation of about 25,000 residents and visitors. It was the most destructive wildfire in Canadian national park history. The park has reopened and reconstruction is ongoing under the federal Jasper Wildfire Recovery Plan announced in October 2024. Jasper is part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks UNESCO World Heritage Site (1984) and the world's largest dark-sky preserve at 11,228 square kilometres (designated by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada in 2011).