Jasper National Park sprawls over 4,200 square miles of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta. Celebrated for its forests, glaciers and backcountry trails, the Canadian park also hosts retail outlets and franchise restaurants catering to crowds of tourists. Starting in the mid-1990s, as development accelerated and traffic soared, University of Alberta researchers set out to study how best to restore the natural environment. They soon realized they knew little about the park’s original conditions.
Luckily, a warden had just discovered a stash of 735 black-and-white photographs stored in an old basement. The pictures were taken in 1915, less than a decade after the park’s founding. “We realized they were something special,” recalls University of Victoria ecologist Eric Higgs, who led the restoration’s research effort while at Alberta. “Clearly it wasn’t a personal album.” Grouped by location, and facing in all directions, the pictures appeared to be the product of a long-forgotten survey.
Higgs and graduate student Jeanine Rhemtulla, now at the University of British Columbia, decided to see if they could find the original vistas, hoping to compare the images with the views today. To facilitate the process, they found a surplus large-format film camera and took the photos anew. With practice and persistence — and frequent lifts from friendly helicopter pilots — they replicated the survey over two summers. Careful analysis by Rhemtulla revealed that forest cover had become denser and more homogenous. Jasper had changed over the years, with implications for habitat and fire susceptibility, and the Alberta team couldn’t have found out any other way.
