Katelyn Bellerose had no idea anything was wrong until the helicopter landed.
The Edmonton hiker had been in the backcountry of Jasper National Park with her husband and a group of friends.
“I hadn't hiked in a little while, like a big backcountry hike that takes multiple days, because last year was so awful with the smoke, of course,” Bellerose said. “And then, yeah, this happened.”
On July 23, they were returning down the Fryatt Valley Trail, the trailhead roughly 30 kilometres south of the townsite, and weren’t aware that there were wildfires raging nearby.
The wind had been strongly blowing the other away, the group was surrounded by mountains and the sky was clearer than any other day on their excursion.
“Then the helicopter went by and we did kind of that jump thing you do when you see a helicopter," Bellerose said. "You wave at it, like, ‘Hi, I see you, helicopter,’ like little kids."
“And then it started to land, and we thought that we were wasting their time, and we were like, ‘No, we're okay. We're okay. You don't need to land.’ We thought they were looking for a lost hiker or something.”
The helicopter crew also assumed they knew because the first thing they told the group was the helicopter would take five people and come back for the remaining three.
Bellerose and her husband were among the remaining three. She had no idea where the fire was or when the helicopter would return, the main consolation being that a few rescuers had waited with them.
When the helicopter returned 30 minutes later and took them away, she was able to see the raging wildfire below her.
“That was just a terrible, terrible moment,” she said. “Even now, just talking about it, I'm getting emotional and my heart’s racing. When we came out of that valley, [we] just saw this monster, monster fire. And even when we first came out of the valley, it was a monster fire, but then as we got closer, a lot of it even went beyond around the corner after that, and we went passed the whole thing to get into the Jasper town.”
The helicopter dropped them off at the Valley of Five Lakes parking lot, and Parks Canada staff and a police officer drove them into an already evacuated town around 1 p.m. where they had to wait at an emergency shelter since the highway had been closed.
The emergency evacuation bus was scheduled to pick them up at 3 p.m. but wasn’t able to arrive until almost 5 p.m., which Bellerose said was completely understandable given the situation.
“Everyone did such amazing job, but that was so nerve-wracking, just seeing the plumes get bigger and bigger and closer and closer and just not knowing, you know, ‘Are we going to get out?’”
The fire east of town had moved off the road by then, so the bus managed to take them to a Red Cross station in Edmonton.
She noted that her bus has a few locals who hadn’t gotten out earlier, and there was an English man who had slept through the evacuation order only to wake up to a ghost town, “which was kind of jarring for him.”
Since then, Bellerose has been in touch with some of the others who were on the hike, and most have said they were all right, although a few were still a bit rattled.
“I think I was affected quite a bit while we were in Jasper,” she said. “I didn't want to vocalize it or say it to my friends. Not everyone makes it out of forest fires.”
She noted that looking at photos and videos she took during the evacuation has helped put the experience more in context, and she was also planning to seek someone out to talk about it.
Bellerose offered her sympathies to Jasper residents and praised the first responders, volunteers and others who worked to carry out the evacuation.
“They did such a great job, and I just the thing that really gets me as I keep thinking about how rattled I was when I arrived at the emergency shelter, and there were local volunteers who had stayed behind, basically to take care of us and make sure we get out, and they stayed calm and collected for our sake when I'm sure they were quite stressed as well,” she said.
“And I just think how kind and amazing they were to me and I didn't have as much on the line as they did, and potentially the next day they lost their house and that really just gets me. That just really, really hits me, so I'm just so appreciative to them.”
