Tag: Wood Buffalo National Park

Moving into 2025 I’m excited to return to my position with Parks Canada. I hope to continue offering services like our Guided hikes to Grosbeak lake. Before the 2023 fire season this was one of our most popular sites within the park. A natural salt flat where the rocks have been eaten away and slowly dissolved over hundreds of years. In 2023 when the smoke was thick the area felt like another planet. I look forward to returning home and continuing our reopening of the Park after the devastating fires of 2023.

A section of the drive out to Pine Lake through the recently burned forests of Wood Buffalo National Park.

In the summer of 2023 the NWT and WBNP faced devastating forest fires. Our local firefighting team worked endlessly to protect both Park and Town facilities. In July we faced a crisis of resources. WBNP Officers were burning themselves out working on this series of Fires. It was asked that if any other departments had staff to spare to send them on a deployment to work logistics on the WBNP Fire Complex. I then spent two weeks deployed to the Complex fire as the logistics team food lead. The days were all long 12+ hours shifts and moral was not super high. Below is an except from my interview with Haida Davies-McDermott and the Climate Disaster Project.

“I was just in charge of food. I was in charge of feeding the 200 firefighters and people who are working on behind the scenes. That was my job, is get them the food, get the chef the food, the chef will cook the food. All you have to do is go and buy the things and make sure that you’re accommodating for everybody’s allergies. Even when that was going, I was super stressed in that time because not only was I getting the updates, but I was physically, seeing the planes fly and seeing the people get off the choppers covered in soot, covered in ash. There were days where the sky was orange and sepia from all the ash in the air. “

The full interview can be read on CabinRadio.

In addition to the “Snake Program” that I delivered at JBT within my role as Interpretive Coordinator at Parks Canada I also facilitated a series of educational animal based programming to both public and private groups. The Visitor center team ran weekly programming both within Town and inside the Park at the Salt River Dëldël Kué building and Pine Lake day-use area. I worked in PWK Highschool at the job fair and was honored to present an award to a 2023 graduating student on behalf of Wood Buffalo National Park. Finally, we partnered with the Aurora College Science Fair to show off a homemade sinkhole model that my team and I constructed inside a fishtank.

Over the winter of 2023 I championed a free guided snowshoe hike through the Salt-River Meadows. We offered weekly hikes and a specialized event for the Wood Buffalo Frolics Festival, a community run festival that celebrates the coming of spring. I’ve attached the post-event report from the Frolics event!

While working at the WBNP Visitor Center I had the privilege to work on decoration, both inside the Visitor Center and on our seasonal parade floats! We usually decorate the visitor center for Halloween, Christmas, and PRIDE month.

My main 2022 project with Wood Buffalo National Park was the 2022 Pumpkin Party. During the two year hiatus during the pandemic the former “Haunted Cabin” site was torn down and replaced with a more modern facility. The rebranded “Pumpkin Party” event was designed to capture the same energy as our original “Haunted Cabin” event with less touchpoints and risk of Covid contamination. Attached are the posters and a copy of my post-event report.

Check out https://lukekjames.opened.ca/news/ for some articles on the WBNP Pumpkin Party.