Rocky Mountain Rail - Jasper 15th August

Jasper, Alberta

For most visitors, a trip to Jasper is about seeing wildlife. Jasper National Park protects a vestige of the wildlife that once blanketed the west. While the last 200 years have seen a dramatic decline in wildlife in most parts of North America, healthy populations of plants and animals have persisted inside the park. The Canadian Rockies are known to support 1300 species of plants, 20,000 types of insects and spiders, 40 types of fish, 16 species of amphibians and reptiles, 277 species of birds and 69 different species of mammals including: humans; elk; deer; moose; caribou; sheep; goats; bears; coyotes; wolves; beavers; pine martens; lynx; porcupines; cougars; snowshoe hares and wolverines. Jasper's elevation range, geology, geography and climate create diverse habitats for a surprising variety of species.

Ecosystems

Climate, geology, soil, plants, animals – and humans all interact in one large complex web of life. In Jasper this web is especially fragile. Here existence depends on the intricate relationships between flora and fauna, weather and landscape. These relationships, called ecosystems, can be upset by the smallest of changes, affecting even the largest of animals, including Jasper's monarch, the grizzly.

Jasper National Park is located on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains of west-central Alberta, east of the continental divide. This location strongly influences its climate, geology, plants and animals, and also has affected its human history. The mountain landscape has been formed by a variety of geological events over millions of years. This has resulted in a rugged topography with a large range in altitude from about 985 meters in the Athabasca Valley to nearly 3800 meters at the top of Mt. Columbia.

These attitudinal differences influence the climate, with higher altitudes being colder and generally wetter, while lower altitudes are warmer and drier. As well, Jasper National Park's location east of the continental divide also affects the climate. The eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains are drier than the western slopes in adjacent British Columbia due to a rain shadow effect. This occurs when storms moving eastward from the Pacific Ocean drop much of their moisture on the western slopes as the clouds are forced higher by the mountains. The eastern slopes are also more frequently subjected to Arctic air plunging southward, especially in the winter. As a result of these two influences, Jasper is generally colder and drier than areas to the west.

Climatic differences at different altitudes produce different environments which are inhabited by various combinations of plants, animals, and other forms of life. These are recognized as three different life zones - montane, sub-alpine, alpine.

Ecologically, plants and animals are not independent of their environment or of each other. All of these components - climate, geology, soil, plants, animals, and so on - influence one another in a complex web of components and interactions called an ecosystem. In the sections that follow, each of these ecosystem components will be described in greater detail.

Mount Robson 

Pyramid Falls