CAVELL MEADOWS : restored for now

Updated August 23, 2005

The newly restored trails through the Cavell Meadows have now endured their first full summer of thousands of tramping feet since a three-year restoration program was completed. The project appears to have been a success.

The Parks Canada trail crew, the Friends of Jasper National Park and all their enthusiastic volunteers deserve high praise. They reconstructed many of the trails and blocked off many others that had been trodden across the flower-filled meadows and that were getting progressively worse each year. The Friends also put up very attractive informational signs for the various fauna and flora of the meadows as well as directional signs to indicate the way around the two loops in the meadows. It should be hard for anyone to get lost up there now.

However, people - like mountain streams - tend to look for the quickest way downhill and there are already indications that short cuts are once again being taken. It looks as though some repairs are going to have to be done each year if all the hard work of the past three years is not to be wasted.

Parks Canada took the right step in keeping the meadows closed until all the snow and ice had melted this spring, otherwise the damage would be much worse by now.

Now, in the final weeks of August, most of the flowers have gone to seed. A few moss campion blooms shelter in the lee of rocks. Some lovely dark red paintbrushes and purple fleabanes add a few last splashes of colour and along the edges of the trail little partridge-foot flowers soldier bravely on. It won’t be long before snow covers the meadows for another nine months.

White-tailed ptarmigan are making the most of the seed bounty. Yesterday a mother hen and her six chicks were pecking at the seeds of sorrel and the leaves of the white-mountain avens. The chicks, while still partly downy, already have heavily feathered legs. Above the meadows, ten male ptarmigan were feeding amongst the rocks – making hoarse little growls and chattering noises. The males are easy to identify with their red patch above the eye and pure white underparts. In another month or so, they will be completely white and all that will be visible against the snow will be a little black beak and a beady black eye.

Dogs are now banned from the Cavell Meadows because this is the habitat of a threatened species - woodland caribou. This ban will also help protect ptarmigan and their chicks from untoward disturbance.