Parks Canada is developing a fire management plan for Jasper National Park (JNP) to restore the natural fire regime that occurred prior to forest fire Suppression in the 2Oth century. While fire history for both the 19th and 20th centuries is well documented, less is known about the earlier fire history of JNP. This project utilizes paleoecological methods to analyze forest disturbance regimes over the past ca. 300 years in the Athabasca River valley of JNP. Freeze cores (ca. 50 cm in length) were obtained from Mina Lake in 1995 and 1996. The recent sediments were dated by 210 pb analyses, and the examination of charcoal particles was used to infer the fire history of the Park. I tested the validity of these methods by focusing on recent lake sediments (ca. the past 200 years) and comparing the charcoal inferred fire history to the known fire history derived from tree ring and fire scar data. The results from the Mina Lake cores indicate that macroscopic charcoal particle analyses can detect the major documented fires in the Park. In particular, the last major fire year in JNP occurred in 1889, and is represented by a broad peak in the macroscopic charcoal record. After 1889, there was little fire in JNP, and this is reflected by low macroscopic charcoal concentrations in the most recent sediments. Thus, charcoal particles can effectively serve as a proxy for fire history in JNP.