Canada Guide
Alberta and the Rockies
The Canadian Rockies
Rising with overwhelming majesty from Alberta's rippling plains, the Canadian Rockies are one of the main reasons people come to Canada. Their beauty is legendary and few North American landscapes come this loaded with expectation. So, it's a relief to find that superlatives are scarcely able to do credit to the splendour or immensity of the forests, lakes, rivers and snowcapped mountains here.
Joined with their smaller cousins in the US, the Canadian Rockies extend north of the US border almost 1500km to Canada's far north where they merge with ranges in the Yukon and Alaska, forming the Continental Divide in the process – a vast watershed which separates rivers flowing to the Pacific and Arctic oceans from those flowing into the Atlantic. But the range is best known for its virtually unbroken north-south chain of national and provincial parks and glut of world-class ski resorts at its heart.
At the southern end of the range and coupled with Glacier National Park in the US is small but impressive Waterton Lakes National Park. North of here lie a series of less-restrictively managed provincial parks, collectively known as Kananasksis Country. These exist partly to take the pressure off the adjacentBanff National Park, the region's best known and most touristy park. Beyond its northern boundary the range is protected by the much less busy Jasper National Park, by far the largest park in the region. The western boundary of both Banff and Jasper parks is also the provincial border, so that adjacent lands are protected in a separate set of parks managed by British Columbia: Mount Robson Provincial Park, just west of Jasper – which protects Mount Robson, the highest and most dramatic peak in the Canadian Rockies – and Yoho and Kootenay west of Banff. Two smaller parks, Glacier and Mount Revelstoke, lie separate and firmly in BC.