Alberta Guide

Alberta is Canada at its best. For many people the beauty of the Canadian Rockies, which rise with overwhelming majesty from the rippling prairies, is one of the main reasons for coming to the country. Most visitors confine themselves to the four contiguous national parks - Banff, Jasper, Yoho and Kootenay – enclaves that straddle the southern portion of the range, a vast area whose boundaries spill over into British Columbia.

Two smaller parks, Glacier and Mount Revelstoke, lie firmly in BC and not, technically, in the Rockies, but scenically and logistically they form part of the same region. Managed with remarkable efficiency and integrity, all the parks are easily accessible segments of a much wider wilderness of peaks and forests that extend north from the Canada-US border, before merging into the ranges of the Yukon and Alaska.

If you're approaching the Rockies from the east or the US, you have little choice but to spend time in either Edmonton or Calgary, the transport hubs for northern and southern Alberta respectively. Poles apart in feel and appearance, the two cities are locked in an intense rivalry, in which Calgary comes out top in almost every respect. Situated on the Trans-Canada Highway, less than ninety minutes from Banff National Park, it is more convenient whether you plan to take in Yoho, Kootenay, Glacier or Revelstoke, or push on to southern British Columbia and the west coast. It also has far more going for it in its own right: the weather is kinder, the Calgary Stampede is one of the country's rowdiest festivals, and the vast revenues from oil and natural gas have been spent to good effect on its downtown skyscrapers and civic infrastructure.

Edmonton is a bleaker city, on the edge of an immense expanse of boreal forest and low hills that stretches to the border of the Northwest Territories and beyond. Bypasses by the Canadian Pacific Railway, which brought Calgary its early boom, Edmonton's main importance to travellers is as a gateway to the Alaska Highway and the Arctic extremities of the Yukon, as well as to the more popular landscapes of northern British Columbia. The Yellowhead Highway and Canada's last transcontinental railway link Edmonton to the town of Jasper and its national park in about four hours.

Formed by the meltwaters of the last Ice Age, the valley of the Red Deer River cuts a deep gash through the dulcet prairie about 140km east of Calgary, creating a surreal landscape of bare, sunbaked hills and eerie lunar flats dotted with sagebrush and scrubby, tufted grass. On their own, the Alberta Badlands - strangely anomalous in the midst of lush grasslands - would repay a visit, but what makes them an essential detour is the presence of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, amongst the greatest museums of natural history in North America. The museum is located 8km outside the old coal-mining town of Drumheller, a dreary but obvious base if you're unable to fit the museum into a day-trip from Calgary. Drumheller is also the main focus of the Dinosaur Trail, a road loop that explores the Red Deer Valley and surrounding badlands; you will need your own transport for this circuit, and for the trip to the Dinosaur Provincial Park, home to the Tyrrell Museum Field Station and the source of many of its fossils.

Few North American landscapes come as loaded with expectation as the Canadian Rockies, so it's a relief to find that the superlatives are scarcely able to do credit to the region's immensity of forests, lakes, rivers and snowcapped mountains. Although most visitors confine themselves to visiting just a handful of national parks, the range spans almost 1500km as far as the Yukon border, forming the vast watershed of the Continental Divide, which separates rivers flowing to the Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic oceans. Landscapes on such a scale make a nonsense of artificial borderlines, and the major parks are national creations that span both Alberta and British Columbia. Four of the parks - Banff, Jasper, Yoho and Kootenay - share common boundaries, and receive the attention of most of the millions of annual visitors to the Rockies.