By Michael Lanza
Whereas I at all times favor to get as removed from any highway as attainable at any time when I go to a mountain vary, one fact that will—and maybe should—be mentioned of the Canadian Rockies is that they are going to go away you smitten with an lifelong, unshakeable love earlier than you even step out of the automobile. Driving to any trailhead alongside the 143-mile-long (232-kilometer) Icefields Parkway between Lake Louise and the city of Jasper, or alongside the Trans-Canada Freeway throughout the mountains, and you’ll wrestle to sound like a literate individual as superlatives and easy gasps of “wow” roll repeatedly off your tongue. On my most up-to-date go to we noticed, along with numerous, sizable glaciers tumbling off a series of peaks stretching for miles, maybe the most important grizzly bear of my life (a sow with two cubs), two bull elk with racks probably broader than my wingspan, and a pod of bighorn sheep—all from the automobile in a single afternoon on the Icefields Parkway.
However in the event you’re like me, you go to the Canadian Rockies to stroll deeply into the mountains, both for a day or a number of days. This story will offer you a window into that have, sharing photos from most of the backpacking journeys and dayhikes I’ve taken in Canada’s Rockies on my current journey and over the previous three-plus a long time, together with the ten years I spent as Northwest Editor of Backpacker journal and even longer running this blog.
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Straddling the Continental Divide within the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, the Canadian Rockies lengthen for about 1,000 miles/1,600 kilometers from northern British Columbia to Waterton Lakes Nationwide Park on the U.S.-Canada border, which bumps up towards America’s Glacier Nationwide Park. Spanning over 5.8 million acres/23,600 sq. kilometers, the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Website encompasses 4 nationwide parks (Banff, Jasper, Yoho, and Kootenay) . and three provincial parks (Mount Robson, Mount Assiniboine, and Hamber).
That’s a really giant space—almost equal to Yellowstone, Everglades, Grand Canyon, and Glacier nationwide parks mixed. The phrase “you could possibly spend a lifetime exploring it” will get rolled out hyperbolically a bit too typically, however when utilized to the Canadian Rockies, the descriptor rings true.
Each time I am going there, I wonder if there’s a mountain vary within the Decrease 48 that basically compares with the Canadian Rockies. Significantly.
In late July and August 2023, three-fourths of my household, joined by a father-daughter who’re longtime associates of ours, backpacked a pair of three-day journeys and took some dayhikes in Banff, Jasper, and Yoho nationwide parks. We began with the Skyline Path in Jasper, a traditional, three-day, 27.3-mile/44k traverse normally hiked south-to-north, from the Maligne Lake Trailhead to the Sign Mountain Trailhead, simply southeast of the city of Jasper. For a lot of its distance, the Skyline stays true to its identify, following the crest of a mountain vary with fixed panoramas of large partitions of rock rising in each path.
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That was adopted by the Nigel, Cataract, and Cline Passes Route, a small sampler of the Nice Divide Path, a 698-mile/1,123-kilometer path stretching from Waterton Lakes Nationwide Park to the GDT’s northern terminus in Kakwa Provincial Park. From a trailhead on the Icefields Parkway in northern Banff, we hiked over a primary cross right into a southern nook of Jasper, then up a valley sliced by the meandering, emerald-green, glaciated Brazeau River to cross a second cross beneath a dangling glacier, getting into the White Goat Wilderness, the place we spent two nights in an alpine basin ringed by rocky peaks, with one more tongue of ice dangling off a mountain simply past our camp.
Look ahead to my upcoming tales about that journey.
This submit additionally contains images from my household’s four-day backpacking journey a number of years in the past on the roughly 34-mile/54-kilometer Rockwall Trail in Kootenay Nationwide Park. Well-known amongst Canadian backpackers however much less so amongst Individuals and different worldwide trekkers, the Rockwall’s identify comes from its defining geological function: an enormous limestone escarpment plastered with glaciers and towering in some areas about 3,000 toes (900m) above the path. Backpackers comply with the bottom of this wall for greater than 18 miles/30k. It’s no exaggeration to liken it to dozens of the tallest cliff in Yosemite Valley, El Capitan, lined up in a row stretching for miles.
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