Alberta Travel 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.