Alberta

I arrived in Banff in late September, when the larch trees go gold and the summer crowds have thinned enough that you can actually hear the wind come off the glaciers. The moment you round that final curve on the Icefields Parkway and Peyto Lake opens up below you — electric blue against grey limestone and the last patches of snow — you understand why people come back here year after year and never fully recover. It’s not subtle country. Alberta does not do subtle.

The Parkway

The Icefields Parkway is the spine of the whole trip. It runs for about 230 kilometers between Lake Louise and Jasper, and almost every kilometer has a pullout with a view that would be the centerpiece of any other country’s tourism campaign. Waterfalls, glaciers you can see from the road, turquoise lakes the color of milk and mint. The best of them is Athabasca Falls, where the river is squeezed into a rock gorge near the Jasper end of the road.

The Rockies get all the attention, rightly, but what surprised me was how much the landscape shifts within a single day’s drive.

Banff, Lake Louise and Moraine Lake

Banff, in 1885, became Canada’s first national park, after railway workers found a hot spring in a cave. Today the town is a busy mountain village with excellent coffee and a gondola, and it works best as a base for the lakes and trails around it. Lake Louise is the famous one, with the turquoise water and the old hotel at the end, but I prefer Moraine Lake, a smaller lake in a ring of ten peaks, which is breathtaking at sunrise. Access to Moraine has changed in recent years, so check Parks Canada before you plan around it.

Canmore is the quieter town in the valley below, and Kananaskis Country is the wild, much less visited mountain country south of it.

Jasper

From Banff I pushed north through Jasper, where the elk wander through town like they’ve read the municipal bylaws and know exactly what they’re entitled to. Jasper is the calmer, wilder cousin of Banff: a smaller town, bigger park and a lot fewer people. Maligne Lake is the place to head from town, a long glacial lake with a famous spirit island, and the road there is one of the best places in the Rockies to spot wildlife at dawn.

The Hikes

The hikes are what I keep returning to in memory. The Plain of Six Glaciers above Lake Louise. The Skyline Trail in Jasper. The meadows around Larch Valley in early October, when the larches are burning orange and you’re the only person up there because everyone else assumed the season was over. These are subalpine larches, and the gold lasts only a couple of weeks, which is why the trails fill up in the last days of September. Alberta rewards the people willing to go slightly past the obvious stopping point, to stay one more day when the weather clears, to take the trailhead that isn’t on the first page of results.

Beyond the Mountains

Then east past Edmonton, and the mountains simply end — you drop onto the prairies and suddenly it’s flat in every direction, grain elevators on the horizon, skies so wide they feel pressurised. This isn’t a disappointment. It’s a different country within the same province, and both halves are worth understanding. Calgary sits at that threshold, a proper city with a food scene driven by Alberta beef that is genuinely exceptional — a dry-aged striploin at a good steakhouse here makes most of what passes for steak elsewhere seem like an approximation. In July the whole city turns into the Calgary Stampede, ten days of rodeo, parades and free pancakes, and it is either the best or the worst time to arrive depending on how you feel about cowboy hats. Edmonton, further north, is the festival city, with a big summer theatre and arts calendar and a river valley that runs right through the middle of town.

The prairies are older than the mountains, in a way. Drumheller sits in a badlands valley full of dinosaur bones, and Dinosaur Provincial Park, a couple of hours southeast, is a UNESCO World Heritage site for its fossils. Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is another World Heritage site, where Indigenous hunters drove bison over the cliff for thousands of years, and Writing-on-Stone is a sacred valley of sandstone hoodoos with rock art carved and painted over centuries. Waterton Lakes is where the prairie runs straight into the mountains with no foothills in between, and Cypress Hills is a forested island of hills rising out of the grassland. Elk Island National Park near Edmonton has one of the best-kept herds of plains bison in the country, and Frank Slide is the scar of a mountainside that came down on a coal-mining town in 1903. Medicine Hat and Bragg Creek round out the list for a slower route.

When to go: Late June through early October for hiking and the full Icefields Parkway experience. Early October specifically for the larch season — a brief window that most visitors miss entirely. January through March if you ski: Lake Louise and Sunshine Village receive snow that Whistler tourists would weep over, with a fraction of the lift lines.

What most guides get wrong: They treat Banff and Jasper as bucket-list checkboxes and miss the fact that the Icefields Parkway between them — 230 kilometres of arguably the most spectacular mountain road on earth — is itself the destination. Stop at every pullout. Wake up before sunrise at Moraine Lake. Do not rush Alberta. The province will outlast your schedule.

Photography: Pexels contributors.