Golden
"Five national parks within a two-hour drive and somehow it's still the town nobody mentions."
A Rocky Mountain trench town where the Columbia River, five national parks, and a gondola with a glass-floor skywalk all sit within an hour's reach.
Golden sits at the bottom of the Rocky Mountain Trench, a long geological fault that the Columbia River runs through, with the Purcell Mountains on one side and the actual Rockies on the other — a genuinely rare piece of geography where you can watch the sun set behind one mountain range and rise over a completely different one. I stopped here originally just to break up the drive between Revelstoke and Banff, planning one night, and stayed three because I hadn’t realized how much sat within reach: Yoho, Kootenay, Banff, Glacier, and Mount Revelstoke national parks are all under two hours away, which is a density of protected wilderness that few towns in North America can claim.
The Kicking Horse Mountain Resort, just above town, runs a gondola up to over 2,300 metres where there’s a glass-floored skywalk cantilevered off the ridge — I am not someone who loves heights and I stood on it anyway for longer than was comfortable, watching paragliders launch off the same ridge and drift down over the valley. In winter the resort gets some of the driest, deepest snow in the Columbia Mountains, famous among skiers specifically for the steep alpine bowls above treeline, though I went in September for hiking and had the upper trails almost entirely to myself.
Downtown Golden itself is unpretentious, a working highway town more than a resort village, but that’s part of its appeal — the restaurants serve elk burgers and local trout to actual locals rather than performing rusticity for visitors, and I had one of the better huckleberry pies of my life at a diner that had clearly not redecorated since the 1980s and had no interest in doing so. The Kicking Horse River running alongside town is a serious whitewater rafting river, and I did a half-day trip through class III–IV rapids with a guide who’d grown up in Golden and had opinions, strongly held, about which of the five nearby parks was overrated (Banff, in case you’re wondering — too many people, he said, not enough actual wilderness left in it).
When to go: July through September for hiking access to the surrounding national parks and whitewater rafting at good water levels. December through March for skiing at Kicking Horse, when the alpine bowls open in full.