Alberta, Canada
Banff is Canada's first and most visited national park, ninety minutes west of Calgary, and it is sold in every form. The day tours from Calgary drive to the town of Banff, Lake Louise and Moraine Lake with photo stops and return in the evening; they are the option for people without a car, and since 2023 they are also the only way to reach Moraine Lake by road, because private cars are banned from its access road and the shuttle and the tour operators are the alternatives. From Banff and Canmore, the full-day lake tours cover Louise, Moraine and the Icefields Parkway to the Columbia Icefield or cross into Yoho for Emerald Lake and Takakkaw Falls; the wildlife tours go out at dawn and dusk along the Bow Valley Parkway for elk, bighorn sheep and bears;
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Alberta, Canada
Waterton Lakes lies in the south-western corner of the Canadian province of Alberta, against the border of Montana, at the point where the prairies run straight into the Rocky Mountains without any intervening foothills, and it is a small, quiet and beautiful park, far less visited than Banff or Jasper, which forms with the American Glacier National Park, immediately to the south, a single international peace park. It is about two hundred and seventy kilometres, three hours by road, south of Calgary, which has the nearest large airport, an hour and a quarter from Lethbridge, and an hour from the Chief Mountain border crossing, open in summer, which leads to the eastern side of Glacier; there is no public transport, and a Parks Canada pass is required. Everything centres on the little township of Waterton, on the shore of Upper Waterton Lake beneath a ring of peaks, where deer graze on the lawns, which has motels, a campground, restaurants and the landmark Prince of Wales Hotel, a many-gabled timber building of 1927 standing alone on a windswept bluff above the lake.
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