Alberta Travel Video Guide

Alberta Travel Itinerary

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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.

Your Tips For Alberta

• Yukon Northwest Territories and Northern British Columbia Canada Travel Videos
  Canada Travel Itinerary
  Although much of Canada still has the flavour of the "last frontier", it's only when you embark on the mainland push north to the Yukon that you know for certain you're leaving the mainstream of North American life behind. - Canada
  

• Southern British Columbia Canada Travel Videos
  Canada Travel Itinerary
  The often pristine scenery of British Columbia more than lives up to most people's image of the wilds of Canada. - Canada
  

• Quebec Canada Travel Videos
  Canada Travel Itinerary
  As home to the only French-speaking society in North America, Quebec is totally distinct from the rest of the continent - so distinct, in fact, that its political elite have been obsessed with the politics of secession for the last forty years. - Canada
  

• Ontario Canada Travel Videos
  Canada Travel Itinerary
  The one million square kilometres of Ontario , Canada's second-largest province, stretch all the way from the St Lawrence River and the Great Lakes to the frozen shores of Hudson Bay. - Canada
  

• Maritime Provinces Canada Travel Videos
  Canada Travel Itinerary
  The MARITIME PROVINCES - Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island - are Canada's three smallest provinces, and their combined population of around one-and-three-quarter million has been largely confined to the coasts and river valleys by the thin soils of their forested interiors. - Canada
  

• Alberta Canada Travel Videos
  Canada Travel Itinerary
  Alberta is Canada at its best. - Canada
  

• Manitoba and Saskatchewan Canada Travel Videos
  Canada Travel Itinerary
  The provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan , a vast tract bounded by the Ontario border to the east and the Rocky Mountains in Alberta to the west, together comprise a region commonly called "the prairies". - Canada
  

• Newfoundland and Labrador Canada Travel Videos
  Canada Travel Itinerary
  In 1840 an American clergyman named Robert Lowell described Newfoundland as "a monstrous mass of rock and gravel, almost without soil, like a strange thing from the bottom of the deep, lifted up, suddenly, into sunshine and storm", an apt evocation of this fearsome island, which is still referred to - by Newfoundlanders and mainlanders alike - as "The Rock". - Canada