Kananaskis Country

Where it sits. Kananaskis Country is a block of roughly 4,200 square kilometres of provincial parks, wildland and public land on the eastern slopes of the Rockies, immediately outside Banff National Park's southeastern boundary and about an hour west of Calgary. Highway 40, the Kananaskis Trail, runs south from the Trans-Canada through the valley of the Kananaskis River, past Barrier Lake, Ribbon Creek and the Kananaskis Lakes, and over Highwood Pass at 2,206 metres — the highest paved road in Canada — before dropping to the Highwood River and the ranch country beyond. Canmore and the Bow Valley sit at the northern end, the Elbow and Sheep river valleys and Bragg Creek on the eastern edge.

How it came to exist. This was logging and coal country, threaded with forestry roads and abandoned mine sites. In 1977 Premier Peter Lougheed's government used Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund money — oil revenue — to designate the whole area as a multi-use recreation region for the province's fast-growing cities, building campgrounds, trails and the Kananaskis Village resort. It is provincial land, not national park, and that legal distinction governs almost everything a visitor experiences: hunting, off-highway vehicles, grazing, logging and commercial filming are all permitted in ways they are not across the boundary. Peter Lougheed Provincial Park, around the two Kananaskis Lakes, carries his name. The 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics staged its alpine events at Nakiska on Mount Allan, purpose-built for the games, and the G8 leaders met at Kananaskis Village in 2002.

On screen — this is where Alberta's films were actually made. Because Parks Canada restricts feature filming inside Banff, the mountain productions people associate with the Canadian Rockies were shot here instead:

• Brokeback Mountain (2005). Ang Lee's Wyoming was assembled from Alberta locations, with the mountain itself played largely by the Moose Mountain and Canyon Creek area in the Elbow valley, sheep-camp and high-meadow scenes on and around Fortress Mountain, and lakeside camp material near the Kananaskis Lakes.
• The Revenant (2015). Alejandro Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki shot in natural light through the winter of 2014-15 in the Bow Valley and Kananaskis, on the Bow and Kananaskis rivers and at Fortress Mountain; when an unusually warm spring stripped the snow, the production finished the closing sequences in southern Argentina.
• Inception (2010). The third-level snow fortress was constructed at Fortress Mountain Resort, a ski area that had closed to the public and now earns its living as a film location.
• Mystery, Alaska (1999) worked out of nearby Canmore, and the foothills southeast of here supplied Unforgiven (1992) and Legends of the Fall (1994).

What you actually do. The trail network is enormous and mostly unsigned beyond junction posts. Standard days include Ha Ling Peak and the East End of Rundle above Canmore, Ptarmigan Cirque and Pocaterra Ridge off Highwood Pass, Rawson Lake and Upper Kananaskis Lake circuit in Peter Lougheed, Prairie Mountain at Elbow Falls for a fast summit, and Mount Yamnuska on the eastern rampart. Elbow Falls itself is a roadside stop on Highway 66, a broad ledge on the Elbow River that was substantially rearranged by the 2013 flood. Barrier Lake, a reservoir on the Kananaskis River near the highway's northern end, has an easy shoreline trail and a visitor information centre worth stopping at for current bear closures. Bighorn sheep stand on the road shoulder near Barrier and along the Smith-Dorrien gravel road toward Spray Lakes with total indifference to traffic. Winter brings cross-country skiing on the Peter Lougheed and Ribbon Creek networks, ice climbing in the Ghost and Evan-Thomas drainages, and lift skiing at Nakiska. Canmore Nordic Centre, built for the 1988 games, is 20 minutes north.

Practicalities that catch people out. Highway 40 closes between the Kananaskis Lakes turnoff and Highwood Junction from 1 December to 15 June to protect wintering elk, sheep and deer, which cuts the region in half for half the year. Since 2021 every vehicle stopping in Kananaskis needs a Conservation Pass, bought online by licence plate; enforcement is real. This is dense grizzly habitat with seasonal trail closures and mandatory group-size rules on some routes, and bear spray is standard equipment rather than a precaution. The June 2013 floods destroyed roads, bridges and campgrounds across the region and reshaped several valleys; some trails still follow post-flood realignments.

Getting there and timing. There is no public transport worth the name; drive from Calgary in an hour or from Banff in 45 minutes. Snow lingers on high routes into early July, larch season in the last ten days of September fills the Highwood and Pocaterra trailheads by seven in the morning, and October brings quiet, cold, clear days and the first road closures.