Banff to Jasper

Banff is one of the only towns in Canada that sits entirely within a national park, and the federal government caps its boundaries.

These shallow lakes you're passing are actively disappearing.

You're driving through one of the most heavily monitored wildlife corridors in North America.

You're passing through Castle Junction, where during World War One the Canadian government operated an internment camp holding over six hundred prisoners of war, mostly…

Castle Mountain is one of the best examples of a layer cake mountain in the Canadian Rockies.

You're driving through one of the most heavily used wildlife corridors in the Canadian Rockies.

You're approaching Lake Louise, named by a Canadian Pacific Railway surveyor in 1884 to honor Princess Louise Caroline Alberta — the same princess who gave this entire…

You're passing through Field, British Columbia, which means you've just crossed the Continental Divide.

Crowfoot Glacier got its name in the early 1900s because it had three distinct lobes spreading downward, resembling a crow's foot. Today only two remain.

Bow Lake is the headwater source of the Bow River, one of the most consequential waterways in western Canada.

At 2,069 meters, Bow Summit is the highest point on the entire Icefields Parkway and the highest elevation reached by a major road in all of Banff National Park.

You've just crossed the highest point on the Icefields Parkway and you're now descending into the Mistaya River valley.

The Mistaya River below you has cut a slot canyon through limestone that's over five hundred million years old, dating to the Cambrian period when this rock formed as…

This is the only fuel, food, and shelter between Lake Louise and Jasper, a two hundred and thirty kilometer stretch.

You're driving through one of the longest continuous wildlife corridors in the Rocky Mountains.

The cliff face you're approaching drops nearly 700 meters in a single sweep, making it one of the tallest exposed rock walls along the Icefields Parkway.

Wilcox Pass, just behind you now, is one of the most accessible alpine tundra zones in the Canadian Rockies.

You're crossing one of the most hydrologically significant points in North America.

The Columbia Icefield covers 325 square kilometers with ice up to 365 meters deep, making it the largest icefield in the Canadian Rockies.

The rock these falls cascade over is Precambrian quartzite, dating back more than 700 million years.

The Sunwapta River beside you has only existed in its current form for about eleven thousand years.

Sunwapta Falls drops eighteen meters through a tight limestone gorge, but what makes it geologically unusual is why the falls exist at all. This is a hanging valley.

You're now driving through a stretch of the Athabasca Valley where the river has had roughly ten thousand years to reshape what glaciers left behind.

Athabasca Falls is unusual not for its height but for its raw erosive power concentrated through an eighteen-meter-wide gorge.

You're now entering one of the largest national park townsites in the Canadian Rockies. Jasper the town exists because of the railroad.

The valley you're driving through right now was carved by ice over two kilometers thick during the Pleistocene, which ended roughly eleven thousand years ago.