Northwest Territories

Canadian Rockies

The magnificent Canadian Rockies are one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations – and for good reason: they comprise some of the most glorious wilderness lands on earth, but they also are among the most accessible natural environments on the planet. At the same time, the very best in tourism facilities... Read on

Canadian Rockies

The magnificent Canadian Rockies are one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations – and for good reason: they comprise some of the most glorious wilderness lands on earth, but they also are among the most accessible natural environments on the planet. At the same time, the very best in tourism facilities sit readily at hand to cater to a traveller’s every need for comfort. Alternatively, those who feel like roughing it can find challenging opportunities to experience mountain and ice climbing, white water rafting, hiking, skiing, and camping in the wild within a few kilometres of the comforts of civilization.

The Rockies consist of several mountain groupings that run roughly along a northwest-southeast axis: the front ranges which lie beside the Alberta foothills, the eastern main ranges (such as those you will encounter at Lake Louise on the Alberta-British Columbia border), the western main ranges inside BC, and the western ranges over by Radium Hot Springs on the border with the Rocky Mountain Trench.

The story of the Rockies began hundreds of millions of years ago when the region lay under water. The land to the east drained into the sea, dumping sediment which slowly hardened into the distinctive layers of limestone, shale, dolomite, and quartzite that are so visible on the mountains today. Then, about 200 million years ago, the immense continental plate under North America began to move west and crashed into a series of islands, land masses, and other plates.
Over the next 35 million years, these sedimentary layers were compressed horizontally. Subsequently, some of them broke under tremendous pressure and shifted up over the underlying layers, piling upwards, and forming mountains.

Now, at an age of 120 million years, the Rockies are older than the Himalayas, the Alps, and the American Rockies. They also have been eroded significantly from the time of their primaeval birth because the sedimentary rock that composes the mountains is susceptible to the forces of wind, water, and ice that have attacked these giant peaks over the millennia.

During the last of the ice ages, which ended about 11,000 years ago, most of Canada lay under massive sheets of ice. In the lowland areas, such as the Bow River Valley in Banff, glaciers transformed the landscape of the old 'V-shaped' river valleys by carving them deeper and wider so that most Rocky Mountain valleys today are more 'U-shaped' than they were before the glaciers descended upon the region.

About 11,500 years ago, the ice sheets were in full retreat, the climate had begun to warm, and hunter-gatherer Palaeo-Indians started to appear at the lower elevations of the Rocky Mountain and neighbouring regions. The environment they encountered below the mountains was a mix of tundra towards the north and lichen woodlands to the south.
They hunted such now-extinct beasts as ancient mammoths, mastodonts, camels, horses, and sloths, as well as creatures indigenous to Canada today such as bison, beavers, and caribou. Gradually the more exotic species disappeared and the climate continued to warm to its present-day state.

The people themselves, never numerous in the inhospitable environment of the Rockies, adapted to changing conditions and developed more complex and regionally-distinct societies over the centuries, as demonstrated by the changes in their tools which archaeologists have discovered in the Rockies and elsewhere in western Canada. The first Europeans to reach the Rocky Mountains encountered three main cultural groups, each comprising a number of different nations: the subarctic peoples to the north; and to the south, the plateau cultural group centred west of the mountains, and the inhabitants of the Great Plains to the east.

Before Europeans came to the Rockies, however, their goods arrived, carried here by aboriginal traders who acquired them from fur trade outposts at Hudson Bay and elsewhere. Similarly, modern horses reached the area in the early 1700s after making their way north from Spanish Mexico. By the 1750s, European explorers began to venture into what now is Alberta. Because of fierce competition between the Hudson’s Bay Company of London and its rival, the North West Company in Montreal, fur trade posts began to be built in the province by the 1780s. Many fur trade employees married into aboriginal society and helped create a new, mixed-race cultural group, the Métis.

In 1793, fur trader and explorer Alexander Mackenzie staked his claim to fame when he led the first group of Europeans through the Rockies from the plains to the Pacific Ocean. Christian missionaries arrived in Alberta in the early decades of the 19th century. Then, a trickle of ranchers and settlers moved onto the Alberta foothills east of the Rockies after the Canadian government negotiated treaties with the native inhabitants, beginning in the 1870s. During this period of early exploration and settlement, however, the Rocky Mountains remained relatively quiet.

That changed with the arrival of the railway in the 1880s. Earlier, in 1867, far to the east, the older British colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the United Province of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec) united as the Dominion of Canada, a country within the British Empire. Two years later, the Dominion purchased the vast Hudson’s Bay Company territory representing what now forms part of northern Quebec and Ontario, the totality of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, and much of the Yukon and Northwest territories.

Then, in 1871, British Columbia joined the Canadian confederation. However, there was a condition: a transcontinental railway had to be built linking it to the rest of Canada through the Rocky Mountains. In 1883, that railway, the celebrated Canadian Pacific, reached Banff from the east. Work continued for another two years, and in November 1885, the last spike of the transcontinental railway was driven into the ground at Craigellachie in the Eagle Pass of British Columbia. The first train to make the journey from eastern Canada to the Pacific left Montreal in June 1886. Afterwards, large numbers of settlers, miners, and others moved to Alberta and British Columbia and began the process of creating the modern society that now is home to the several million people who live in Canada’s two westernmost provinces.

The advent of the railway allowed for the birth of mining and forestry in the Rockies. With good rail connections, coal mining and logging became major activities at Banff and Jasper in late Victorian times, while talc, iron, lead, silver, zinc, gold, sulphur, and other minerals encouraged miners to set up operations throughout the Rocky Mountains. Tourism also got its birth in the 1880s because of the railways. Now, travel-trade is the central industry in Banff, Jasper, and much of rest of the Canadian Rocky Mountains.

Today, the region is well positioned to provide you with all the tourist facilities you will ever need while you enjoy the primary attractions of the Rockies, the stunningly grand scenery and one of the world's great wildernesses. The best of the Rockies is preserved in perpetuity in a number of famous and not-so-famous national and provincial parks.
So important are the Canadian Rocky Mountains to the planet that the United Nations declared them to be a world heritage site in 1984.

Now, at this point in our story, we would like to invite you to join us on a journey through the Canadian Rocky Mountains, to peruse the pages below and enjoy our wonderful photographs, as we explore this fascinating part of the world.

close