Looking for some great hiking trails that are not south of the border this year? There are always great Canada East and Canada West options.  We recently spoke to Michael Taylor, a 25-year-plus veteran hiker who knows all about the variety of hikes that are available in Alberta. Michael is the president of Skyline Hikers of the Canadian Rockies, a volunteer-run non-profit society that offers its members week-long group hikes in the mountains each summer.

Skyline Hikers offers group hiking trips trips for avid hikers within the ages of 8-80 years-old, with many people coming back every year and then bringing their grandchildren on these trips, says Michael. About 20 per cent of their clientele are Bruce Trail members from Ontario, with 30+% each from Alberta and British Columbia.  The society traditionally looks after base camp setup (in tents), and provides meals and evening campfire entertainment for the hikers or uses lodges or local hotels when suitable. Veteran volunteers lead the group hikes at paces suitable for the members, with ten per group. “It’s not uncommon for eastern Canadians to take a day or two to adjust to the altitude change,” he says.

This year, the group is heading to an area about 2 ½ hours drive south-west of Calgary as they explore the Castle and Castle Wildland Provincial Parks, Beauvais Lake Provincial Park, and the Crowsnest Pass, including the Frank Slide area. This area is part of the Rocky Mountain range and is known as “where the prairies meet the mountains,” Michael says. Hikes provide for great vistas as the routes offered will take you above the treeline.

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Working with Indigenous Groups to
ensure environmental protection is paramount

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Skyline Hikers works very closely with First Nations and environmental concerns are paramount. When camping, they carry out all waste, and do not go back to the same location for five-ten years. “As our Indigenous partners would say to us, “the land needs to rest.”, Michael says. After camping, volunteers will re-seed the area and go back to check on the re-growth after a couple of years.

Back in the 1970’s and 80’s, the province of Alberta was concerned that the Banff and Jasper areas were being overrun by tourists. Even so, Michael says that while 4.2 million people visit Banff annually, less than 10% venture out more than one kilometre from the Trans-Canada Highway, and only 51,000 camp in the back-country, as of 2024. Nevertheless, the Alberta government responded by creating more provincial parks, which is taking some of the pressure off Canada’s crown jewel national mountain parks.

Outside of Jasper & Banff National Parks and the Kananaskis area (bordering the town of Canmore and Banff National Park), there are many less populated provincial parks to the north and south that you can explore in the province, says Michael. For example, Bighorn Country, west of Red Deer, provides another alternative to some of the busier hiking locations, he says. It covers 5,000 square kilometres of public lands and is about 30 km east of the Saskatchewan River Crossing on the Icefields Parkway, and about 3.5 hours from Calgary.  Skyline Hikers ran three hiking camps in the Bighorn Country in 2024.

Explore magazine lists five trails within Waterton Lakes National Park as some of the best in the province and Waterton is recommended by Michael.  The Park is located in the extreme southwest corner of the province, near the border with both British Columbia and Montana (Glacier National Park). It’s about a three hours drive from Calgary.