Southern Rockies With Campgrounds

Fifteen nights in a motorhome out of Calgary heading east first, which almost nobody does, and it turns out to be the more interesting direction.

Drumheller is the destination. The prairie around Calgary is flat and agricultural, and then without much warning it drops into the Canadian Badlands, a landscape of eroded canyons and hoodoos cut by the Red Deer River. The Royal Tyrrell Museum there holds one of the largest collections of dinosaur fossils anywhere, and it is a research institution as much as a visitor attraction.

Dinosaur Provincial Park follows and is UNESCO listed for the quality of its fossil beds, which have produced specimens from around seventy-five million years ago in numbers that few sites in the world can match. On the way there the route takes in the Star Mine suspension bridge across the river, the Willow Creek hoodoos and the Atlas Coal Mine, where the last wooden tipple in Canada still stands.

Then the route turns west across the prairie, and the Rockies come up on the horizon long before they are reached, which is one of the better views in Canada. Waterton Lakes closes the trip, a small park where the mountains rise straight out of grassland with no foothills at all, joined to Glacier in Montana as an international peace park. Canadian Affair include the flights, the motorhome, the pre-booked campgrounds and the listed attractions, with fuel, insurance and meals separate. The price is per person. For anyone who has done the Icefields Parkway already, this is the alternative worth looking at.