Banff National Park Jasper Yoho Kootenay

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This month's World Heritage Site...

A Spectacular Winter Unfolds Among Some of the Earth’s Most Beautiful Mountains

By Patrick Totty

The recent movie “Mystery, Alaska” told the story of a fiercely competitive amateur hockey team from a backwater Alaskan town that manages to land an exhibition game with the National Hockey League’s New York Rangers. Filmed in winter, “Mystery” constantly distracted viewers with a spectacular backdrop of steep, sharply chiseled, Alp-like peaks surrounding the town. Where in Alaska were these gorgeous summits?

They were in Canmore, Alberta, a small town just south of Banff National Park. The peaks that soar above Canmore are prelude to a 200-mile stretch of some of North America’s most beautiful mountain scenery – so beautiful that the 14,000 square miles of uplands that the Canadians have preserved there in seven national parks (Banff, Jasper. Yoho and Kootenay are the most popular) have been named a World Heritage Site.

The Canadian Rockies, like the Alps and Himalayas, rise abruptly from their bases. There are no foothills to hide or diminish the visual effect of the mountains’ steepness. They were once heavily sedimented seabeds that were broken, elevated and then thrust up into almost vertical directions by tectonic activity. Later, huge glaciers scraped and honed the peaks, giving them their distinctive sharp-edged, pyramidal profiles.

In winter, the mountains look even more epic than in warmer months, with bright mantles of snow spilling down the dark rock thousands of feet, delineating every crevice and fold. Clouds hover near the tops as though attending to some remote assembly of ice gods. With its quiet, lack of crowds and almost overwhelming scenery, winter is a perfect time to visit the Canadian Rockies. The Canadians have built some of the best winter accommodations on earth to house cold-season travelers, including the great old railroad hotels at Lake Louise and Banff. The towns of Banff and Canmore at the southern end of the parks offer abundant cultural, dining and shopping opportunities in winter, as well as access to skiing (including helicopter, downhill and cross-country), snowboarding, dogsledding, snowmobiling, hockey and glacier tours. The town of Jasper, 150 miles north, is smaller and quieter, but also offers a broad range of winter services and amenities.

For more information, use an Internet search engine like Google or Dogpile to look under “Canadian Rockies,” “Canadian Rockies National Parks,” or the names of individual towns or parks (Banff, Jasper. Kootenay, Yoho)