by Bedouin Bourdain
There are road trips, and then there is the Icefields Parkway. One rewards you with scenery. The other makes you question whether you’ve somehow driven into a painting.
One can fly into Edmonton, point the car west, and let Alberta do the rest. The strategy was deliberate: arriving in Jasper first means you consume this masterpiece north to south, building toward a crescendo rather than away from one. And make no mistake, every mile between Jasper National Park and Banff feels like God showing off.
The iconic red Adirondack chairs along the Parkway are practically a rite of passage, positioned with almost unfair precision to frame glaciers tumbling between snow-capped peaks. Sit down. Stay a while. The view isn’t going anywhere, even if the glaciers slowly are. Athabasca Falls roars with a fury that feels almost personal: glacial green water churning over ancient layered rock with a snow-crowned peak standing witness behind it. Pull over. Every time.
Wildlife doesn’t wait for invitation here. A bighorn sheep navigating sheer cliff face with casual indifference to gravity is a reminder that you’re the tourist in this particular neighborhood. They’ve been running these ridgelines long before the parkway existed.
Two nights at the Glacier View Lodge, ideally positioned between Jasper and Banff, sets up a final morning perfectly. Lunch at Lake Louise with those impossible turquoise waters followed by the Rundle Bar patio at the Banff Springs Hotel is a sequence of experiences that would be almost absurdly difficult to top anywhere on earth.
Then comes Calgary: underestimated, a little scrappy, genuinely pleasing. The Cold Garden Beverage Company in the Inglewood neighborhood is worth the detour alone. Think Meow Wolf meets malt house, with a “This Must Be the Place” sign that somehow perfectly captures the disbelief of stumbling onto something this good. The River Café along the Bow delivers on both atmosphere and plate.
Calgary won’t steal the show from what came before it. Nothing could. But it sends you home satisfied rather than deflated, which is exactly the right note to end on.
As Tom Petty wisely observed, it’s a great big world with lots of places to run to. The Icefields Parkway is where you start lacing up.