Calgary sits at one of the best day-trip hubs in North America. The Canadian Rockies begin less than an hour west, and the prairies to the east hold their own surprises.
Banff National Park is the obvious first choice. The townsite of Banff is about 90 minutes from downtown Calgary along the Trans-Canada Highway. The park contains some of the most dramatic mountain scenery on the continent — turquoise glacial lakes, elk wandering the main street, and hiking trails in every direction. In winter the ski resorts at Sunshine Village, Lake Louise, and Norquay are world-class. Summer brings crowds, especially at Lake Louise and Moraine Lake; go early in the morning or accept the shuttle buses.
Canmore is a smaller mountain town just outside the national park boundary, about 15 minutes before Banff on the highway. It has a more local, less touristy feel than the Banff townsite, with good independent restaurants and access to the same mountain scenery. Many Calgarians prefer it.
Kananaskis Country, southwest of Calgary via Highway 40, offers hiking, cross-country skiing, and mountain scenery comparable to Banff with a fraction of the crowds. There are no entrance fees and no townsite; just wilderness, campgrounds, and well-maintained trails. It's a favourite with Calgarians who find Banff too busy.
Drumheller lies about 90 minutes northeast of Calgary in the Alberta Badlands — a landscape of eroded hoodoos, coulees, and canyon walls that looks like another planet. The area is famous for dinosaur fossils; the Royal Tyrrell Museum in nearby Midland Provincial Park is one of the world's great palaeontology museums, with an enormous collection of mounted skeletons. The drive through the Red Deer River valley into the badlands is striking in itself.
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, about two and a half hours south near Fort Macleod, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site where Plains Indigenous peoples drove bison herds off a cliff edge for thousands of years. The interpretive centre built into the cliff face tells the story well, with artefacts and oral history from the Blackfoot people. It is one of the oldest, largest, and best-preserved buffalo jump sites in the world.
