Prairies to the Pacific

Fourteen nights by hire car from the Alberta prairie to the Pacific, which is a proper crossing rather than a loop and takes in three completely different landscapes.

The prairies come first, and the dinosaurs are the reason. The Royal Tyrrell Museum at Drumheller holds one of the largest fossil collections in the world and is a working research institution. Dinosaur Provincial Park follows, UNESCO listed for the richness of its beds, and the included archaeological dig is the distinctive part of this itinerary: participants work a genuine quarry under supervision rather than watch someone else do it.

Waterton Lakes is next, and it is the least visited of the Canadian Rockies parks, which is its chief virtue. The mountains there rise straight out of prairie grassland with no foothills at all, and the park is joined to Glacier in Montana as the world’s first international peace park.

The Crowsnest Pass then carries the route west through the Rockies to the Okanagan around Osoyoos, which is the warmest part of Canada and the only true desert in the country, with vineyards and orchards running up both sides of the valley. The final leg continues to the Pacific coast. Canadian Affair include the flights, the hire car, the hotels, the dig and the museum admissions, with fuel, insurance and meals separate. The price is per person. Going prairie to ocean rather than the usual Vancouver round trip means the landscape changes completely about three times, which is more than most fortnight itineraries manage.