Alberta Road Trip - Day 2 - Kananaskis Country

After a wonderful breakfast at the hotel we set off along Kananaskis Trail (highway 40) into Kananaskis Country, a scenic region on the leeward side of the Rockies, southeast of Banff.

The scenery was fantastic -- towering dolomite mountainsides, tree-filled valleys, turquoise lakes, and abundant prairie dogs.

We headed back north along Smith Dorrien Spray Trail (highway 742), a gravel road leading up to Canmore. The road was easily drivable and not terribly dusty, thanks to some recent rain and a paucity of traffic on this weekday morning.

Our loop brought us through no fewer than four provincial parks -- Elbow-Sheep Wildland, Peter Lougheed, Spray Valley, and Bow Valley Wildland -- each of which stood in for the Wyoming wilderness in scenes from Brokeback Mountain.

We stopped a few times to take in more beautiful views, before arriving in Canmore, a former coal-mining town turned tourist destination. Canmore feels like Banff lite: candy and souvenir shop-lined streets, the Bow River, and visitors galore, in a mountain-surrounded valley. It's really a beautiful town and we enjoyed an afternoon spent wandering around the downtown area.

We ventured down the boardwalk at Policeman's Creek, but had to scrap our other trail-walking plans thanks to an unrelenting thunderstorm.

Not to worry, it was 4 pm and not too early to make our way back to Stoney Nakoda to do some reading -- alongside this view: