Alberta Geography, Climate & Nature

Alberta covers 661,848 square kilometres, the fourth-largest province, a rectangle 1,223 kilometres north to south and 660 wide, bordered by British Columbia along the Continental Divide and the 120th meridian to the west, Saskatchewan to the east, the Northwest Territories at the 60th parallel to the north, and Montana along the 49th to the south. With Saskatchewan it is one of only two landlocked provinces. The land divides in three: the Rocky Mountains and their foothills along the south-western border, rising to Mount Columbia at 3,747 metres, the highest point in Alberta, on the edge of the Columbia Icefield; the plains and prairie across the south and centre, dropping into the badlands of the Red Deer River valley and, in the far south-east, to the Cypress Hills, the highest ground between the Rockies and Labrador; and the boreal forest and muskeg of the north, where the Athabasca oil sands lie under 141,000 square kilometres and the land falls to its lowest point, 152 metres on the Slave River in Wood Buffalo National Park.

The rivers rise in the mountains and run to three oceans: the Athabasca, the longest in the province at 1,538 kilometres, and the Peace, the largest by flow, north through the Mackenzie system to the Arctic; the North Saskatchewan and the Bow and Oldman east to Hudson Bay; the Milk south to the Gulf of Mexico. The largest lakes are Lake Athabasca and Lesser Slave Lake in the north; the famous ones -- Louise, Moraine, Peyto, Maligne, Minnewanka -- are small glacial jewels in the mountain parks, and Abraham Lake a reservoir on the North Saskatchewan.

The 4.26 million people, 84 per cent of them German, British and other European in ancestry with a large Ukrainian community and the third-largest First Nations population of any province, are overwhelmingly urban and concentrated in the Calgary–Edmonton Corridor along Highway 2, which holds more than half of them. Calgary, at the mountains' edge where the Bow and Elbow meet, is the largest city at 1.31 million and the fifth-largest metropolis in Canada; Edmonton, the capital, on the North Saskatchewan in the centre, is next at 1.01 million; then Red Deer between them, Lethbridge and Medicine Hat on the southern plains, Grande Prairie in the Peace Country and Fort McMurray in the oil-sands north. The nine Goparoo cities on this page -- Banff, Calgary, Drumheller, Edmonton, Fort Macleod, Fort McMurray, Jasper, Lake Louise and Lethbridge -- run from the mountain resorts to the prairie towns.

Alberta's climate is continental and semi-arid, with temperatures that swing fast because the air is so dry and the province so far from any ocean. Summers are hot on the plains -- record maxima climb past 40 °C in the south-east and around 32 °C in the mountains -- and short and warm in the north, where Edmonton's growing season runs from early May to late September, one of the longest on the prairies. Winters are cold, Edmonton averaging around −11 °C in January and dropping below −40 in a cold snap, but southern Alberta's winters are the mildest on the prairies because of the Chinook: the warm, dry wind that pours down the eastern slope of the Rockies and can raise the temperature from −19 to 22 °C in a single hour, as it did at Pincher Creek in 1966, melting the snow and arching a band of cloud over the foothills.

It is a dry province: annual precipitation runs from about 300 millimetres in the south-east to 450 in the north, reaching 600 in the foothills where snow piles up. The Calgary–Edmonton corridor has the highest frequency of hail in Canada, thrown up by the Rockies' orographic lift; the same country gets summer thunderstorms and the occasional tornado, one of which killed 27 people in Edmonton in 1987. The winter variability of the western foothills is, the record says, the highest of anywhere in the world. The extremes cut both ways -- the record high near 42 °C in the south, the record low below −50 °C in the north -- and the hazards are the winter storms and avalanches that close the mountain highways, the summer wildfires and their smoke, and the floods that devastated Calgary and the foothills in June 2013. The UK advisory adds that mountain highways in Alberta are often shut by snow and avalanche and that a vehicle needs snow tyres and emergency supplies. Best Destinations by Month has the practical reading.

Alberta runs from prairie grassland through aspen parkland and foothills to the alpine of the Rockies and the boreal forest and muskeg of the north, and it protects the range in six World Heritage Sites and five national parks. Banff, the first in the country in 1885, and Jasper, the largest in the Alberta Rockies at 11,000 square kilometres, hold the Columbia Icefield, the largest ice mass in the Rockies, and the glacial lakes; Waterton Lakes joins Montana's Glacier as an international peace park where prairie meets mountain; Elk Island, a fenced 194 square kilometres east of Edmonton, saved the plains bison from extinction and restocked the herds that now roam Wood Buffalo, the largest national park in Canada and, at 44,741 square kilometres, larger than Switzerland, holding the world's largest free-roaming wood bison herd, one of only two whooping-crane nesting grounds on earth, the Peace-Athabasca Delta and the world's largest beaver dam. Kananaskis Country, the provincial parks and the Cypress Hills fill in the rest. Alberta is also, famously, the only province in Canada kept free of rats.

The wildlife is the northern-Rockies set: grizzly and black bears, elk, moose, mule and white-tailed deer, bighorn sheep and mountain goats on the crags, cougars and wolves, and the bison of Elk Island and Wood Buffalo. The badlands of the Red Deer River are one of the richest dinosaur fossil beds in the world -- fifty-eight species from Dinosaur Provincial Park -- and the Royal Tyrrell Museum at Drumheller holds the largest fossil collection in Canada. No fuller species inventory was consulted beyond the sources named in the data file.

The threats are the oil-sands footprint on the boreal north and the Athabasca watershed, the fracking and coal pressure on the eastern slopes, the pine-beetle and warming damage to the forests, and the wildfires that are burning larger and hotter -- 590,000 hectares around Fort McMurray in 2016, a third of the town of Jasper in 2024. Grizzly bears are listed as threatened and the prairie population is extirpated; the bison recovery is the counter-example.

Alberta is one of the best places in North America to see large mammals from the road, which is exactly why the province's first rule is distance. Elk graze the townsites of Banff and Jasper and bugle through the September rut; bighorn sheep stand on the highway cuts of the Icefields Parkway; mountain goats work the crags; moose feed in the muskeg and the willow flats; and mule and white-tailed deer are everywhere, including on the roads at dusk. Bears are the animal to plan around: grizzlies on the high meadows and passes, black bears in the forest, both drawn to berries in late summer and to anything left at a campsite. The province's BearSmart guidance is to carry bear spray year-round, keep food and garbage locked away, travel in groups, make noise, and never approach or feed an animal for a photograph; the same goes for the elk in rut and the bison, which look placid and are not.

The bison are the set piece: the plains and wood bison of Elk Island, half an hour from Edmonton, the largest and smallest land mammals in North America in one fenced park, and the great free herds of Wood Buffalo. The birds run from the whooping cranes that nest in Wood Buffalo, the tallest bird on the continent brought back from the brink, to the waterfowl of the prairie sloughs and the golden and bald eagles of the mountains. The practical zoology: bear spray and food storage in the parks, deer and elk on the roads at dawn and dusk, ticks in the grass in spring, and the cold and the crevasses -- the Athabasca Glacier has killed unprepared walkers -- as the real dangers alongside the animals.