Canadian Rockies

A backpacker above Cataract Creek on the Nigel, Cataract and Cline Passes Route in the White Goat Wilderness, Canadian Rockies.

Backpacking the Canadian Rockies: Nigel and Cataract Passes

By Michael Lanza

A couple of hours up the Nigel Pass Trail, after a lunch break beside boulder-strewn rapids on chalky, glacially silted Nigel Creek, we pop out of forest into sub-alpine terrain with wildflowers and the kind of dense, low brush that conceals grizzly bears better than we think—enjoying our first expansive views of the peaks flanking this valley in Banff National Park. As we make our way farther up the valley, our gentle trail turns steeper, leading us up to Nigel Pass at 7,200 feet (2,195 meters), where we drink up a 360-degree panorama of tall cliffs and treeless mountainsides of broken rock in this little patch of the Canadian Rockies.

But even this barely hints at what lies ahead.

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A backpacker on the Rockwall Trail, Kootenay National Park, Canada.

Photo Gallery: The Rockwall Trail in the Canadian Rockies

By Michael Lanza

A few hours into our hike’s first day, we came around a bend in the trail to a sight that stopped us cold: a pair of skyscraping stone monoliths rising thousands of feet above the treetops. Silhouetted by the sun arcing toward the west, the peaks resembled a pair of El Capitans standing shoulder to shoulder. A little while later, one of the tallest waterfalls in the Rocky Mountains came into view: Helmet Falls, plunging 1,154 feet (352 meters) over a cliff.

After that, the scenery really got good.

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A backpacker hiking above Death Hollow on the Boulder Mail Trail in southern Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

16 Photos From 2023 That Will Inspire Your Next Adventure

By Michael Lanza

How was your 2023? I hope you got outdoors as much as possible with the people you care about—and you enjoyed adventures that inspired you. I’m sharing in this story photos from the seven backpacking trips I took this year (in addition to the usual dayhiking, climbing, skiing, etc.). In early April, I went on a pair of three-day hikes in Arizona’s Aravaipa Canyon and on a section of the Arizona Trail that was in the midst of a wildly colorful wildflower bloom. On a two-family trip to the Canadian Rockies in late July and early August, we backpacked two amazing routes, the Skyline Trail in Jasper National Park and a piece of the Great Divide Trail into the White Goat Wilderness.

Later in August, I returned yet again to the Wind River Range for a roughly 41-mile hike that I am prepared to boldly call the best multi-day hike in the Winds (and that’s saying an awful lot). September featured a much-anticipated return to Glacier National Park for a seven-day hike complicated by an ever-present possibility in Glacier—”bear activity”—following trails I have walked before but which I think could never fail to inspire a sense of awe. And finally, in early October, two friends and I backpacked a three-day loop in southern Utah’s Escalante region that exceeded even my high expectations for it.

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Backpackers hiking the Skyline Trail north toward Tekarra camp, Jasper National Park, Canadian Rockies.

Backpacking the Skyline Trail in Jasper National Park

By Michael Lanza

About three hours into our hike on the Skyline Trail in Canada’s Jasper National Park, a rumble of thunder rips the sky with a sound like a train derailment; moments later, the gray overcast that had rolled overhead maybe 30 minutes earlier starts spraying us with random bursts of raindrops. By the time the five of us have hurried into rain shells and flipped our hoods up, the rain commences in earnest, chauffeured by strong wind just as we emerge from forest into the alpine terrain.

Walking into the full brunt of the weather but dressed for it—and this crew has deep experience with all kinds of nasty weather—we just push on through the rain, motivated by the first taste of the scenery that awaits in greater glory ahead. Plus, we face several more miles of hiking to our first camp on the Skyline Trail in Jasper, the much-less-visited but larger sister park of its joined-at-the-hip sibling, Banff, in the Canadian Rockies.

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Backpackers hiking the Skyline Trail north toward Tekarra camp, Jasper National Park, Canadian Rockies.

Hiking and Backpacking the Canadian Rockies—A Photo Gallery

By Michael Lanza

While I always prefer to get as far from any road as possible whenever I visit a mountain range, one truth that may—and perhaps must—be said of the Canadian Rockies is that they will leave you smitten with an lifelong, unshakeable love before you even step out of the car. Driving to any trailhead along the 143-mile-long (232-kilometer) Icefields Parkway between Lake Louise and the town of Jasper, or along the Trans-Canada Highway across the mountains, and you will struggle to sound like a literate person as superlatives and simple gasps of “wow” roll repeatedly off your tongue. On my most recent visit we saw, in addition to countless, sizable glaciers tumbling off a chain of peaks stretching for miles, perhaps the largest grizzly bear of my life (a sow with two cubs), two bull elk with racks possibly broader than my wingspan, and a pod of bighorn sheep—all from the car in one afternoon on the Icefields Parkway.

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