For a few special weeks every fall, Alberta hikers go crazy with larch tree fever. Parking lots for the best larch hikes in Alberta fill before dawn and social media feeds fill up with images of these beautiful trees and their brilliant golden needles.
The Larch Valley hike is the most famous larch tree hike in Lake Louise. It’s a bit of an effort to climb from Moraine Lake up the lower slopes of Mount Temple to get to Larch Valley, but the payoff is worth it, no matter the time of year.
The Rummel Lake hike one of our favourite year-round Kananaskis hikes. For a moderate amount of effort, you get to enjoy a beautiful walk through a mountain forest, an open meadow with incredible vistas of the Spray Lakes Valley and a beautiful mountain lake in an intimate setting, with enormous Rocky Mountains looming overhead.
The South Pocaterra Ridge trail is one of the most rewarding and scenic hikes in Kananaskis Country. This popular Kananaskis hike offers hikers a wide variety of Kananaskis scenery, ranging from a walk through a mountain cirque, to rushing streams to a spectacular ridge hike with jaw-dropping Rocky Mountain views.
Taylor Lake in Banff National Park is an enjoyable hike up the lower slopes of Mount Bell to a beautiful mountain lake. The forest along the Taylor Lake trail is quite lush, in large part due to the creek the trail follows for most of its length.
Arethusa Cirque is an extremely scenic short Kananaskis hike near the Highwood Pass. It’s not as well-known as the nearby Ptarmigan Cirque trail or the Pocaterra Ridge hike, but it offers a ton of varied Rocky Mountain scenery for a moderate amount of effort.
The Ptarmigan Cirque hike is a very popular Kananaskis trail near the Highwood Pass (the highest paved pass in Canada). This fun, kid-friendly Kananaskis hike offers hikers a wide variety of excellent mountain scenery over a relatively short distance.
Whether you’ve come to visit Banff National Park or live nearby, hiking in Kananaskis will leave you wanting to come back for more. With jaw dropping views, we’d consider many of these to be the best hikes in Kananaskis.
If you are a seasoned hiker in good shape and crave some of the best scenery in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, you should add the Sarrail Ridge hike to your list of must-do Kananaskis hikes.
Rawson Lake is one of the best easy hikes in Kananaskis. Hikers going to Rawson Lake will enjoy being lakeside on not one, but two beautiful Kananaskis lakes, with a highly enjoyable, somewhat challenging, forest hike in-between.
