Alberta, You Surprised Me!

Alberta has many wonderful things to offer.

I am having such a good time with our journey through the provinces. I

thought I knew the shape of Canada fairly well, but each week I find

something that makes me stop and look again.

This week it was Alberta. In my mind, Alberta has always been enormous:

prairie stretching to the horizon, mountains rising beyond the foothills, and

a sky with plenty of room for the weather to put on a show. So I was

astonished to learn that Alberta ranks sixth in land area among our

provinces and territories. Quebec has more than twice as much land.

Alberta, meanwhile, has the fourth-largest population.

So down the rabbit hole! What else didn’t I know? I kept going. Only 16%

of Albertans are 65 or older, compared with 23% of us here in Nova Scotia.

And about 85% of Albertans live in urban areas. I had been carrying around

a picture of Alberta as mostly open country, with a few cities set down in it.

The people, of course, have been living a much fuller story than the picture

in my head.

That may be what I love about exploring Canada this way. A number

catches my attention, and then I begin to wonder about the lives inside it.

What is it like to grow up beneath that prairie sky? To make a home in

Edmonton or Calgary, with the mountains close enough to hike in? To live

in the north, where the distances are great, and there are signs to tell you to

make sure you have enough gas because the next gas station is 200 km

away!

I still think Alberta feels vast. Now I’m curious about why—and about the

people who have made lives in all those different landscapes.

Calgary oozes confidence. There are cowboy hats and pancakes when

Stampede comes around, but there are also neighbourhood cafés, busy

restaurants, music, and people walking beside the Bow River on an

ordinary Tuesday. The mountains beckon from the west, just close enough

to become part of a city dweller’s plans for the weekend.

Edmonton feels different to me. Alberta’s capital makes room for art,

festivals, and the North Saskatchewan River Valley, where you can step

away from city streets and find yourself among trees. There is something

rather appealing about a city that knows how to celebrate both a long

summer evening and the middle of winter.

Then there is Jasper, tucked into a mountain valley where visitors come

hoping for beauty and residents have built an everyday life. The wildfire of

2024 left losses that cannot be captured in a holiday photograph. As Jasper

rebuilds, I find myself thinking less about the view and more about what it

means to belong to a place and stay with it through hard times.

At Lake Louise I wanted to linger. So many of us know that remarkable blue

water from pictures, but I do know what it feels like to stand there long

enough to notice the changing light and the small sounds around the shore.

A place can be famous and still offer a moment that belongs only to you.

Fort McMurray sits where the Athabasca and Clearwater Rivers meet,

surrounded by boreal forest. The oil sands have drawn people here to work

and build families, making this northern community far more varied than I

once imagined. Cree, Dene, and Métis histories reach back long before the

industry, and their communities remain a strong part of the landscape.

Drumheller takes us into another chapter. The Badlands hold dinosaur

fossils millions of years old, but they also hold the more recent story of

coal. Mines once brought workers and their families into the Red Deer

River Valley; when the industry faded, communities had to find their way

forward. Drumheller lets us look at both kinds of history at once: the

astonishing age of the earth, and the much shorter, deeply human story of

the people who worked it.

Perhaps that is what makes Alberta feel so vast—the sheer variety of lives

and landscapes it holds. We have wandered from prairie skies to mountain

lakes, from busy city streets to northern forests, and even stopped to visit a

few dinosaurs along the way.

I began with a picture of Alberta in my head. Now I have a whole collection

of pictures, and a growing curiosity about the people in them. It seems you

can travel quite a distance with a cup of tea and a willingness to be

surprised. I wonder what next week’s province will teach us?