Having seen the cowboys (and girls) in action at the Strathmore Stampede on the first day of our family road trip of the Alberta Badlands and Canadian Prairies, we intended to continue the cowboy theme on our holiday. Determined to get on horseback at least once, we booked into the Historic Reesor Ranch in the Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park for a ranch stay and slice of cowboy lifestyle.
Driving south east across the Alberta prairie, the land is flat for hours. Then, without much warning, hills appear. Wooded, green, several hundred metres above everything around them, and completely out of place.
The Cypress Hills are one of the odder pieces of geography in Canada, and one of the more significant pieces of its history. We came for a ranch stay and stayed for the story.
Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park straddles the Alberta and Saskatchewan border, which is what makes it interprovincial and what made it Canada’s first park of its kind. It comes in three parts: the Alberta side around Elkwater, the West Block containing Fort Walsh, and the Centre Block in Saskatchewan. It holds the highest ground in Canada between the Rockies and Labrador, it is a Dark Sky Preserve, and two nights is the minimum worth giving it.
The park sits on the border between south east Alberta and south west Saskatchewan, close to the United States. It became Canada’s first interprovincial park in 1989, jointly run by the two provinces. To get there, there are some great stops:
From Medicine Hat, Alberta: Around 65km south on Highway 41 to the Alberta entrance at Elkwater.
From Maple Creek, Saskatchewan: The nearest town to the Centre Block and the West Block.
From Strathmore or Calgary: Roughly three and a half to four hours.
From Grasslands National Park: About three hours, or four if you route via Fort Walsh, which we would recommend.
Full drive times for the whole route are in our road trip planning guide.
Some roads within the park are gravel or dirt and are only reliably passable in dry conditions. We asked locals before we drove them. Fuel up in Elkwater or Maple Creek, because there is very little in between.
The Cypress Hills escaped the last ice age. When the glaciers ground south across the prairies, the top of this plateau stood above the ice and was never covered. Geologists call that a nunatak. Everything around it was scoured flat. This was not.
The consequences are strange and visible. The hills reach 1,468 metres at Head of the Mountain on the Alberta side, which makes this the highest ground in Canada between the Rocky Mountains and Labrador. The Elkwater townsite sits at roughly the same elevation as the townsite at Banff.
Because the plateau was never glaciated and because the elevation creates its own climate, you get an ecological island. Lodgepole pine forest, montane plants and alpine wildflowers grow here, hundreds of kilometres east of where they otherwise stop. Species that belong in the Rockies survive out on the prairie because this one patch of ground stayed above the ice.
It is also why the park feels so unlike its surroundings. You climb into it and the temperature drops, the trees close in, and the Great Plains disappear behind you.
The park comes in three pieces and they are not adjacent, so you will need to decide before you go:
The recreation hub for the Alberta half. Elkwater Lake with a beach and boat and kayak hire, campgrounds, cabins, the Head of the Mountain viewpoint, the Horseshoe Canyon and Reesor Lake lookouts, and over fifty kilometres of trails. This is where most families base themselves and it has the most services.
Straddles the provincial border and is the wilder half. This is where Fort Walsh National Historic Site is, along with the Conglomerate Cliffs, and it is where the Historic Reesor Ranch sits. Fewer facilities, more space.
Near Maple Creek, with the resort village at Loch Leven, campgrounds, a beach and the main Saskatchewan trail network. Confusingly it is not physically joined to the border-straddling portion at all.
We stayed in the West Block at the Reesor Ranch and used it as a base for Fort Walsh, coming in from the Alberta side via Elkwater. If you have one night, that is a reasonable way to do it. If you have two or three, the Alberta side and the Centre Block both deserve time.
Fort Walsh is the single most historically significant place in this park, and it exists because of something terrible that happened two kilometres away.
On 1 June 1873, a group of American wolf hunters, camped near two trading posts in the Battle Creek valley, attacked a camp of Nakoda people over a dispute about missing horses. Alcohol had been flowing on all sides. At least twenty Nakoda were killed, including Elders, women and children.
The Cypress Hills Massacre changed Canada. When news of it reached Ottawa it confirmed the government’s fear that the west was beyond its control, and it accelerated the creation of the North West Mounted Police. In July 1874 around three hundred recruits set out from Manitoba on what became known as the March West, a journey of nearly 1,400km, establishing posts as they went.
Fort Walsh was built in June 1875 by Inspector James Morrow Walsh and roughly thirty men, a short distance from the massacre site. It became NWMP headquarters from 1878, was closed and dismantled in 1883 once the force moved to Regina, and was reconstructed by the RCMP in the 1940s. It is now run by Parks Canada.
Several men were arrested and tried over the massacre. Nobody was ever convicted. The case was formally closed in 1882. The site is a National Historic Site in its own right, and the Nakoda hold it sacred as the place to which the spirits of their ancestors are tied.
The fort’s other chapter came after the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, when Sitting Bull crossed into Canada with several thousand Lakota seeking refuge from the United States Army. Inspector Walsh was the man who negotiated with them, and the fort’s importance peaked during those years. Adhesions to Treaty 4 were signed here in 1877, and to Treaty 6 in 1879 and 1882.
We took the guided tour, which is included and very good. Allow two to three hours for the fort, the visitor centre film and the reconstructed trading posts down at the massacre site. Park interpreters run excursions to the massacre site itself in season.
If you are also visiting the RCMP Depot in Regina, do Fort Walsh first. The story starts here and finishes there, and doing it in that order makes far more sense of both..
Cypress Hills was designated a Dark Sky Preserve in 2004, covering around 400 square kilometres across all three blocks and Fort Walsh itself. It is among the darkest and, because you can drive right into it, among the most accessible dark sky sites in North America.
The elevation helps, the total absence of any nearby town helps more, and the result on a clear moonless night is exceptional. If you are planning around it:
Check the moon phase: A full moon undoes everything - as the bright light acts as natural light pollution, washing out any faint stars & the milky way.
Look for star party dates: The park runs astronomy events through the summer, and turns off road and washroom lighting for them.
Take warm layers: The elevation means evenings are markedly colder here than on the prairie below, even in July.
Give your eyes half an hour: Properly dark-adapted vision makes an enormous difference.
We were staying at the Reesor Ranch and simply walked out into the yard. That was enough, and one of the many parks of the ranch.
Coming in from Medicine Hat, the Alberta side is your introduction to the park and it is a pretty one.
Elkwater Lake sits in the middle of the townsite, surrounded by trees, with kayaks for hire if you want to get on the water. We walked around the southern shore and it looked as Canadian as anything we saw in two weeks.
The viewpoints are the reason to drive up:
Horseshoe Canyon Lookout: Up in the hills behind Elkwater, with views out over the park. This is a completely different place from the Horseshoe Canyon near Drumheller, which shares its name and nothing else. Worth knowing before you plan.
Reesor Lake Viewpoint: The better of the two in our opinion, looking down a long valley. The road then drops to the lake itself and runs along the tree-lined shore.
Head of the Mountain: The highest point between the Rockies and Labrador, on the Alberta side.
On a clear day the views from up here reach around a hundred kilometres.
There are over fifty kilometres of hiking and mountain biking trails on the Alberta side, and in winter the park runs a small ski hill along with skating, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing.
We had decided early that we wanted to get on a horse at least once, and a ranch stay in the Cypress Hills was how we did it.
The Historic Reesor Ranch was established in 1904 and has been in the same family for five generations. The buildings sit under distinctive red roofs at the end of a kilometre-long approach road, and the cattle grid at the entrance also marks the Alberta and Saskatchewan border.
We had barely crossed it before we were met by a very curious white horse and then, shortly after, an equally curious cow.
We hired the Bunkhouse, which sleeps five, is extremely cosy and is decorated with more cowboy detail than strictly necessary. Its veranda had a constant stream of visitors throughout our stay; one of the ranch cats, or one of the two ranch dogs, Charlie and Cowboy, all of whom clearly considered our booking to include their company.
Dinner is served in the Ranch Hall in the evening, with guests choosing from a short menu the night before. Steak or grilled chicken with a jacket potato, salad and barbecue beans, plus a vegetarian option, and ice cream for pudding. Homely, generous and good, with family members around to talk to.
Breakfast is cooked and served in the Ranch Hall in the morning. The breakfast potatoes, made with what we were assured were real potatoes, were the best we had anywhere in Canada.
Our daughter and one of us booked a morning ride. You are assigned a horse, and you groom and saddle it yourself before setting out, which we had not expected and which made the whole thing feel far less like a theme park.
We rode out over the fields and up to the ridge above the valley before coming back. The horses were patient with a group of very rusty riders and we did not want to hand them back.
You can book the riding without staying at the ranch, and slots fill up, so book early either way.
While two of us rode, the other two walked the Kinnikinick Cliff Trail on the ranch property. It is a 3km loop and gains around 90 metres of height in under a kilometre, so it is short and properly steep. The views from the clifftop are worth it.
We also did an ATV safari across the property, up a steep and winding track to the top of the cliffs. The verdict from our group was split. The boys preferred the quad bikes. Everyone else preferred the horses.
There are tipi rings near the ranch buildings, though they are difficult to spot under grass and flowers. Charlie the ranch labrador came along on our walk and led us straight to them, which we choose to believe was deliberate.
Tipi rings are circles of stones that once weighted down the edges of hide-covered lodges, with a gap left at the eastern entrance. When a camp moved on, the lodge went with it and the stones stayed. There are thousands of them across this landscape.
If you are approaching from Alberta, Medicine Hat is the obvious break. It is a city of around 65,000, known as The Gas City for the natural gas fields beneath it.
We arrived on a public holiday with everything closed, which we had not planned for. What saved the stop was the Saamis Teepee, an enormous steel structure billed as the world’s tallest tepee at around twenty storeys, visible from the Trans-Canada Highway.
It is free, it is open to the public, and it is worth driving right up to the base. Storyboards on each of the legs cover elements of First Nations culture and history. The Medicine Hat visitor centre is next door and the staff there were the most helpful we met anywhere on the trip.
When? Summer is the main season, with everything open and the lakes and trails at their best. Autumn is quieter and the light on the hills is lovely. Winter is a genuine option here, unusually for this region, with skiing, skating and snowshoeing, and the dark skies at their longest.
Whatever the season, take warm layers for the evening. The elevation makes a real difference.
How long?
One night: Enough for a ranch stay or Fort Walsh. Not both comfortably.
Two nights: Our minimum recommendation. Fort Walsh and the massacre site on one day, the ranch or the Elkwater side on the other.
Three nights: Adds the Centre Block, the Conglomerate Cliffs and time on the trails..
In closing
Yes, and it surprised us more than anywhere else on the trip. We came expecting a ranch stay and a night on a veranda. We got that, and it was lovely: the woodpecker, the horses in the field, coffee in the morning, the animals treating us as their guests rather than the other way round.
What we did not expect was the rest of it. A forested plateau that the ice age forgot, holding trees and plants that have no business being on the prairie. The place where the North West Mounted Police were effectively born, and the far darker events that brought them into being. A dark sky preserve you can drive into. And Sitting Bull, of all people, camped a few miles away.
If you only take one thing from this, do Fort Walsh properly and give it the time. The ranch is the reason most people come. History is the reason to stay an extra day.
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