Rouge is Canada’s first national urban park, a remarkable pocket of nature, farmland and history within the Greater Toronto Area, reachable by city transit. Spanning forest, river valleys, wetlands, working farms and a Lake Ontario beach, it protects rare Carolinian habitat and thousands of years of human history at the doorstep of millions of people….
Quttinirpaaq, “top of the world” in Inuktitut, sits at the far northern tip of Ellesmere Island, one of the most remote and northerly places on the planet. A polar wilderness of ice caps, jagged mountains and glacier-carved fjords, it is the second-most-northerly park on Earth, a realm of 24-hour summer sun, surprising oases of life,…
Qausuittuq is one of Canada’s newest and most remote national parks, a High Arctic wilderness on Bathurst Island, protecting critical habitat for the endangered Peary caribou. Its name means “place where the sun doesn’t rise” in Inuktitut, a fitting name for a stark, wind-scoured land of polar desert, sea ice and profound solitude far above…
Pukaskwa is Ontario’s only wilderness national park. A rugged, roadless stretch of the Lake Superior coast where the ancient granite of the Canadian Shield meets the largest freshwater lake on Earth. Boreal forest, cobble beaches and wave-battered headlands frame a coastline so wild that most of it is reached only on foot or by kayak,…
Prince Edward Island National Park strings together some of the most beautiful coastline in Atlantic Canada, red sandstone cliffs, rolling dunes, and long stretches of soft beach along the island’s gentle north shore. Backed by woodland and salt marsh, dotted with iconic lighthouses, and home to the beloved Green Gables of literary fame, it is…
Prince Albert National Park protects a beautiful cross-section of the Canadian wilderness where the aspen parkland gives way to the great boreal forest of the North. A land of clear lakes, spruce forest and open meadow in central Saskatchewan, it shelters free-ranging bison, a rare colony of white pelicans, and the remote cabin of Grey…
Point Pelee is a slender sandspit reaching into Lake Erie at the southernmost tip of mainland Canada, a tiny park with an outsized reputation. Its position on a major migratory flyway makes it one of the great birding destinations in North America, where each spring thousands of warblers and, in fall, clouds of monarch butterflies…
Olympic is really three parks in one, glacier-capped mountains, lush temperate rain forest, and a wild, driftwood-strewn Pacific coast, packed onto Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. From the alpine meadows of Hurricane Ridge to the dripping green cathedral of the Hoh Rain Forest to the sea stacks of Rialto Beach, few parks offer such staggering variety in…
Nááts’įhch’oh protects the wild headwaters of the South Nahanni River in the mountains of the far southwest Northwest Territories, the upstream companion to famous Nahanni. Named for a mountain sacred to the Shúhtaʼotʼįne (Mountain Dene), it is a remote realm of jagged peaks, whitewater rivers and abundant wildlife, protecting the source of one of the…
The North Cascades are the “American Alps”, a wilderness of jagged, glacier-hung peaks, plunging valleys and turquoise glacier-fed lakes in northern Washington. Holding more glaciers than anywhere in the Lower 48 outside Alaska, and among the least-visited of the major parks, it offers rugged solitude, serious mountaineering, and scenery as dramatic as any range on…
