Canada

Canada

The water really is that colour — an impossible turquoise that looks photoshopped until you're standing at the edge of Lake Louise watching glacial silt catch the morning light. Banff is the Canadian Rockies compressed into a national park: valleys that dead-end at blue-white glaciers, elk wandering through town like they pay rent, and a two-lane highway (the Icefields Parkway) that might be the best drive on the continent. The town itself is touristy and expensive — $9 craft beers, souvenir shops selling moose plush toys — but step onto any trailhead and within 20 minutes you're alone with mountains that make you feel appropriately small.

Canada

You round a bend on the Icefields Parkway and the road just stops making sense. A glacier hangs off a cliff that shouldn't exist, a lake sits below it in a colour that has no business being that blue, and there are no buildings, no towns, nothing. The Canadian Rockies operate at a scale that makes most other mountain ranges feel like suggestions. The elk near Jasper townsite don't flinch when you slow down.