Brian Patton, Summerthought

Many people think of the four contiguous mountain national parks of Banff, Jasper, Yoho, and Kootenay as separate entities. But, despite natural features which seem to give each of these parks its own unique character, the boundaries drawn between them are strictly artificial, created primarily for administrative purposes. In reality, as you enter the mountain parks, you are visiting one huge 20,280 square kilometre national park-one of the largest areas of mountain parkland in the world.

Parkways of the Canadian Rockies treats this vast area as a single park, referring to the separate parks only as regions or districts within the whole, and using the park names merely as a means of helping to orient the visitor. The chapters follow the main roadways through the parks, which, like the flora, fauna, and geological formations, run oblivious of man-made boundaries.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK. While this book is designed for motorists and cyclists moving through the parks on paved highways, roadside viewpoints and short nature trails are used as the main theatres for interpreting the natural and human history of the region. These national parks cannot be fully appreciated from a moving vehicle, or even a bicycle. To put this book to its best use, the visitor must stop, get out of his car, camper, motorhome or whatever, breath in the fresh mountain air and begin to discover just what this exceptional landscape is all about.

The first section of the book briefly outlines the natural history and human past of the mountain parks' region. By reading through this section, you will better understand some of the roadside descriptions found later in the book. Some terms used in both the natural history introduction and road log descriptions may sometimes seem a bit technical, but I have purposely avoided "writing-down" to the reader. Most of these terms are repeated and features re-explained wherever good examples appear on a given tour, so by the time the traveller leaves the parks, he should have a pretty good idea of what certain features look like and how they were created.

Since most of the roads in the mountain parks can be travelled starting from either end, distances are included in the margins for both directions. For example, if you are west-bound on the Trans-Canada Highway, you can read through that chapter in the normal front-to-back fashion, following the distances in the left-hand margin; if you are east-bound, you must turn to the end of the chapter and work backwards, following the distances in the right-hand margin. The distances printed in bold type are in kilometres and those in italic type are in miles.

A word of caution about distances: it is probably not advisable to try to follow a long highway on your car odometer. Unless you have a trip odometer that can be set at zero at the start of the tour, you would do better to simply make a quick calculation of distance between points of interest as you go. Anyway, there are discrepancies among car odometers, and trying to match distances with the book over a long trip would undoubtedly be a frustrating task.

Shorter chapters on prime areas of interest, such as Banff, Lake Louise, the Columbia Icefield and Jasper, are scattered throughout the book. In these chapters, natural and human history are treated in more detail, and many pleasant drives, bicycle outings and nature hikes are described.

Just one last friendly word of advice: take your time as you travel through the mountain parks.