Region · the Rockies
The Most Beautiful Places in the Rocky Mountains
5 places · every one real, mapped, and worth the trip
The Rocky Mountains run some 4,800 kilometres from British Columbia down to New Mexico, a chain of uplifted and heavily glaciated ranges quite distinct from the red-rock canyon country of the Colorado Plateau further south. Ice did most of the sculpting here — the horn peaks, the U-shaped valleys, and the rock-flour lakes that give the Canadian Rockies their improbable turquoise.
This is our editors' pick of the most beautiful places in the Rockies proper, on both sides of the border. It isn't a strict ranking, and it is deliberately short: places like Zion and Bryce are spectacular but belong to the Colorado Plateau, not this range.
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Banff & Moraine Lake The turquoise icon
Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada
Glacial rock flour suspended in meltwater turns these Alberta lakes an intense blue-green beneath the Valley of the Ten Peaks.
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Columbia Icefield The ice reservoir
Alberta & British Columbia, Canada
The largest ice field in the Rockies, feeding glaciers that drain to three different oceans, with a highway running right past its toe.
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Grand Teton The abrupt range
Wyoming, USA
A young fault-block range that rises straight off the Wyoming flats with no foothills at all — one of the most sudden mountain fronts anywhere.
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Glacier National Park The Crown of the Continent
Montana, USA
Montana's high country of carved cirques and hanging valleys, crossed by one of the great alpine roads and still holding remnant glaciers.
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Yellowstone The volcanic heart
Wyoming / Montana / Idaho, United States
A vast caldera sitting inside the range, where the world's densest concentration of geysers and hot springs meets open wildlife country.
The Rockies are a summer-and-early-autumn proposition for most visitors: high passes and alpine roads such as Going-to-the-Sun typically open only from roughly late June into September, and the turquoise in the Canadian lakes needs the summer melt to develop. Winter turns the same places over to skiers and, in Yellowstone, to a much quieter landscape reached by snow coach.
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