Filming locations in Canadian Rockies

Visiting the Canadian Rockies: a set-jetting guide. The soaring peaks and alpine meadows of Alberta's Kananaskis Country are wild, high country an hour west of Calgary, and they did the most quietly famous job in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. The Wyoming mountain that gives the 2005 romance its name and its ache was never in Wyoming at all: it was played, start to finish, by these Canadian Rockies.

What rewards the trip is the sense of vast, indifferent beauty the film drew from the place. The two herders' summer of love unfolds against meadows, ridgelines and big silent skies, and standing in Kananaskis you feel exactly the isolation that the story needs, the same scale that dwarfs its characters. Mount Lougheed is the peak that stood in for Brokeback itself, a fine thing to seek out on the horizon.

Kananaskis is a vast spread of provincial parks, laced with trails and viewpoints, and noticeably quieter than the famous valleys next door. You enter with a conservation pass for your vehicle, then it is yours to explore at whatever pace suits, from short overlooks to long mountain walks. Banff National Park lies just a short drive on, so the two combine easily into a bigger Rockies loop.

Calgary makes the natural gateway, about an hour east, with the mountain towns offering closer lodges and cabins for those who want to wake up in the scenery. This is real backcountry, so check the weather, carry layers and water, and mind the wildlife rules. Come in the long light of late summer, when the meadows are at their greenest, for the landscape at its most Brokeback.