Willmore Wilderness Park

Alberta Wilderness Park Of About 4,600 Square Kilometres Immediately North Of Jasper National Park; No Roads, No Facilities, No Mechanised Travel Of Any Kind, And About 750 Kilometres Of Trail Used Mainly By Horse Parties · Grande Cache, Alberta

Willmore begins where Jasper National Park ends and runs north for four thousand six hundred square kilometres of the same Rocky Mountain country - the same peaks, the same valleys, the same wildlife - WITH NONE OF THE INFRASTRUCTURE AND ALMOST NONE OF THE PEOPLE. There are no roads inside it, no lodges, no serviced campgrounds, no interpretive signs and NO MECHANISED TRAVEL OF ANY KIND PERMITTED: no bicycles, no motorised vehicles, nothing with a motor. What there is is about seven hundred and fifty kilometres of trail, much of it following routes used by Indigenous people and later by outfitters and trappers, and it is still travelled mainly ON HORSEBACK - Willmore is one of the last places in the Rockies where the pack-horse tradition is the normal way to move. Jasper next door receives millions of visitors a year. Willmore receives a few thousand, and on most of its trails you will not meet anyone.

North of Jasper National Park, near Grande Cache, Grande Cache, Alberta, Canada

OPEN YEAR-ROUND WITH NO GATE AND NO ENTRY FEE, but the practical season is ROUGHLY JULY TO EARLY OCTOBER, bounded by snow on the passes and by high water on the creek crossings in early summer. THERE ARE NO SERVICED FACILITIES OF ANY KIND - no campgrounds, no huts, no water taps, no rubbish collection and no staff in the interior. NO MECHANISED TRAVEL IS PERMITTED ANYWHERE IN THE PARK, including bicycles. Trailheads are reached by road from Grande Cache and from the Jasper side, and RANDOM BACKCOUNTRY CAMPING IS PERMITTED without a site reservation, which is unusual and is part of the park's character. THE CREEK CROSSINGS ARE THE REAL CONSTRAINT: many are unbridged and become impassable after rain or in the early-summer melt. This is grizzly country throughout.

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