The first international peace park in the world, where the prairie hits a wall
The mountains here do not build up to anything, they simply start: prairie, then wall. That is the Lewis thrust, which slid a sheet of Proterozoic rock bodily over much younger rock, so the old sits on the new and the front range rises straight off the grass. The park was set aside in 1895 as the Kootenay Lakes Forest Reserve and was the fourth in Canada. In 1932 it was joined to Glacier across the line as the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, the first of its kind anywhere in the world, and UNESCO listed the pair in 1995. The Prince of Wales Hotel went up in 1926 and 1927 and opened that July, standing on a bare knoll in a wind that visibly leans it. In 2017 the Kenow fire burned 200 square kilometres of the park, severely damaging about 30 per cent of it and up to 70 per cent of the forest; the recovery is a large part of what you are looking at now.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
