The UNESCO list of World Heritage cultural views 830
universal throughout the world with exceptional properties
Value, of which 13 are in Canada, and 5 of
these are in Alberta.
1. Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.
For thousands of years the native population of North
America used the Buffalo to give them life
Needs, meat, clothing, shelter, tools and fire.
Stormed farms on large rocks and slaughtered
touching the groundwhere they had camps set up. The
skeletal remains, at places more than 30 feet deep, are
still there. At the butchering camp the remnants of meat
caches and cooking pits are on top of layers of bones.
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is known around the world
as a remarkable testimony of prehistoric life.
2. Dinosaur Provincial Park
The first time we traveled through Alberta, the
landscape suddenly changed. We felt like we had
literally landed on the moon. A feeling shared by many.
Strange land formations rise up on all sides, sculpted
by wind and water into beautiful shapes sunbathed in
terra cotta, bronze and amber. A trip to Dinosaur
Provincial Park is a 75 million-year trip back in time.
This region was then a subtropical paradise populated by
turtles, crocodiles and sharks. Here dinosaurs once
hunted and mated, and ultimately met their demise,
leaving an amazingly rich fossil and bone record for us
to discover today. Dinosaur Provincial Park -- a world
heritage site like nowhere else on earth!
3 Wood Buffalo National Park
With 44,807 square kilometres, Wood Buffalo is Canada's
largest national park. It was established in 1922 to
protect the last remaining herds of bison in northern
Canada. Today, it protects Canada's Northern Boreal
Plains. The largest free-roaming, self-regulating bison
herds in the world, the only remaining nesting ground of
the endangered whooping crane, the biologically rich
Peace-Athabasca Delta, extensive salt plains, and some
of the finest examples of gypsum karst topography in
North America.
4 Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks
Seven parks in the Canadian Rocky Mountains have some of
the best-known mountain scenery on Earth. More than nine
million people annually visit the seven preserves along
the Alberta-British Columbia border. There are four
national parks in the ensemble -- Banff, Jasper, Yoho and
Kootenay. They account for most of the preserve's 22,990
square kilometres. Adjoining them are three British
Columbia provincial parks -- Mount Robson, Mount
Assiniboine and Hamber.
The park has a wealth of natural wonders: jagged peaks
and conifer-clad slopes, silt-laden glacial streams and
turquoise lakes, the vast Columbia Icefield and the
complex Castleguard Caves. The Burgess Shale, in Yoho,
contains one of the world's most significant finds of
soft-bodied, Middle Cambrian-age marine fossils, with
about 150 species, including some bearing no resemblance
to known animals.
5 Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park
The abrupt rise of the Rockies from the prairie
flatlands has made the twin parks the place "where the
mountains meet the prairie." Nature has provided much
that is worthy of protection: high mountains and deep
canyons, forest belts and prairie grasslands, deep
glacial-trough lakes and rivers that feed three oceans.
Diversity of wildlife - mountain goats, bighorn sheep,
coyotes, grizzly bears, scores of birds, and a
celebrated "international" herd of elk that migrates
annually between summer mountain habitat in Glacier and
winter prairie ranges in Waterton.
The highlight of Waterton's sparkling chain of lakes is
the international Upper Waterton Lake, the deepest lake
in the Canadian Rockies. In 1932, the park was joined
with Montana's Glacier National Park to form the
Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park - a world
first.
With information obtained from Canada's Parks.
http://www.pc.gc.ca/progs/spm-whs/index_E.asp
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