What Park staff love most about the Cypress Hills:
"I really like the scenery. The rolling hills with the dark green spurce and bright green aspens, with the grassy meadows on the ridges. And the fort nestled in the valley is like icing on the cake. Every day brings a new scene."
Harvey Kay, Asset Management, Fort Walsh
"The crunching of the snow under foot, the crisp winter air and being surrounding by the absolute beauty of winter in the Cypress Hills...it is an absolutely incredible experience to head out with a group of people during one of the snowshoeing programs to explore the tracks and traces of wildlife and the exhilirating world of winter together. These are the memories that people of all ages will never forget!"
Nicole Dancey, Interpretive and Education Coordinator
The Authors Weigh in on Cypress Hills
"The Cypress Hills regions, in the south at the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, is the highest point in mainland Canada between Labrador and the Rocky Mountains. Lodgepole pine, white spruce, balsam poplar, and aspen made it a sanctuary for a wide variety of birds, animals, and plants. But it was also a dangerous no-man's land, a rendezvous for white whiskey traders."
Maggie Siggins, Revenge of the Land
"Not only are the Hills beautiful but, together with a tip in the Wood Mountains about three hundred kilometers southeast, they are unique in the West. During the Pleistocene ten to twelve million years ago when glaciers scraped down this area, the highest part of the Hills remained above the level of the ice. To this day certain montane species of flora, which occur elsewhere only in the Rocky Mountains two hundred miles to the west, can be found here."
Sharon Butala, The Perfection of the Morning
"The Cypress Hills, low as they are, are the highest point in Canada between Labrador and the Rockies. Everything about them is special, and everything special about them is explained by the accident of elevation. Their topography, their climate, their plants and animals, their peculiar geographical and zoological lags and survivals, even their human history, are there because this uplift has been pushed a thousand to fifteen hundred feet above the plains that apron it."
