A mountain island the Laurentide ice sheet never got over the top of
An island of mountain country sitting on open prairie: 1,466 metres at the top, about 600 above the plain around it, and the highest ground in Canada between the Rockies and Labrador. The reason it is strange is that the Laurentide ice sheet never got over the top of it. The summit stood out as a nunatak while everything around drowned in ice, so what grows up here is lodgepole pine, aspen and white spruce, and a flora and fauna more like Montana and Wyoming than like the wheat below, with fourteen species of orchid in the woods. The killing that brought the North-West Mounted Police into being happened in these hills in 1873, and it has its own pin on the Saskatchewan side, where the site is. The two provinces joined their parks into one interprovincial park in 1989, about 400 square kilometres of it.
Southeastern Alberta and Saskatchewan
See it on the map
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
