Glacier National Park had a record number of visitors this summer, and the visitation increase is no anomaly. Last year the park had 2.36 million visitors, which was a record breaking number, and the attendance was even higher this year. This July had the park’s highest ever attendance, with August having the second highest attendance ever. (Read this article from the Flathead Beacon for more info on this year’s record tourist season and how the park services and infrastructure are being prepared for next year.)

It’s not just Glacier National Park that’s been busy – we’ve noted record attendance in the mountain national parks in Western Canada this year, too. And with 20017 being the 150th birthday of Canada as  a nation, the parks will probably be even busier next year! That’s because Parks Canada is waiving park entrance fees in 2017 to celebrate the Canada’s 150th birthday.

Watch for the 2017 edition of Experience the Mountain Parks to learn about hidden gems and places to avoid the masses. With the possibility of another year of record-breaking activity in the parks, you won’t want to miss those tips. Many of the parks in Canada have year-round services with lots to see and do, so there’s no need to wait until next summer for your next visit to a park!

Balu Pass-Glacier National Park. Photo by Sean Allen.

Yesterday (October 11) Lloyd Dykstra recieved the grand prize for the 2015-2016 EMP Photo Contest! We greatly appreciate The Camera Store’s generosity in giving a $1,500 gift certificate to the grand prize winner. In the photo below, Jamie presents the gift certificate to Lloyd Dykstra of Grande Prairie. Lloyd’s photo of the Athabasca Falls & Mount Kerkeslin was the winning entry in our Experience the Mountain Parks Reader Photo Contest.

Be sure to enter our 2016-2017 Experience the Mountain Parks Photo Contest if you haven’t already done so. The Camera Store in Calgary is donating a $1,500 gift certificate to the grand prize winner again! Remember to vote for your favourite entry, too.

Answer this month’s railroad history trivia question correctly and you’ll be entered to win a prize! The True/False format gives you a good chance of answering correctly, even if you aren’t a history aficionado.

Everyone who answers the question correctly will be entered in a random draw for Graeme Pole’s book The Spiral Tunnels and the Big Hill. It brings history alive with photos and exciting tales of the building and operation of the second-steepest mainline railway track ever in North America. Click here to enter the contest on our Trivia Quiz page!

We are truly excited by the recent announcement by the Scottsdale Convention & Visitors Bureau regarding their name change to Experience Scottsdale.

http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/news/2016/09/21/scottsdale-convention-visitors-bureau-is-now.html

In 2005, when I first thought of publishing a visitor’s guide to the mountain national parks in western Canada, I sat at the feet of the manager of a very important Visitor Information Centre.  He told me what travellers wanted to know and suggested ways on how to present that material.

As I chewed on what I had learned, the word Experience just naturally came to mind.  As the vision of our traveller’s guide came into focus, the only logical title became apparent to us: Experience the Mountain Parks.

We have published Experience the Mountain Parks each spring now for 11 years. Along the way, we have received hundreds of testimonials from not only our readers, but also the front line staff whose job it is to counsel travellers in the region. Here is just one example:

We are having a such a busy summer in our centre. Our main building itself is having over a thousand visitors every day. And as you might know already, Experience the Mountain Parks is the most popular brochure to visitors of all time. We have just used the last box of two of your magazines. Please send us more Experience the Mountain Parks and Experience the Cowboy Trail when you have a chance. They both go really fast.

Thank you always,
Traveling Counselors
(Travel Alberta Canmore Visitor Information Centre)

Over the past 2-3 years, we have started to notice that some of the communities in western Canada are starting to realize the value of the word Experience, because they are starting to use it in the titles of their brochures. However, I’m not so sure that they fully understand what is needed in a guide in order to truly help the reader enhance their experience.

In 2017, we will launch our 4^th magazine to be titled Experience the Dinosaur Trails. It will be modelled, like its sister Publications, Experience the Cowboy Trails and Experience Calgary’s Parks ‘n’ Paths upon the foundation of success first built with Experience the Mountain Parks.

For more information, please visit www.cmiPublishing.ca.

Congratulations to our August Trivia Contest winner, Sue Bepple! Each month on the Experience the Mountain Parks website we’re featuring a trivia question about Canada’s Railroad History. Everyone who correctly answers the question is entered in a random draw for Graeme Pole’s book “The Spiral Tunnels and the Big Hill,” which is the perfect companion for railroad enthusiasts or history buffs. Greme also supplied the questions for our monthly trivia contest, so you’ll learn just by participating in the contest.

In August, we asked the following multiple choice question:

Construction of the Spiral Tunnels lasted how long?
• 2 months
• 18 months
• 2 years

The correct answer is “2 years”! We’d like to congratulate our contestants – every one of them submitted the correct answer!

We received the following note from Sue Bepple after she learned she had won the August contest (and a copy of “The Spiral Tunnels and the Big Hill”). She wrote,

Thank-you very much! I look forward to receiving this book. I enjoyed doing the trivia contest, too.

Click here to enter the September Trivia Quiz, which is a true/false format.

There are two more days to enter our August Trivia Contest! We’ve already had a great response, but be sure to submit your entry if you haven’t already! To enter, simply click here to answer a multiple choice question and provide your name and email.

If you answer the question correctly, then you’ll be entered in a random draw to win a copy of Graeme Pole’s book The Spiral Tunnels and the Big Hill. This historical book has a tremendous selection of archival photographs illustrating the evolution of railroading through Kicking Horse Pass. Revised in 2016, the text also provides up-to-date information on railway operations, locomotives, and rolling stock. Graeme has provided the trivia questions we’re featuring each month and the archival photos that we’re posting on the Trivia Quiz page!

Each month on the Experience the Mountain Parks website we’re featuring a trivia question about Canada’s Railroad History. We’d like to congratulate our July Trivia Contest winner, Katie Novak of Calgary! She won a copy of Graeme Pole’s book “The Spiral Tunnels and the Big Hill,” which is the perfect companion for railroad enthusiasts or history buffs. Greme also supplied the questions for our monthly trivia contest, so you’ll learn just by participating in the contest.

In July, we asked if the following statement is true or false:

At one time, the Spiral Tunnels had large wooden doors at each portal.

The correct answer is “True”!

The August quiz is a multiple choice format. Everyone who answers correctly will also be entered in a draw to win a copy of Graeme Pole’s book “The Spiral Tunnels and the Big Hill.”

We received the following note from Katie Novak after she learned she had won the July contest (and a copy of “The Spiral Tunnels and the Big Hill”). She wrote,

That is SO fun, thank you so much!

Click here to enter the August Trivia Quiz.

Construction tote road in the Kicking Horse Canyon with the railbed taking shape below, ca. 1884

Blog post published on August 3, 2016.

Construction work on Highway 93S is scheduled to occur through the end of October. The project will include paving and safety improvements. Make sure to allow for extra time if you’re travelling through the two affected areas.

The first construction zone is between the Continental Divide day use area and Marble Canyon day use area, and the second zone is located between the Hector Gorge viewpoint and McLeod Meadows. Roadwork will occur from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday. There will be no work on Sundays or long weekends. Motorists should anticipate reduced speed zones and occasional single lane alternating traffic, resulting in delays of up to 30 minutes.

Important note: Rock blasting at a location approximately 1 km north of the Marble Canyon Campground will be required as part of this project. During a two-week period tentatively scheduled to occur in mid-late August, delays at this location may last up to 90 minutes between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Drive BC will post these scheduled 1 hour delays on its website a few days in advance. Motorists can expect occasional delays of between 30 and 45 minutes for rock blasting, from Monday through Saturday. No work on Sundays or long weekends.

For all current highway construction delays in the Kootenay national parks, visit www.drivebc.ca or call 1-800-550-4997. You can also find out more details about the Kooteny Park construction by visiting http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/pn-np/bc/yoho/visit/heures-hours/infrastructure.aspx

“How do we get the GPS audio guide when visiting the Mountain Parks?” That’s a question our publisher recently received. Here is the answer he provided:

Over the years, two audio guides using GPS technology have been available in the national parks.  CMI Publishing does not yet offer this service, but we do create a mobile-friendly version of all of our guides. For that story and links, go here: http://www.experiencemountainparks.com/a-letter-from-our-publisher-about-mailing-individual-guides/

We have written stories about GPS audio guides in past issues, such as here: http://www.experiencemountainparks.com/the-gps-audio-tour-of-the-canadian-rockies/ This story contains a couple of links.

GyPSy Canada offers a similar service which they advertised with us a few years ago. Here is a link to their web site:  http://gypsyguide.com/canada

We also ran a short story about an Augmented Reality App that you can find here: http://dig.cmipublishing.ca/i/99755/16

We hope that helps any other of other readers who may have been wondering about the GPS audio guides. And if you’ve never heard of the GPS audio guides before, we hope this article inspires you to visit the parks and learn new things! Our guide Experience the Mountain Parks can also also be a great tool for making the most of your visits to the parks.

“One Nice Drive” – 2015-216 Experience the Mountain Parks Photo Contest entry by Leighton Lum

We sincerely appreciate the kind words readers send us about Experience the Mountain Parks when they ask for us to mail individual copies. This is our flagship magazine. We’ve published it since 2006 and for the past two years it is now the only visitor’s guide that covers all of the mountain national parks in Western Canada.  As a result, demand for it is very high.

As a private sector publishing company, we receive no financial assistance from the government to offset mailing costs of individual copies of our maps and magazines, or for freight charges to cover bulk shipments overseas, so mailing individual copies to readers just isn’t in our budget.

We receive multiple requests for a hard copy, and if we continue to get such inquiries, we may start a subscription service next year. In the meantime, I do have some good news for you.

About 4 years, we started to create mobile-friendly digital copies of all of our maps and magazines.  We even went back into our archives and digitized several back issues. You will find a mobile version of the 2016-2017 edition of Experience the Mountain Parks on the 2nd Shelf in our Digital Library, here:

http://www.cmipublishing.ca/library/

Two more things…

– If you are travelling to Alberta, please ask for our magazines when you arrive at the Info Centre at the Calgary Airport, at many of the RV Rental Companies, all the Travel Alberta Info Centres, and most community Visitor Information Centres
– If you plan to come to Canada next year, you should book your campsite well in advance as 2017 marks Canada’s 150th birthday and Parks Canada is waiving their entrance fee to the national parks. Demand for campsites then is expected to spike well beyond the record levels experienced so far in 2016.

I sincerely hope that you and your clients find all of this to be helpful and best wishes for a pleasant Canadian adventure!

Warm regards,

Bob Harris
Publisher