Canadian National Parks

Canada's national parks

Parks Canada manages 37 national parks, 10 national park reserves, and one national urban park — Rouge, in Toronto — and this map includes all 48. They range from Banff, established in 1885 and still the most visited, to Akami-Uapishkᵁ-KakKasuak-Mealy Mountains in Labrador, created in 2015 and barely visited at all. The reserves are parks in waiting, set aside pending the settlement of Indigenous land claims; for the visitor they work the same way.

The Rockies parks are where most people start: Banff and Jasper on the Alberta side, Yoho and Kootenay across the divide in British Columbia, all four contiguous and all reachable on the Icefields Parkway. Add Waterton Lakes on the Montana border, Pacific Rim on Vancouver Island, and Bruce Peninsula and Georgian Bay Islands near Toronto, and you've got the accessible core of the list.

The far north

The rest is an atlas of remote places. Five parks are in Nunavut — Auyuittuq, Sirmilik, Quttinirpaaq, Ukkusiksalik, and Qausuittuq — and Quttinirpaaq on Ellesmere Island is the second-most northerly park in the world, reachable by chartered flight from Resolute. Ivvavik and Aulavik in the western Arctic, Nahanni and Nááts'įhch'oh in the Northwest Territories, and Torngat Mountains in Labrador are all fly-in or boat-in. Finishing this list is genuinely rarer than finishing the American one.

Click a badge or its pin to mark a park visited, again for want-to-go. The subtitle on each badge notes whether it's a park, a reserve, or the urban park.

The Discovery Pass and getting around

A Parks Canada Discovery Pass covers admission to every site on this map for a year and pays for itself after a week in the Rockies. The southern parks are road trips: the Icefields Parkway, the Cabot Trail through Cape Breton Highlands, the Trans-Canada through Riding Mountain and Terra Nova. The Gulf Islands, Pacific Rim, and Gwaii Haanas need a ferry or floatplane. For the northern parks, Parks Canada runs a registration and orientation system — Nahanni, Auyuittuq, and Torngat Mountains all require it — and the Torngat base camp near Saglek is the usual way in to Labrador's mountains.