Canada

Kelowna is the final stop before we drop the Indie Campers van back in Vancouver and fly east to Quebec. We’ve built two nights there deliberately

Banff National Park is the most visited park in the Canadian Rockies — and the most visited for good reason. Over 1,600km of maintained trails cut through some of the most dramatic mountain scenery on earth, from turquoise glacial lakes at valley level to exposed alpine ridges at 2,400m+.

Jasper National Park covers 11,000 square kilometres — more than twice the area of Banff — with a fraction of the visitor density. The practical consequence for hikers is that Jasper’s trails tend to be longer, wilder, and less crowded than equivalent distances in Banff.

This article was written ahead of our September 2026 trip. We’ll update it with actual on-the-ground spending when we’re back in October. This article contains affiliate links. If you book or purchase through these links I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products and companies I genuinely…

Most people fly into Vancouver and head straight to Banff. We did it differently — picking up a campervan from Indie Campers in Vancouver and spending two and a half weeks on a loop that took us north through Whistler, east through the national parks to Jasper, south down the Icefields Parkway to Banff and Yoho, then west through Revelstoke and into the Okanagan Valley.