With more national parklands than the United States—and fewer visitors—Canada promises glorious solitude. Sue Halpern finds the promise kept

Admittedly, my husband, who is eagerly scanning the Douglas firs and trembling aspens that wall either side of the road, is not the most reliable person with whom to discuss this. Years before, as we were walking through a different forest, a black bear about the size of a living room sofa dropped out of a tree twenty feet in front of us. The bear looked at us. We looked at the bear. And then it took off, cutting a wide swath through the understory. Which was useful, I guess, because my husband took off after the bear, trying, he said later, to get a better look. As far as I can tell, this is not a recommended method for minding les animaux sauvages.

We are remembering this when the RV in front of us comes to an abrupt halt in the middle of the highway. We stop short behind it. And then, as if summoned by our imaginations, one bear (a dark chocolate brown) and then another (pure cinnamon) lumber casually across the road. They pause at the shoulder—by now, there is a line of idling vehicles with people leaning out the windows (not on the recommended list either, I don't think), taking pictures—and then move on to a thicket of soapberries and settle in for a snack. The bears walk slowly, with what appears to be self-possessed nonchalance. Though I can't know it then, these animals are the embodiment of Jasper National Park itself: wild, immediate, startling, serene.

Jasper exists, midway along Alberta's border with British Columbia, as a kind of secret. Granted, it is a big secret—bigger than Banff, Kootenay, and Yoho national parks combined, all of which are nearby (nearby being a relative term, measured in hundreds of miles). Bigger than Yellowstone. It is more remote than any of these, too, and less visited and arguably less tamed—an authentic wilderness, not one that has been managed and developed for human enjoyment.

But who wants to argue? It is a stunning day in the mountains, even if my husband, my daughter, and I have been in the car for five hours already, and even if the town of Jasper looks significantly closer to Calgary on the map than it is turning out to be, and even if it would have been a whole lot quicker to fly into Edmonton and approach the park from the east. The Icefields Parkway, the astonishing 140-mile landscape parade that stretches between Lake Louise in the south and Jasper in the north, could be a destination in itself. It is a riptide in an enveloping sea of ten-thousand-foot snowcapped sawtooth peaks; it is ringside in the massive big top of the Columbia Icefield, the largest glacial area south of the Arctic Circle and the hydrologic apex of North America; it is the main artery to the heart of a country so vast and primal that civilization itself seems an anomaly, a thing of the future.