The Cowboy Trail: Alberta's Most Scenic Food Road Trip
Highway 22 runs north-to-south along the foothills, threading through ranch country and through some of the most quietly underrated kitchens in the province.
Most Alberta road trips run east-west, between Calgary and the Rockies. The far more interesting one runs north-south along Highway 22, the road they call the Cowboy Trail. It starts up in Mayerthorpe near the Yellowhead, drops three hundred kilometers through ranch country and foothills, and ends at the Montana border south of Pincher Creek. Drive it slowly. Eat at every other stop.
Start in High River. Skip the chain on the highway. The Whistle Stop Café on Centre Street has been serving from-scratch all-day breakfasts since 1989, and it's the kind of place where the same waitress remembers your name on the second visit. Order the eggs Benedict with chipotle hollandaise and bring cash for the cinnamon-bun-pie hybrid at the till.
Twenty minutes north, take a detour into Black Diamond and Turner Valley for one of the most beloved diners in Western Canada: the Chuckwagon Café in Turner Valley. Their bison meatloaf and house-cured peameal bacon have been profiled by the Food Network multiple times for good reason. Cowboy-country soul food.
Carry on north to Bragg Creek for an afternoon stop. Evelyn's Coffee Bar serves the village's best pour-over and bakes morning buns that disappear before noon. Walk the river path. Buy a few pastries for the road.
Cochrane is the next stop and it's an unavoidable one. MacKay's Ice Cream. Family-owned for over forty years, lines down the block every weekend from May through September. Their bumble berry and saskatoon flavors are the regional reason to stop — they freeze the Alberta summer in a cone.
Now head south. Half an hour south of Calgary, hit Okotoks for a brief lunch at Heartland Café (homemade soups, a sourdough program). Then Highway 22 starts climbing into ranch country.
The most under-rated stop is the Twin Butte General Store, about forty minutes north of Pincher Creek. Locally famous, regionally treasured. The 1916 country store doubles as a Mexican kitchen that may be the most surprising restaurant in Alberta — chimichangas, huevos rancheros, pulled-pork tacos — all served in a building that smells like a hundred years of woodsmoke and sells fishing tackle in the front room. Eat in the back patio in summer.
End in the Crowsnest Pass — specifically Bellevue, where Stone's Throw Café occupies a historic mining bank. The perogies here are some of the best in southern Alberta, and the strudel program is a serious operation. Coal-mine country, refracted through a quiet café in a building that used to count coal-miner paycheques.
A few road-trip notes. First, fill the tank. There are long stretches of Highway 22 with no services. Second, the drive is most beautiful in early autumn (third week of September, peak gold) and in late June (wildflowers). Third, almost none of these places take reservations — show up, wait if needed, and use the time to walk into the next-door shop or the small-town museum.
This is the Alberta road trip that locals do and that out-of-province visitors rarely hear about. Twelve hours, three hundred kilometers, ten honest meals, and not a single white tablecloth anywhere on the route. That's the foothills. That's the trail.
