Wood Buffalo National Park Travel Guide

Welcome to Wood Buffalo National Park!

This remote park sits in the northeastern corner of Alberta, overlapping the border and extending into the Northwest Territories. At 44,807 sq km (17,300 sq mi), Wood Buffalo National Park is Canada's biggest national park. It was established in 1922 to protect the rapidly dwindling population of wood bison and now protects the world's largest free-roaming herd of these magnificent animals. The park is also special as the only known natural nesting site of the highly endangered whooping crane. Black and brown bears, moose, wolves, lynx and red-sided garter snakes—which maintain communal winter snake pits in the park—are all at home in the park's unique environment. An exquisite example of northern boreal plains terrain, the landscape encompasses fascinating and delicate geographical features; here exists one of the world's largest freshwater deltas, otherworldly salt flats and volatile karstland permeated with sink holes, caves and springs. Wood Buffalo is also home to a small First Nations settlement, its inhabitants maintaining a traditional lifestyle hunting and fishing on the land.

Summer beckons visitors to the park for astounding hiking, camping, canoeing, fishing and wildlife-viewing opportunities, while late winter/early spring is ideal for secluded cross-country skiing and snowshoeing adventures and viewing the spectacular Northern Lights. Wood Buffalo National Park can be accessed from Fort Smith, Northwest Territories or Fort Chipewyan, Alberta.