Twenty Minutes From Home: Kelley's Bathtub and the Case for Alberta's Provincial Parks

There's a stretch of Highway 40 north of Hinton where the trees open up and the mountains show themselves, and every single time I drive it I think the same thing: people fly across the world for views like this, and I get to have them on a Tuesday.

That road takes you into William A. Switzer Provincial Park. And about twenty kilometres northwest of town, you'll find a small body of water with one of the best names in Alberta — Kelley's Bathtub.

A little lake with a big view

The name makes you smile before you ever see it. But when you do — when you stand at the water's edge and look across Jarvis Lake to the Rockies stacked up blue and grey on the horizon — the joke stops being the point.

The loop around the bathtub is about a kilometre. It starts right from the deck of the Visitor Centre, and it's an easy walk. That's not a caveat, it's the whole gift of the place. You don't need a permit, a shuttle, a four-hour drive, or a pair of boots that cost more than your first car.

You need twenty minutes and a willingness to look.

There's a small beach. Picnic tables. washrooms, and Firepits.

Moose, beaver, and loon move through here if you're patient enough to be quiet.

Jarvis Creek threads its way between all five of the park's lakes, so if you paddle, you can follow the water from one to the next.

Why the provincial parks deserve more of our attention

I love Jasper. I love Banff. But there's a particular kind of magic in a place that hasn't been photographed ten thousand times before breakfast.

Switzer was established in 1958 and covers about ninety-three square kilometres of foothills country. It has campgrounds on Gregg, Cache, Blue, and Jarvis lakes. It has trails and paddling and fishing and quiet. And on most days, it has room to breathe — no shuttle buses, no crowds three deep at the viewpoint, no circling a parking lot for forty minutes.

That's not a lesser experience. For me, it's a better one. The national parks are our showpieces, and they've earned it. But Alberta's provincial parks are where a lot of us actually live our outdoor lives — the after-work walk, the Sunday picnic, the first place we took the kids, the lake we learned to paddle on. They hold the ordinary memories, and I've come to believe the ordinary ones are the ones we miss most later.

What I see through the lens

I love filming wild places, and I've noticed something about how people react to footage from spots like this. It isn't awe, exactly. It's recognition. I know that place. I've been there. That's ours.

That's a different and better feeling than being impressed. It's belonging.

I think God put beauty this close to us on purpose — not tucked away for the people who can afford to chase it, but right off the highway, twenty minutes out, free to anyone willing to pull over. Kelley's Bathtub is a small lake with a funny name. It's also proof that you don't have to go far to find something worth stopping for.

If you go

• Where: William A. Switzer Provincial Park, about 20 km northwest of Hinton on Highway 40

• The walk: roughly 1 km loop, starting from the Visitor Centre deck — easy, and genuinely doable with small kids

• Bring water. Alberta Parks has advised that the hand pump at the Kelleys Bathtub day use area is not in service — check the park's current advisories before you head out

• Go early or go late. The light across Jarvis Lake in the first and last hour of the day is the whole reason to bring a camera

• Leave it better than you found it. These places stay beautiful because people take care of them

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One more thing worth knowing: Alberta Parks officially spells it Kelley's. Half of Hinton spells it Kelly's. Nobody has ever been confused about which lake you mean.

Wanderlust Heart Media is the wildlife and backcountry division of Belina Hooper Media, based in Hinton, Alberta. If you've got a wild place, an expedition, or a story in the backcountry worth capturing, I'd love to hear about it.