Heart Creek Provincial Recreation Area

Heart Mountain – which towers over the PRA, but isn’t in it

What is a PRA?

There are almost 100 Provincial Recreation Areas (“PRA”s) in K-Country. A PRA is also a park just like a Provincial Park and Wildland Provincial Park, and they are all administered under the same act, the Provincial Parks Act. Accordingly, it’s easiest to think of a PRA as just another specifically designated Provincial Park. PRA’s are generally small and encompass specific locations of more intensive human activity. Heart Creek PRA is a good example of this.

As has been mentioned on other pages about land classifications, what changes between these different Park classifications is to what end the park is managed. For a Provincial Park or Wildland Park, like Spray Valley or Bow Valley, preservation and conservation is paramount, pursuant to Section 3 of the Provincial Parks Act. Four of the parts of Section 3 deal with preservation, conservation, and protection; only Subsection (d) is about facilitating use.

For a PRA, preservation is important (because it’s a Park), but the park is managed primarily for recreation and tourism. To quote Section 4 of the Provincial Parks Act:

“Recreation areas are established, and are to be maintained, to facilitate their use and enjoyment for outdoor recreation by present and future generations.”

You can’t ensure enjoyment by future generations without protection of what is there today, so preservation is important, too. For instance, Heart Creek PRA is occasionally closed to let bears “do their thing” in the canyon, even though you might want to go climbing there. PRA’s are proof that managing Parks is sometimes a balancing act.

As another example, just because a PRA is there for your recreational pleasure doesn’t mean you can build stuff willy-nilly; Section 9 of the Provincial Parks Act specifically prohibits the building of structures or improvements. You can’t store stuff, either, so in Heart Creek, creating a climbing equipment cache is not permitted. It’s a protected space, so harming trees, wildlife, archaeological artefacts, fossils or pretty much anything else isn’t allowed either. It’s a park and a protected space despite being there for your recreation. Part of the reason PRAs are generally small is to minimize the footprint created by more high-intensity recreational use.

How big is Heart Creek PRA?

Heart Creek PRA is a LOT smaller than you think it is. It’s only 9.7 Ha, or just under 24 acres. As you can see on this official map of the PRA, it is just a strip 100 feet wide running about 2.7 km up the centre of Heart Creek valley starting at the edge of the Trans Canada Highway. The PRA doesn’t include the official parking lot or the trail over to the PRA from the lot; they are both in Bow Valley Wildland Park, which surrounds the PRA. The parking lot is a designated Day Use Area in the Wildland Park.

Heart Creek PRA itself was created in August 1997 by an Order in Council (“OC” or sometime “OiC”) called “The Kananaskis Country Provincial Recreation Areas Order (O.C. 389/97)”, along with 91 (!) other PRAs such as Highwood Junction, the original Evan Thomas, Elbow Launch and the Waiparous Group Camp. You can see the Gazetted version of the O.C. here; Heart Creek was PRA #33 on an impressively long list. Heart Creek as a PRA was created 18 months before the Wildland Park that surrounds it.

Why make a PRA here?

The primary reason to make Heart Creek a PRA was the rock climbing activity, but also because an interpretive trail leading to the waterfall had been built in the 1970’s. The 7 original bridges crossing the creek were installed in 1982. Rock climbing areas in the canyon include creatively named sections like The Bayou, First Rock, Waterfall Wall, Bunny Hill, Jupiter Rock and Blackheart. The guide sheets we have to the canyon’s rock climbs show 103 individual climbs rated from 5.4 to 5.12d. It’s also a popular spot for ice climbers.

The Heart Creek trail used to be a quiet, cool, green oasis. To quote Gillean Daffern’s 1994 edition of the book “Canmore and Kananaskis Country: Short Walks for Enquiring Minds”, Heart Creek was:

“…an easy walk through a lushly vegetated canyon with some unusual plants.”

The flood of 2013 changed all that. The flood cleared the canyon wall-to-wall of vegetation, and re-directed the creek making some climbing routes much harder to access. All 7 bridges were washed away, and the “lushly vegetated canyon” was no more. Restoration of this trail was a major effort by Alberta Parks and The Friends in 2013. Six of the seven bridges were dug out of the flood debris (by hand) and reused. The trail in the PRA itself got a new start near the highway, and was almost completely re-routed in the canyon. It has not yet returned to it’s pre-flood green-ness, but it remains a cool place on a hot summer day.

As part of the 10-year project between the Friends and Parks, the interpretive signage along the trail was re-invigorated. In the early summer of 2016, a series of new signs were installed which look at the 2013 Flood’s impact on the environment, the wildlife and the people of the area.

What other rules do PRAs have?

You can only have a fire in a PRA (or any Park) in a fire pit or facility (like a BBQ grill) provided by Parks. There are none of these in Heart Creek PRA, so fires are not allowed. There are no BBQ grills in the official parking lot, either, so at Heart Creek, fires are not permitted.

Random camping is not permitted in any PRA, but PRAs can have campgrounds. Often, this is the reason for the PRA to exist; Cataract Creek is just one of many examples in K-Country of these. Heart Creek PRA doesn’t have a campground, though, so camping is not permitted here. Heart Creek PRA is surrounded by a Wildland Park where random camping is permitted, but the presence of the PRA creates a 1 km random camping exclusion zone surrounding it. And the camping rules in Bow Valley Wildland Park are such that you really can’t random camp anywhere in the Bow Valley itself. The only place you can camp near Heart Creek is across the TransCanada in the official Lac Des Arcs campground, which is part of Bow Valley Provincial Park..

Many people visiting Heart Creek park in the ditch along side the Trans Canada; technically, that’s illegal, as it is parking without an emergency, on the side of a limited access highway, on Alberta Transportation land. Guardrails were installed a few years back to discourage the practice, but that didn’t have much success. Currently, parking on the highway is not even possible, as flood management structures are being built on the roadside both east and west of the creek on the south side of the highway.

Neither bikes nor horses are allowed on the Heart Creek trail, though we can’t imagine why you would want to use either in the PRA itself. There is, however, a trail that crosses the PRA near the highway where both are allowed. That trail is both part of the Trans Canada or Great Trail, but also, uniquely, is the Quaite Valley trail. Trivia: the official start to, and parking lot for, the Quaite Valley trail is Heart Creek’s, too.