Which Kananaskis Larch Drives Are Paved? Highwood Pass, Highway 40, and the Gravel Road Your Rental Can't Take

Search for Kananaskis fall colours and within about three results somebody will tell you to drive the Smith-Dorrien.

It is good advice for the right vehicle. It is not advice we can let our guests follow. Highway 742 is a gravel forestry road for most of its length, our Turo listings cover paved public roads only, and a rock through a windshield on that road is a deductible event we have to charge back. Every fall a few people book with that drive already pencilled into their itinerary, and we find out at handover.

The part worth knowing is that you do not need it. The best alpine larch drive in Kananaskis is paved to the summit, it needs no shuttle and no reservation, and it has a hard closing date most visitors misread.

Can you see larches in Kananaskis without driving a gravel road?

Yes. Highway 40 south from the Trans-Canada is paved the entire way to Highwood Pass, and the pass itself sits in open larch and alpine terrain at just over 2,200 m — Alberta Parks calls it the highest paved road in Canada. You park at the top, in a paved lot, and you are already in the scenery.

That is the structural difference between this drive and the famous Banff larch hikes. At Moraine Lake the gold is two gates away from you: a shuttle seat you have to win, then a group-of-four bear rule at the trailhead. We wrote the whole workaround up in the Banff larch post. At Highwood Pass there is no booking system between you and the larches. There is a parking lot and a pass you buy online in two minutes.

The drive from our NW Calgary handover to the top of the pass is roughly two hours, and the last stretch up Highway 40 through Peter Lougheed is the reason people make the trip even when they never leave the car.

When does Highway 40 close at Highwood Pass?

Highway 40 closes from Peter Lougheed Provincial Park to Highwood House Junction on December 1, and stays closed until June 14. That is an annual wildlife closure, not a weather call — it goes down on the date regardless of how clear the road is.

Here is the trap, and it catches people every year. The gate date is not the colour date. Alpine larches in this range turn somewhere around mid-September and are generally past it within the first week or so of October — it moves with the season and nobody can promise you a weekend. The gate stays up for roughly six weeks after the gold is gone. So “the road is open until December 1” is true and almost useless for planning a larch trip, and every year somebody books late October off the back of that sentence and drives up to bare grey slopes.

Plan the colour for late September into the first days of October. Treat everything after that as a snow-and-rock drive, which is its own thing and genuinely worth doing — just not the thing you came for.

The Highwood Meadows day use area at the top runs June 15 to November 30, which lines up with the gate.

Which trails start at the top of Highwood Pass?

Three, and all of them start from the pass itself rather than a gravel access road. Ptarmigan Cirque Interpretive is the one most people mean — 4.5 km, climbing into a hanging valley on the east side of the highway. Pocaterra Cirque goes up the west side. Highwood Meadows is 0.6 km one-way on an interpretive path, which is the one to know about if you have somebody in the group who is not hiking.

All three were listed open as of this week. Alberta Parks’ trail report for Pocaterra Cirque on September 19 noted the trail was soft with some muddy sections, which is normal for the shoulder and is worth a pair of proper boots rather than runners.

Because everything here starts at the summit lot, this is the rare mountain day where the hard part is the parking, not the approach. The lot is not large relative to how many people want it on a clear late-September Saturday. Early still works — which, unlike Moraine Lake, means early is actually a strategy.

Do you need a Kananaskis Conservation Pass in a rental car?

Yes, and this is the single most common way our guests get a surprise bill after a Kananaskis day. The pass is $15 for a day or $90 for a year per personal vehicle, it is required to park anywhere in Kananaskis Country and the Bow Valley, and rental vehicles are explicitly not exempt.

The mechanism is what trips renters up. The pass is registered to a licence plate, not to a person. So you register the plate on the vehicle we hand you, not the plate on whatever you drive at home. Enforcement is automated plate scanning in the day-use lots, with a $150 fine for personal vehicles. There is no windshield sticker and no booth, which means “I will sort it out when I get there” is how people end up paying ten times the price by mail three weeks later.

One more thing, and we would rather say it twice than have you find out the expensive way: every vehicle in our fleet goes out with an annual Parks Canada Discovery Pass on the mirror, and it does not cover Kananaskis. Discovery is federal — Banff, Jasper, Yoho, Kootenay. Kananaskis is provincial and sells its own pass. National parks have gates that stop you; K-Country has cameras that mail you. If your trip runs Banff one day and Highwood Pass the next, you need both passes, and only one of them is already hanging in the vehicle.

We laid out the pass rules in full when the spring gate was still shut; nothing about the pass itself has changed since. If your dates are flexible, the first Wednesday of every month is a Wilderness Wednesday and the pass is not charged. The next one is October 7, 2026 — which lands squarely in the back half of larch season.

Is the Smith-Dorrien Trail (Highway 742) open in 2026?

It is open, and it still is not an option in one of our vehicles. The Canmore Hill section reopened on August 21 after a rockfall came down off the East End of Rundle on June 1 and shut the route for two and a half months. The Rocky Mountain Outlook reported the province spent about $1.1 million on the mitigation, clearing roughly 200 cubic metres of unstable rock and bolting sections of the face.

Worth being precise about what is gravel, because we have been sloppy about this ourselves in an older post: the climb out of Canmore is paved, and the gravel starts once you are past Goat Creek. That distinction changes nothing for you as a renter — the moment your route continues toward Spray Lakes and Chester Lake, you are on gravel, and that is outside what our listings and Turo’s terms allow. It just means “742 is gravel from Canmore” is not quite right, and we would rather be accurate.

If your itinerary has Chester Lake or Burstall Pass on it, the honest answer is that those are trips for a vehicle you own. Highwood Pass is what we can send you to, and on the larch question specifically it is not a consolation prize. We also covered the broader gravel and towing limits on our fleet if you want the full boundary.

What is still closed in Kananaskis after the June 2026 flooding?

Enough that you should check the day you drive rather than the week you book. The June rain event did real damage and some of it is still open work heading into October: the snowshoe trails between Chester Lake and Sawmill day use are closed for flood damage, the Three Isle Trail is closed from the Upper Lake Trail junction to the Upper Kananaskis River because the bridge washed out, and the High Rockies Trail is partially closed.

There is also a bear notice covering the Elpoca day use area and Valleyview Road through to Highway 40 South near Little Highwood Pass day use, last updated August 8. Fall is the wrong season to treat a bear advisory as background noise — this is the hyperphagia window, when bears are feeding hard before denning and are far less interested in moving off a trail for you. Carry spray where you can reach it, make noise, and report sightings to Alberta Parks at 403-591-7755.

Alberta Parks posts all of this on the Peter Lougheed advisories page, and it changes week to week. It is a two-minute check the night before.

Snow at 2,200 metres, and which vehicle makes sense

Alberta does not require winter tires, and Highwood Pass is on the Alberta side, so there is no legal trigger here the way there is crossing into Yoho and Kootenay on October 1. The elevation is the trigger instead. The pass is the highest paved road in the country and it collects snow in September while Calgary is still in shirtsleeves. A dusting at the summit lot on a 14 °C day in town is ordinary, not remarkable.

Our fleet is on winter tires before October 1, ahead of the BC requirement and ahead of any Alberta one, because this drive is exactly the case that justifies it. If you are booking in late September, ask in the Turo thread what is on the vehicle for your dates and we will tell you straight.

For two people, the Volvo XC60 is the right tool — AWD, comfortable for the two-hour run each way, and nothing about this trip needs more vehicle than that. For a group of five to seven, the Yukon XL keeps everyone in one vehicle instead of caravanning two cars to a summit lot that is already tight. A Sierra 1500 makes sense if you are carrying real gear or heading on to a campsite afterward; for a day trip to a paved parking lot it is more truck than the day asks for.

One last thing about Highway 40 in the fall: this is elk rut season, the highway runs through the middle of it, and dawn and dusk are when both the wildlife and the photographers are out. We wrote about what hitting one actually costs you in a rental, and the short version is that it is the most expensive twenty seconds of inattention available in this province.

Book the drive

Highwood Pass is open now. The gate drops December 1, the larches are gone well before that, and the paved lot at the top is the whole trip.

🚙 Volvo XC60 — AWD, two people, the easy pick for this drive

🚐 2026 GMC Yukon XL Elevation — seven seats, one vehicle for the group

🛻 The Sierra 1500 fleet — four identical trucks, pick your dates

Every vehicle goes out with an annual Parks Canada Discovery Pass on the mirror for the national parks. Buy the Kananaskis Conservation Pass separately at albertaparks.ca and register the plate we give you at handover. Two-day minimum on every booking, pickup in NW Calgary or at YYC.