Taking a tour of the Canadian Rockies for the first time often leaves visitors awestruck and is well worth a visit in the summer months.

If you are trying to find a summer 2012 tour and wondering where to take your group travel tour, why not look to our northern neighbors? Beating the intense temperatures on a summer tour of the Canadian Rockies will lend you back much of your energy so you can enjoy more of the natural world while having less to sweat about. Canadian Rockies travel often leaves visitors mesmerized and is well worth seeing firsthand.

When choosing an escorted tour, make sure your Canadian tour includes Jasper National Park. Not only is Jasper National Park a safe place for wildlife due to its vow in protecting the land from city light, Jasper's elevation range, geology, and geography have long enabled noteworthy diversity in nature. A tour of the Canadian Rockies gives travelers a taste of a vast ecosystem consisting of 1,300 species of plants, 20,000 insect and spider types, 40 fish types, 16 species of reptiles and amphibians, 277 species of birds, and 69 different species of mammals. Canadian travel almost guarantees you will see a moose, porcupine, bighorn sheep, beaver, lynx, wolverine, or elk, just to name a few. The surprising variety of native species is an extra bonus to the great natural beauty already present in Canada's vistas.

Banff National Park is another great place for Canadian travel tours. It is a short drive away from Jasper National Park on your Canadian group tour and is Canada's oldest National Park founded in 1885. The area is very rich in Native American history and on the way to Banff National Park is Head-smashed-in Buffalo Jump where the Blackfoot tribe hunted buffalo by cloaking themselves in predator skins and spooking their prey enough to run off of a 36 ft high cliff. Banff National Park also has a great deal of early rock paintings from Native American cultures and the area is of tremendous historic importance to aboriginal cultures. Paintings found within the park depict many objects from day to day life of the indigenous tribes as well as more abstract drawings that may have been inspired by dreams or encounters with supernatural beings.

Traveling between Jasper and Banff National Parks is a stretch of highway known as Icefields Parkway that travels the Columbia Icefield. Envision yourself at the planet's biggest dark sky preserve (no billboards and no city lights!) exploring Athabasca Glacier (one of the glaciers that is a part of Columbia Icefield) along Icefields Parkway. Travelers can see the Columbia Icefield while driving Icefields Parkway and it is quite accessible to reach Athabasca Glacier and actually walk or take a special ice-traversing motor vehicle on the glacial terrain.

Jasper and Banff National Parks are a part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site and both have alluring natural beauty and much biological diversity to encounter. Taking a Canadian Rockies tour is great by train or motor coach! However you get around, you can't go wrong with a summer vacation spent touring the Canadian Rockies. All the beauty and diversity of this part of the world is something you will never forget.