Highway 742 -- the Smith-Dorrien/Spray Trail -- is the alternative way to approach Kananaskis Country from Canmore. It takes you up through the mountain pass of Whiteman's Gap and the imposing Chinaman's Peak -- named after the Chinese cook, Ha Ling, who first climbed it for a US$50 bet.
Jack and Ennis' spectacular nude cliff-top leap into a river was shot at the appropriately named Sheep River Falls in the Elbow Sheep Wildland Provincial Park near Okotoks, south of Calgary. We drove to this idyllic spot, passing the house-sized, isolated glacial erratic, said to be the largest in the world and emphatically known as The Big Rock, to reach the Blue Rock campsite in Sheep Valley.
Camping there in the wilderness, the only sounds the thundering waterfall and the rushing river, we felt something of the same sense of peace that the fictional Ennis and Jack must have felt on their Brokeback Mountain.
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