Established in 2014, Antelope Hill Provincial Park is one of the newest provincial parks in Alberta. The park is on land which was donated to the Province by Gottlob Schmidt. “Schmitty”, as he was known locally, originally moved onto the land in 1934 as a young boy.

He gifted the land to the people of Alberta with the intent that it be used as a park. Not long after making the donation, he moved into nearby Hanna but continued to make visits out to his homestead. Schmitty passed away in late 2018 and the Government of Alberta set about investing more than $530,000 to prepare the park for opening to the public.

We knew nothing about this park until May 30th when we saw a posting on Facebook from Alberta Parks saying it was now accessible to the public. That was all the incentive we needed to take the roughly 2.5 hour drive from Cochrane to go check it out.

Covering 940 acres of natural grassland, the park is intended for low-impact activity such as hiking and wildlife watching. During our visit we had the entire place to ourselves and really enjoyed the silence and peacefulness of this location.

It wouldn’t be a patented DanOCan Road Trip if we didn’t make a few detours along the way to check out some different things. Come along for the ride with us as we venture out to Antelope Hill, just north of Hanna, Alberta.