Ya Ha Tinda Ranch is a

ranch A ranch (from es, rancho/Mexican Spanish) is an area of land, including various structures, given primarily to ranching, the practice of raising grazing livestock such as cattle and sheep. It is a subtype of a farm. These terms are most often ...

in Ya Ha Tinda Valley, Clearwater County,

Alberta Alberta ( ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is part of Western Canada and is one of the three prairie provinces. Alberta is bordered by British Columbia to the west, Saskatchewan to the east, the Northwest Ter ...

, Canada near the Alberta side of

Banff National Park Banff National Park is Canada's oldest National Parks of Canada, national park, established in 1885 as Rocky Mountains Park. Located in Alberta's Rockies, Alberta's Rocky Mountains, west of Calgary, Banff encompasses of mountainous terrain, wi ...

. The ranch is around 40 km² (9748 acres, 3,945 hectares) with approximately one third being grassland and two thirds being forested. Around a thousand elk spend the winter in the ranch. The ranch is owned by

Parks Canada Parks Canada (PC; french: Parcs Canada),Parks Canada is the applied title under the Federal Identity Program; the legal title is Parks Canada Agency (). is the agency of the Government of Canada which manages the country's 48 National Parks, th ...

and used to raise horses for use in the western

national parks A national park is a natural park in use for conservation purposes, created and protected by national governments. Often it is a reserve of natural, semi-natural, or developed land that a sovereign state declares or owns. Although individual ...

that request mounted park rangers. Horses are raised for five years before being assigned to a national park. The ranch has around a hundred horses at peak time. Since its creation in 1917, the bounds of the park have frequently changed. Originally, the ranch was within Rocky Mountains National Park boundaries.

History

Prehistoric bison remains indicates the area around the ranch has been used by native people for over 9,400 years. Ya Ha Tinda means "mountain prairie" in the Nakoda language. In the early 1900s Brewster's Travel obtained a grazing lease on the site of the future ranch and, by 1908, were raising horses there. In 1917, Parks Canada began exclusively using the site to train horses.

References

Ranches in Alberta 1917 establishments in Alberta {{AlbertaRockies-geo-stub