Scenic pullout · Icefields Parkway (Highway 93)
Red chairs frame Mount Christie’s pyramid above the Athabasca Valley.
Overview
Map
Plan your stop
The highest, rockiest slopes around here are a summer buffet for grizzly bears.
Icefields Parkway Tour Guide
Parkwolf is a GPS audio tour guide for Icefields Parkway (Highway 93). As you drive, it chimes in with what’s ahead: hidden gems, upcoming stops, history, geology, and wildlife, right through your car’s speakers.
See the Icefields Parkway audio tourRecorded for this place
Mount Christie Viewpoint: Red Chairs and Elk Clues“You're coming up on Mount Christie Viewpoint, where a short, flat path leads to red chairs facing the mountain's broad pyramid across the Athabasca Valley.”
Plays as you drive up to Mount Christie Viewpoint in the Parkwolf Icefields Parkway Tour Guide.
More stories near here in the app
“Fantastic app with many points of information… It’s great to just turn on while you’re driving and it gives you an audio tour of the national Park. We love it!!!!”
Guide
Mount Christie Viewpoint is a roadside stop above the Athabasca Valley, with a short, flat path out to the red chairs. The broad, pyramidal peak is the draw; this is a quick look rather than a separate hike. The surface is unpaved and scattered with rocks, and the viewpoint is a summer-only stop.
From the chairs, look across the wide river flats to Mount Christie, with Mount Fryatt farther north. Use the red chairs as foreground to anchor the peak in a photo, then take one without them to let the pyramid fill the frame.
The tight horseshoe bend in the Athabasca River is a different stop about five kilometres south. This is the Mount Christie and red-chair viewpoint, so keep the two stops straight when planning the drive.
Mount Christie rises to 3,103 metres. Dr. James Hector named it in 1859 for William Christie, a Hudson’s Bay Company chief factor at Fort Edmonton.
About 100 metres south of the viewpoint, aspens have bark stripped to roughly two metres high, a mark attributed to elk feeding in winter. Watch for the stripped trunks as you pass; they point to winter elk browsing in the area, though they don’t mean you’ll see one.
Wildlife
12 sightingsGrizzly BearMost seen around 6 AMSighting map
127 sightingsBlack BearMost seen around 7 PMSighting map
16 sightingsMooseMost seen around 6 AMSighting map
100 sightingsElkMost seen around 8 PMSighting map
34 sightingsMountain GoatMost seen around 7 PMSighting map
53 sightingsBighorn SheepMost seen around 6 PMSighting mapSighting maps show where each species has been reported across Icefields Parkway. Wildlife moves, so no sighting is guaranteed.
Keep exploring
Parkwolf’s Icefields Parkway ranking
The audio tour guide for the drive, plus offline maps, trails, and wildlife heatmaps for when the signal drops.
