Waterton Lakes National Park

What goes up one side comes down the other. What has a front has a back. If one side is gorgeous, chances are the other side will be, too — especially when it comes to mountains in general, and more specifically to mountains that make national parks.

So it is with Glacier National Park in the United States and Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada. They are front and back — or one side and the other side — of the same Rocky Mountain chain.

When Glacier was made a national park in 1910, Waterton Lakes followed in 1911. Both were natural paradises that attracted early visitors who came to see mountains that had been shaped by glacial action eons ago.

In 1932, following a drive initiated by the Rotary Clubs of Alberta and Montana, the two parks joined together to form the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, the first such joint effort in the world.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of that momentous joining, designed "not just to promote peace and goodwill between nations, but also to underscore the international nature of wilderness and the cooperation required in its protection." The two have since also been designated Biosphere Reserves and in 1995 were named a World Heritage Site. Special activities at the park throughout the year will honor the initial joining.

At 203 square miles, Waterton Lakes is by far the smaller of the two parks, but that size gives it an intimate feel and a personality all its own.

From this Canadian side, you get an exciting look at the amazing process of mountain-building. You see rather clearly the abrupt rise of the mountains from the flatlands, the demarcation line "where the mountains meet the prairie." No surprise that that's the catch-phrase theme of the park.

There are no glaciers in Waterton now, but the landscape shows evidence of icy movement in the past: hanging valleys, cirques, aretes, waterfalls. The park centers around the three Waterton lakes: Upper, Middle and Lower. They are named for a British naturalist who spent most of his energies far south of here. Charles Waterton roamed South America and the Caribbean and was the man who introduced curare into Western medicine. He never saw the lakes named in his honor by Thomas Blackiston, who led the first-recorded European visitors through the area in 1858 on the Palliser Expedition. He himself is honored by the tallest mountain in the park; Mount Blackiston rises to 9,580 feet.

Upper Waterton Lake lies to the south; the U.S.-Canadian border cuts across its southern tip, and with a depth of 492 feet, it is the deepest lake in the Canadian Rockies.