Tucked in the southwest corner of Alberta, scenic Waterton Lakes is one of Canada's smallest national parks. -- Photo courtesy of Tourism Alberta

Waterton Lakes National Park certainly lives up to its billing as the place where the prairies meet the mountains. One minute you're passing herds of cattle, next minute mountains appear through the windshield.

Waterton is wedged into the southwest corner of Alberta, with British Columbia on its western boundary and the U.S. to the south. One of our smallest national parks, at 525 sq. km, it perches like a toque atop Montana's Glacier National Park, with which it forms Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park.

The easiest way to take in the park's beauty is to cruise on the MV International. The wooden passenger boat -- built in 1928 -- travels from Waterton town site to Goats Haunt, an obscure U.S. border point so named because mountain goats are often seen there.

The cruise is on Upper Waterton Lake. It's the largest in a chain of four in the park and the deepest in the Canadian Rockies 148 metres at one point. We saw little activity beyond a few canoeists and anglers, and cheered the fact that there is no shoreline development to spoil the scenery. Mountains rear up on the Canadian side. An odd-shaped one called Citadel still had snow on it in August.

Tips: You'll need cash to buy a boat ticket. Take a jacket; the park is one of Alberta's windiest places. You won't need photo ID to disembark on the American side but you will if you want to do any hiking and catch a later boat back to Waterton.

There's also daily water shuttle service to the starting point for the Crypt Lake hike, described as the most spectacular in the park and one of the best in Canada. It's a 17-km round trip that passes four waterfalls. The final section is reached by climbing a ladder, crawling through a small tunnel and edging along a precipice to a deep green lake.

Waterton has three scenic parkways. Locals were keen on the Akima, a lovely, leisurely drive on a winding mountain road that ends at Cameron Lake. It's shaped like a bowl, with forest on two sides and mountains rising at the back. Canoes, kayaks and rowboats can be rented.

We also drove through rolling grassland up the Blakiston Valley to Red Rock Canyon. It turned out to be more like a gully, but if we hadn't done the trip we wouldn't have spotted a huge bear.

An even greater thrill was encountering buffalo in a paddock just north of the park entrance. Signs warn against getting out of your vehicle, but we were able to roll down a window and photograph two fine bulls calming grazing a few metres away.

Waterton's mountains lack the grandeur of Banff's, as well as rampant commercialism and tourist hordes. Apart from a few lodges, most facilities are open from May to October, when the population of about 100 increases to about 2,000. The park gets only 425,000 visitors a year, but most arrive in summer.

Reservations are recommended. We stayed at Aspen Village Inn, which has suites, motel-type rooms and cottages. Contact 1-888-859-2255 or aspenvillageinn.com.