Alpine Helicopter operates from a hangar on Bow Valley Trail where pilots file weather reports twice daily before the first rotor turns. The company holds Transport Canada certification for mountain flying—a designation requiring 500 logged hours in high-altitude terrain and annual proficiency checks over glaciated routes. Five Bell 206 helicopters lift from the tarmac each morning, their turbines calibrated for the thin air above 2,400 metres. Heli tours Canmore gained momentum in 1987 when the provincial government opened airspace corridors over Kananaskis Country, creating fixed flight paths that avoided wildlife corridors and protected watersheds. Today's routes trace the same invisible highways: north to Mount Assiniboine's 3,618-metre pyramid, west to the Continental Divide where meltwater splits toward three oceans, east above the Three Sisters—a limestone triad that anchors Canmore's skyline. Pilots maintain 150-metre clearance over bighorn sheep ranges and cut engines during nesting season overflights of golden eagle territories. The landscape below tells a geological story written in Paleozoic limestone, Precambrian quartzite, and Cretaceous shale. Glaciers that once buried the valley to a depth of 600 metres left U-shaped troughs and hanging valleys now visible only from the air. Peyto Lake's turquoise glow comes from glacial flour—rock ground to silt and suspended in snowmelt. The Icefields Parkway ribbons through forests where lodgepole pine and Engelmann spruce grow in fire-succession patterns mapped by dendrochronologists. Canmore helicopter tours depart between 08:00 and 17:00, with morning flights capturing shadowless light across ridgelines. The facility at 91 Bow Valley Trail offers no-cost entry; flight experiences range from 12-minute passes over the Bow River to 30-minute expeditions circling Mount Assiniboine. Pilots narrate via headset, identifying peaks by their Stoney Nakoda names and pointing out ice-blue crevasses that mark active glacier flow.