AT FIRST BLUSH, ALBERTA’S COWBOY TRAIL stretching from Mayerthorpe northwest of Edmonton to Waterton on the Canada–U.S. border, is the Wild West of your childhood imagination – a land of rugged cowboys plucked from a Charles Russell painting. On a map, it’s Highway 22, roughly 700 kilometres of Canadian driving at its finest, with dramatic scenery rising up to meet your windshield: endless stretches of flat golden prairie, rolling foothills, old wooden barns, grazing horses and the distant jagged mountains jutting into an achingly beautiful, limitless blue sky.