When Clint Eastwood shot his last U.S.-set Western, Unforgiven, in Alberta it wasn’t a surprising move. After all, he had risen to fame during the 1960’s in Westerns that were shot in Spain. The advantage here was low foreign cost, but also the province itself. The film’s Wyoming town of Big Whiskey was shot atop a grassy hill in Longview, where the rugged peaks of Alberta’s Canadian Rocky Mountains push up around it. Three points in particular from that range – Mount Lougheed, Fortress and Moose Mountains – would all later be combined to create Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, set within Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains, but shot in and around Kananaskis Country and Bragg Creek. In this decades-spanning take on a New West love affair, time slows down under the shadow of the (Canadian) American continental divide, where herds of sheep now take the place of the covered wagons which once blazed dangerous trails toward towns like Big Whiskey. In fact, Longview stood in for Wyoming again for the 2006 mini-series Broken Trail. Set on the cusp of the 20th century, it concerns two men on a mustang drive from Oregon who save five Chinese women from forced prostitution in a frontier mining town. Longview’s rolling green ranges also doubled for Montana cattle driving country in Open Range – which itself explored the “range wars” sparked by the use of barbed wire to cordon off newly-private grazing land, and thus marked the decline of the classic American western frontier. All of the above film projects took advantage of inexpensive access to local casts and crews long used to doing Westerns in Alberta. 40 years ago, and across the border in British Columbia, Robert Altman filmed the Washington State mining town of Presbyterian Church in McCabe & Mrs. Miller within the soggy coastal ranges near Vancouver, and Edward Zwick would later use that city to double for early-20th century Helena, Montana in Legends of the Fall. Yet the breathtaking mountain views around that film’s Ludlow ranch were shot west of Calgary near Ghost River, and Brad Pitt would return to Alberta a decade later to film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The physical variety of the province is showcased throughout the film, with the opening nighttime train robbery taking place in the woods of Fort Edmonton Park, while the closing winter scene in “Creede, Colorado” was actually a million dollar set built in Goat Creek. For The Edge, Alberta’s Rockies took on the beautiful-but-dangerous identity of Alaskan mountains, with the survivors of a plane crash fighting for their lives in Banff National Park and other Rocky locales near the town of Canmore – which itself later stood in for Mystery, Alaska. The area actually got to play a Canadian locale in X2, with Kananaskis Country’s Barrier Lake as the secret snowbound Alkali Lake research facility. The snowy Kananaskis peaks would also evoke the High Sierras in The Claim, proving again that Alberta can play more than just the Rockies, and stealing California’s mountain thunder in the quest for shot-on-location profits.