Tucked between the Little Smoky River and Sturgeon Lake in northwest Alberta, Valleyview sits at the crossroads of Highway 43 and Highway 49, making it a natural gateway into the Peace Region. This positioning gave rise to the town’s motto, “Portal to the Peace,” a fitting description for a community that has long served travellers and residents moving through this corridor. The town is elevated above the surrounding landscape, and as its name suggests, it overlooks the valleys that spread out below. Valleyview falls within Census Division No. 18 and is surrounded by the Municipal District of Greenview No. 16. It sits adjacent to the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation reservation within the lands of Treaty 8, and rests atop the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin, a region known for significant coal and oil deposits, as well as the Duvernay Formation, a notable source of natural gas and oil. The town also sits in an active geothermal area. Valleyview experiences a humid continental climate, with warm summers, cool nights, and long, severely cold winters.
The land around Valleyview has been home to Indigenous peoples for thousands of years, prized for its rich hunting and fishing. The local Cree population has lived here since at least the 1700s. European contact began in the early 1800s through the fur trade, and a Hudson’s Bay Company post was established on Sturgeon Lake in 1877. The community that eventually grew here was first called Red Willow Creek, taking on the name Valleyview only when its first post office opened in 1929. Oil was discovered nearby in late 1950, and the completion of the Whitecourt Cutoff in 1955 greatly shortened travel time between the Peace Country and Edmonton. By the late 1950s, Valleyview had achieved boomtown status, having been incorporated as a village in 1954 and then as a town just three years later in 1957. In 2020, the town and its Chamber of Commerce renamed a stretch of highway to mark the 65th anniversary of the cutoff’s completion. Young’s Point Provincial Park, located on Sturgeon Lake roughly 15 kilometres west of town, is a popular destination in the area. According to the 2021 Census, Valleyview had a population of 1,673, a decline of about 10.2 per cent from its 2016 count.