Dawn
I would travel across the northern US to ND and cross over into Canada east of Calgary, which is a neat place to visit. From there we have traveled through Banff, Lake Louise, and Jasper NPs and then on to Dawson Creek to start up the Alaska Highway. From CT you can save time and avoid a lot of traffic by crossing into Canada at Niagra Falls and back into the US at Port Huron, MI and traveling the UP of MI.
If you can allow yourselves more time. We have been up twice, the first time we spent 2 months from border crossing to border crossing and two years ago we crossed on June 6th and returned on August 28th which is pretty much the summer season.
On both trips we passed on some places.