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Banff National Park

Banff National Park is located northwest of Calgary, Alberta. The park measures 6,641 square kilometers, part of a complex chain of national and provincial parks and wilderness areas which together total 5 million acres -- one of the world’s largest protected domains. Vast glaciers rimmed with ice, huge forests, and emerald green lakes exhibit some of the most majestic mountain scenery on earth. Bears, wolves and a host of other magnificent animals and birds extend their range throughout the hinterland. Not surprisingly, about 4 million visitors a year explore these parks.

The park includes parts of two of the three parallel mountain systems that comprise the Rocky Mountains - the easternmost front ranges, with their slanting tabletop shape, and the casellate Main Ranges. Their angular peaks rise as high as 4000 metres.

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Lake Louise

The picture-perfect Lake Louise sits beneath a vast bowl of mountains and glaciers, its eastern shore site of a giant glacial moraine. The peacock blue of the Rockies' lakes is caused by the particles of glacial silt, which absorbs all but the blue-green range of colors from incoming light.

Flora and Fauna

See the entry on Flora and Fauna in Banff National Park.

History

Excavations in the Vermilion Lakes area around Banff have uncovered traces of human habitation in the Bow Valley dating back at least 11 000 years. Stoney, Kootenay, and Blackfoot natives roamed the region at the time George Simpson, governor of Rupert's Land for the Hudson's Bay Company, was led into the area by a native guide in 1841. Trappers and fur traders soon followed. The Canadian Pacific Railway reached Banff in 1883,and it was the railway workers who stumbled upon the soothing waters of the Cave and Basin Springs - long a sacred place of peace to the Kootenay people. The workers' efforts to exploit the cave by registering a claim to the springs ended when the site was appropriated for a reserve by the Canadian government. For several years, access to the spring was possible only by climbing down a tree ladder, a most hazardous method used by many distinguished visitors, including the Prince of Wales. Creation of the Hot Springs Reserve in 1885, and the Rocky Mountain Park two years later would lead to the establishment of Canada's first national park and the world's third.