Canada’s first park began as a hot-springs railroad reserve
Banff National Park, created in 1885 as Rocky Mountains Park, covers 6,641 square kilometres of Alberta Rockies some 110–180 kilometres west of Calgary. Sediments shoved east between 80 and 55 million years ago built the peaks; Ice Age ice still clings to high glaciers and the Columbia Icefield.
Banff shares borders with Jasper to the north, Yoho and Kootenay across the British Columbia line to the west, and Kananaskis Country to the south-east. Most shops and services cluster in Banff townsite, down in the Bow valley. The scenery mixes glaciers and icefields, thick conifer forest and alpine terrain, split into montane, subalpine and alpine ecoregions under a subarctic climate. Lodgepole pine dominates lower slopes and Engelmann spruce higher up, giving way to rock and ice above the treeline. Grizzlies, cougars, wolverines, elk, bighorn sheep and moose live here with hundreds of bird species. Glaciers have repeatedly buried most of the park over the last few million years, and water and ice carved the present shapes.
People were here long before the park. Finds at Vermilion Lakes put the earliest human activity at about 10,300 years ago, and nations including the Stoney Nakoda, Siksika, Piikani, Kainaiwa, Tsuut'ina, Ktunaxa and Plains Cree hunted, traded and travelled through the area. Lake Minnewanka and the Waputik Range still carry Stoney Nakoda names, and the hot springs at Cave and Basin held spiritual importance for the Nakoda, who moved through the Bow Valley with the seasons.
Fur traders and surveyors followed. David Thompson crossed Howse Pass in 1807, Hudson's Bay Company governor George Simpson crossed Simpson Pass in 1841, and the Palliser expedition surveyed the region from 1857 to 1860, with geologist James Hector crossing Vermilion and Kicking Horse passes in 1858. When British Columbia joined Confederation in 1871, Canada promised a railway to the coast; construction began in 1875 via Kicking Horse Pass rather than the Yellowhead, and the last spike went in at Craigellachie on 7 November 1885.
The Canadian Pacific Railway shaped the early park, building the Banff Springs Hotel and Chateau Lake Louise to draw visitors. Roads came in the early twentieth century, some built by First World War internees and later by Depression relief projects. Lodgings stayed open year-round from the 1960s, and visits topped five million a year in the 1990s. That pressure on the ecosystem prompted Parks Canada to launch a two-year study in the mid-1990s.
Source: Banff National Park
