Canadian Road Trips: Banff and Kootenay National Parks

One of the best places to begin a Canadian road trip is in Calgary, the largest city in the Province of Alberta, and just fifty miles from the front range of the Rockies. If you aren’t planning to use your own vehicle for your adventure, you can easily rent one in Calgary; all the major companies are represented, and the market is competitive, so you might even find some deals if you shop around for the best rate.

Tip: Car Rental locations at airports are the ultimate in terms of convenience, but you can expect to pay a premium for that ease of use. If you pick up your vehicle at a downtown location, you’ll usually secure a better rate.

Driving west from Calgary on the Trans Canada Highway, the stunning vistas begin the moment you enter the mountains. Take a good look around, and feast your eyes, for there is beauty on every side, preserved for the ages in a magical place called:

BANFF NATIONAL PARK

Mention the Canadian Rockies, and the image that comes to mind for just about everyone is the classic view of Lake Louise, a pristine, turquoise-green body of glacial melt water nestled in a setting of snow-clad peaks. There are wild looking mountains and glaciers on one side of the beautiful lake, and a palace with a thousand windows standing on the opposite shore. The palace is actually a hotel, the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise, which was built by the Canadian Pacific Railroad more than 100 years ago. The goal was to attract tourists to the area, and it worked, possibly even a bit too well! That picture perfect tableau, of Lake Louise and the Fairmont Chateau, has been duplicated and displayed millions of times, on postcards, calendars, and every other form of media, in every corner of the globe, inspiring a very specific wanderlust in millions of people, going all the way back to the earliest days of Canadian Road Trips. It was an advertising campaign that predates mass-market advertising, and it’s still working, 100 years later!

 Check out the slideshow for photos of Lake Louise, and several of the other attractions in the area. (Click any photo to blow the images up to full screen, with captions).

Banff National Park is one of Canada’s most well-known attractions. It was the country’s very first National Park,  in a system that now includes 48 protected areas, all of them simply extraordinary. Being the first, as well as the closest to Calgary, Banff has always been the most popular, as well as the most crowded of all the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks. Banff gets four million visitors in an average year, and even though the park covers more than 1.6 million acres, 90% of those four million visitors head straight to the same spot, to Lake Louise, and the Fairmont Chateau. If you’re there in the peak season, from mid-June to mid-September? Best of luck finding a parking space anywhere near Lake Louise! 

Tip: When you arrive at Lake Louise, if all the lots are full, you’ll see legions of scofflaws parking on sidewalks, medians, and any other flat piece of ground. Resist the temptation to join them. Have patience, and drive ’round in circles until a real space opens up; the visitors that park illegally will all get hefty fines, and there’s a good chance their vehicles will be towed! 

Needless to say there is a lot more to Banff than that one beautiful lake. There are many lakes, incredible mountain views, rivers, glaciers, and enough hiking trails to put a serious outdoorsman into orbit. For the non-hikers, there’s even more than one century-old castle-like hotel, the other being the ultra-luxurious Fairmont Banff Springs, also built by the Canadian Pacific Railroad. That one is on a hilltop, rather than beside a lake, and it’s situated within piping distance of the natural hot spring that first put Banff on the map. In and around the town of Banff there is a wide selection of hotels and restaurants in every price range, and there are numerous campgrounds in the area. For up-to-the-minute information, be sure to stop in at the Visitor’s Center, located in the middle of town at 224 Banff Ave, at the corner of Wolf Street.

When you’re visiting Banff, there are several more Canadian National Parks within a short driving distance. The closest of these is one of those best-kept secrets, an enticing slice of scenic splendor known as:

KOOTENAY NATIONAL PARK

From Banff, head south to Kootenay National Park, which is immediately adjacent. The boundary between the two is the Continental Divide, which, as it happens, is also the boundary between the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. Kootenay features mountains, glaciers, ice blue rivers, hot springs, pristine forests, and colorful canyons. It’s much like Banff in most respects, a part of the larger protected area that makes up the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks. 

AB-93, the same highway that incorporates the Icefields Parkway north of Lake Louise, splits away from the Trans-Canada Highway at Castle Junction, 20 miles west of the town of Banff, and continues southward the entire 60 mile length of Kootenay, running through the middle of the park to Radium Hot Springs, one of the area’s most popular attractions. Along the way you’ll pass a number of other points of interest, including the Continental Divide, marked off by a monument on AB-93; Stanley Glacier, accessible via a moderate round-trip hike of about six miles; and Marble Canyon, a quite remarkable gorge carved into the landscape by the Kootenay River, accessible by a short trail, just off the highway. Turquoise-colored glacial melt-water rushes between sheer rock walls, spilling down a series of cascades, with the sharply tapered bulk of Vermilion Peak looming above the scene like a watchful pyramid. The trail has stairs and walkways with metal railings leading to viewing platforms, where visitors can check out the colorful waterfalls.

The Visitor’s Center for Kootenay National Park is in the village of Radium Hot Springs, at 7556 Main Street.

(Click any of the photos in the slideshow to expand the images to full screen, with captions)

AB-93 continues south from Radium Hot Springs all the way to the U.S. Border, where it connects to US 93, a venerable two-lane highway that keeps going all the way to Arizona. The more practical choice  for most travelers is AB-95, which will take you back north from Radium Hot Springs, following the Columbia River upstream to Golden, where you’ll reconnect with the TCH. The loop through Kootenay, south on AB-93 to Radium Hot Springs and then north on AB-95 to Golden is one of the most popular drives in the area, as well as being among the most scenic, with spectacular mountain views in every direction.

From Golden, you can turn west toward Rogers Pass, and Glacier National Park, or you can turn east, back toward Banff, passing right through the heart of Yoho, the next National Park in this series, and my own personal favorite.

If you live in Calgary or Edmonton, or even Vancouver, a road trip in the Canadian Rockies is simple to arrange. For the rest of us, it takes a bit of planning, but it’s well worth the trouble. You’ll come away with memories that will last a lifetime!

For more specific information on the Canadian Rocky Mountain National Parks–and a LOT more photographs–check out the rest of my Canadian Road Trip series:

Unless otherwise noted, the images in these posts are my original work, and are protected by copyright. They may not be duplicated for commercial purposes.

This is an interactive Table of Contents. Click the pictures to open the pages.

Canadian Road Trips

A few years ago I wrote a book about road trips in Arizona and New Mexico that's a lot like this website, packed with interesting information, and illustrated with beautiful photographs. Check it out! You can find it on Amazon, and at all other major booksellers.

This is an interactive Table of Contents. Click the pictures to open the pages.

Alaska Road Trip