Banff: A National Park Born From a Railway’s Hot Springs

Banff exists, in large part, because of a business opportunity. In 1883, workers building the Canadian Pacific Railway stumbled on natural hot springs on the slopes of Sulphur Mountain, and the railway company, recognising the tourism potential, lobbied the Canadian government to protect the area, leading to the creation of Banff National Park in 1885, Canada’s first national park and only the third in the world.

The railway’s involvement shaped the town from the start, the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel, opened in 1888, was built deliberately in the style of a Scottish baronial castle to draw wealthy travellers off the new transcontinental line, and remains one of the most photographed hotels in North America, framed against the Rockies behind it.

Turquoise Water With a Geological Explanation

Banff’s lakes, Louise and Moraine among the most famous, owe their strikingly vivid turquoise colour to “rock flour,” fine sediment ground by glaciers and suspended in the meltwater that feeds them. That sediment reflects light in a way that shifts the water’s colour toward blue and green, an effect so vivid in photographs that many first-time visitors assume it must be enhanced, it isn’t.

The park sits within the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is home to grizzly bears, elk, and bighorn sheep, wildlife that regularly wanders close enough to roads and townsites that Banff maintains one of the most active wildlife-crossing infrastructure systems in the world to keep animals and traffic safely apart.

Painting Glacier Blue

The saturated turquoise of Banff’s glacial lakes against dark pine and snow-capped peaks gives a watercolourist a rare, almost otherworldly palette to work with. We’ve captured that alpine colour in our own Banff Watercolor Print, painted first by hand and printed to order on archival paper, a small piece of the Canadian Rockies for a wall at home.

Built around a hot spring and a railway company’s instinct for tourism, Banff has spent well over a century proving that instinct entirely right.