Banff, Canada · North America

6 ideal things to do in Banff

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked September 26, 2025

1. 01

   Johnston Canyon to the Ink Pots

   Bow Valley Parkway, 25 km west of Banff·Before eight or after five. Midday is a queue on a catwalk

   Steel catwalks bolted into the limestone carry you up a slot canyon to the Lower Falls, then the Upper, and that is where almost everybody turns round. Keep going another hour uphill into open meadow and you reach the Ink Pots: six spring-fed pools, blue-green, with sand quietly boiling at the bottom of each one. The crowd thins the moment the handrails end, and stays thin. In winter the whole thing freezes and people climb up it on axes.

2. 02

   Cave and Basin National Historic Site

   Ten minutes' walk west of Banff town·Any weather. It is mostly indoors and partly underground

   Three railway workers dropped through a hole in the ground in 1883, found a steaming cave, tried to claim it, and lost — the government took it and built the reserve that became Canada's national park system. You enter through a tunnel now. It smells of sulphur, the water is the temperature of a bath you would complain about, and swimming stopped years ago because the pool turns out to be the last habitat of a snail that lives nowhere else on earth. Small museum, very large consequences.

3. 03

   Vermilion Lakes before sunrise

   Vermilion Lakes Drive, five minutes from town·The half hour before the sun clears the ridge, any season

   Shallow water along a dead-end road just west of the townsite, with Mount Rundle standing upside down in it on a windless morning. You can walk or cycle out from Banff in less time than it takes to queue for the Lake Louise shuttle. Elk use the marsh, and people have been camping on this ground for something like ten thousand eight hundred years, which puts the parking problem in perspective. I have gone at dawn four times and got the mirror twice — a respectable strike rate in mountain weather.

4. 04

   Lower Bankhead, the coal town that isn't there

   Lake Minnewanka Road, ten minutes from Banff·Any time. Twenty minutes to walk it

   Roughly a thousand people lived here mining anthracite for the railway between 1903 and 1922. When the seam stopped paying, the company owned every building in town and simply moved them — houses to Banff and Canmore, the railway station up to Tunnel Mountain Road. What remains is foundations, a slag heap, some rusting machinery and a set of interpretive signs, sitting inside a park that would much rather you thought of it as untouched wilderness. Ten minutes from the lake everyone drives to, and I have never had to share it.

5. 05

   Sunshine Meadows in larch week

   Sunshine Village, up by gondola from the Trans-Canada·Roughly the third week of September. It moves each year

   Alpine meadow at 2,300 metres straddling the Continental Divide, with a five-and-a-half kilometre loop past Rock Isle Lake and, on a clear day, Mount Assiniboine doing its Matterhorn impression away to the south. For about a fortnight each September the larches turn the colour of a good beer and then drop their needles, being the one conifer that cannot commit. There is no road; you go up by gondola or shuttle. Book it, because every hiker in Alberta owns the same calendar.

6. 06

   Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies

   Bear Street, Banff town·A rainy afternoon, or the day your legs resign

   Peter and Catharine Whyte — he a local painter, she from Massachusetts money — met at art school in Boston, married in 1930, and spent the rest of their lives collecting these mountains. The museum opened in 1968 and holds around seventeen and a half thousand objects, including Byron Harmon's photographs of the range before the road went through. Six historic buildings stand on the grounds, one of them the cabin of Bill Peyto, the guide the lake on the Icefields Parkway is named after.