Banff and Kootenay: Two Parks that Really Bridge the Divide!

Banff, AB → Radium Hot Springs, BC
153.2 km (95.2 mi)

More 2024 Adventures

We’re Banff to the future, everyone!

After a pretty crazy high-mountain thunderstorm overnight, we woke up to clear skies and a beautiful morning looking out over Mount Rundle! It was the same mountain we’d passed yesterday on the Legacy Trail, but a whole different angle with all different surroundings. Our goal for today was to see even more angles, more surroundings, and more natural beauty in the heart of Canada’s Rocky Mountain national parks!

After breakfast, we motored back into Banff and worked our way to one of the park’s most popular hikes, the Tunnel Mountain Summit trail! Part of the reason it’s so popular is because the trailhead is right in town, and it only takes a mile to reach some breathtaking views of the valley! While Terri went into town to explore a botanical garden, Ross and I started our stomp to the summit.

It only took a few switchbacks to get our first gorgeous glimpses of greater Banff, hemmed in by towering peaks on all sides! And it was a perfect day to be soaking it in, a little cool, a little breezy, and kind of damp after last night’s thunderstorm, but all that made the air smell nice and fresh!

The trail was not a steep one by any means, just a series of gently meandering switchbacks. We passed couples and families out for a Monday morning stroll, and a couple really big, fluffy dogs, too! Because of the many hikers and the proximity to the town center, there wasn’t much to see in the way of wildlife this morning. So, it was going to be a stop and enjoy the views kind of day!

And enjoy them we did! To the east, we got another exciting angle on Mount Rundle, what could have been a wild view if not for the Fairmont Banff Springs Gold Course at its base. I’ve never golfed, but if I did, I expect that playing this course, along the meandering Bow River, would have been absolutely life-changing! Meanwhile, a couple of locals gave us some recommendations for the latter part of our day, insisting we just had to stop and see Marble Canyon and the Paint Pots en route to our next campsite in Radium Hot Springs!

As we got closer to the summit, we stopped to check out one of Banff’s postcard-famous postcard views, featuring two bright red Adirondack chairs! These chairs are very special! In 2011, Parks Canada started mapping out remote locations in national parks nationwide and installing red Adirondacks to encourage folks to seek them out for relaxation and social media promotion. They’re made from 100% recycled plastic, and there are over 200 of them for park visitors to enjoy! At these particular chairs, we had to wait in a little bit of a line to take photos, but they were worth it!

The summit views revealed more of the town of Banff, which began as a railroad town called Siding 29 back in 1883! With the discovery of a hot spring here, this town experienced both the opulence of a resort town, with its castle-like Banff Springs Hotel, and the chaos of a western railroad town as most of the money flowed past the regular residents and right into this hotel, leading to all kinds of crime! Ultimately, though, tourism won out, and Banff became a high-mountain cultural center, now home to the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts and Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies!

The Tunnel Mountain summit was pretty darn different from the markers I was used to. Instead, there was a sign in English and French commemorating the spot where King George IV and Queen Elizabeth stood during their visit in 1939, with an additional note about Anne Ness, who climbed this mountain more than 8,000 times over the course of 40 years! That’s some major endurance!

Having reached the summit, we cruised on back down for lunch in the RV and a plan for the rest of the day. We decided to heed the advice of the fellow we met on the trail and check out some off-road sites in Kootenay National Park! To get there, we crossed both the provincial line between Alberta and British Columbia and the continental divide itself! From here, all rivers on the Alberta side flow east into the Atlantic, while all rivers on the B.C. side flow west into the Pacific!

Our first stop was Marble Canyon, a short jaunt off the side of the road. It was breezy with a real threat of rain, but we were not to be discouraged! It was barely a quarter mile to get to the first bridge, so we had an easy way out if it did start raining.

Boy oh boy, what a first impression! If there’s one thing the Canadian Rockies have in spades, it’s beautiful water! Kootenay River was just dazzling as it carved its way among the towering limestone and dolomite cliffs. That’s right, Marble Canyon isn’t made of marble at all! It just looks like it when it rains!

As for the water, Kootenay River gets its lovely blue sheen from the glacial flour that washes into it from high up on the mountain peaks. Glacial flour is a mix of silt and clay that’s ground super fine by glaciers and is slow to sink when it’s in water. That makes a floating cloud of dust, which absorbs most of the wavelengths of sunlight, except for blue or green! As I marveled at the beautiful colors, I spotted a weasel on the other side slipping off the cliff into the water! I prepared to jump in and help, but it paddled its way to shore and clawed its way back to safety. Even woodland critters need to be careful around these cliffs!

The canyon was zig-zagged with bridges, seven total, across an increasingly deep chasm! It’s been carved out of the bedrock over many thousands of years by a steady blast of fast water carrying abrasive particles and periodic freezing. As the limestone dissolves at the base, the cracked rock on top falls off into the water, and the canyon widens. I really wonder what it will look like in another 9,000 years, especially if the glacier feeding the creek goes away!

At the crest of the trail was the grand waterfall that’s slowly making Marble Canyon longer, wearing away the rock, bit by bit, just like Niagara Falls! Beyond was pure wilderness, right under the fossil-rich peaks of a unique, sedimentary Lagerstatte formation, teeming with diverse, Cambrian-era fossils!

But that wilderness was very fenced off for good reason. Weasels weren’t the only ones to fall off these cliffs. These cliffs are precarious, as remembered in a sad poem engraved in a stone just off to the side of the waterfall. Nature is something that can bring great joy and great sadness, so it’s super important to enjoy it safely and responsibly.

Having completed the loop of the Marble Canyon trail, we motored down the road a ways to the next colorful stop: the Paint Pots! The name made me think of Yellowstone, but apparently these were not geothermal paint pots at all! We set off to find out exactly what they were instead.

It sprinkled off and on as we went, crossing back over the Kootenay River on a huge, arched bridge, more bright blues on our way to deep oranges!

We passed a sign in French that indicated “Les Gisements Ocreux,” or the Ochre Deposits! This explained that the waters we were about to see were cool mineral waters rich with iron oxide, which is what gives them their ochre coloring. They literally were paint pots, too! The Ktunaxa people, whose name is now reflected in the park’s name as “Kootenay,” used the color for paint, and it was extracted commercially in the two decades before this was declared a national park in 1920!

Part of the trail turned into a boardwalk to take us over the first ochre mudflats, overseen by the pointy Vermillion Peak! Its sides seemed like they’d had the color drained out of them, but that had nothing to do with the Paint Pots. In fact, it was a mountain pine beetle outbreak in the late 1980s and early 1990s that took out 43% of the lodgepole pines here, a devastating loss that’s still showing, three decades later! Climate change threatens to make these outbreaks larger and more severe!

At last, we reached the paint pots, a couple of pools running into a stream that gathered down on the flats we’d just crossed. After years of seeing colorful tufa formations surrounding hot springs, it felt very strange that these weren’t bubbling and steaming!

We wandered around the paint pots for a bit, enjoying the colors, which the Ktunaxa would dig up, bake, and grind into a powder to be mixed with oil for applying to skin and fabric! And then, it was time to head back to the trailhead and motor into Radium Hot Springs for dinner!

Along the way, we saw two huge herds of wildlife: a bunch of mountain goats wandering between the road and the high bluff, and later a resident herd of bighorn sheep! These sheep stay close to Radium Hot Springs because being close to civilization is a little safer from predators, and also, they like to eat the salt from the roads in the winter! They’re so abundant here that the town has adopted them as its symbol, but keeping them safe from traffic while they cluster along the road is a big challenge on its own!

We pulled in to Redstreak Campground just ahead of sunset, had some more charcuterie from the night before, and attended a ranger talk about the Burgess Shale, a vast mountaintop fossil bed centered in nearby Yoho National Park! Since the late 1800s, over 184 species have been uncovered from the sedimentary rocks on top of peaks like Mount Stephen and Mount Burgess, named for Alexander MacKinnon Burgess, Deputy Minister of the Interior. These Cambrian-era finds (500 million years old) contained spectacular hard-to-fossilize specimens like worms and algae along with trilobites and the unique Anomalocaris canadensis, an flat aquatic predator that moved by undulating and caught prey with two spiraling mouthparts! All of this was presented with diagrams, charts, and of course, costumes for audience participation!

With the show at its end, we returned to the RV and wound down for the night. Today was cloudy, but tomorrow promises to be downright rainy. Nevertheless, we’re booked for a river run! I’ve never been on a raft before, so rain or no rain, I’m excited to experience a rip-roaring ride down the Kootenay River!

Gonna scoot to the Koot!