Banff National Park in Canada is simply heavenly, if you love the great outdoors and are a hiking or nature photography enthusiast. And, in a rarity for North America, you don’t even need a car to make the best of it!

Banff Travel Diary Part 1: Banff town and Tunnel Mountain

Banff is a picture perfect town nestled amongst towering snow-capped, pine-clad mountains, about 125 km to the west of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. It’s packed with tourists in the summer, but still a great base for hikes in the surrounding Banff National Park. It’s especially useful to base yourself here if you don’t have a car, as it has bus and shuttle services to some of the most scenic spots in the Park like Lake Louise, Lake Moraine and Sunshine Meadows. Even though I reached Banff jetlagged and tired after a 8 hour flight and a 2 hour bus ride, I’ll never forget my first walk into town when I captured this gorgeous shot of Cascade Mountain framed in the backdrop of the main high street, Banff Avenue, with its pretty flower boxes and rustic gabled wood-and-stone buildings.

Bow River meanders through the town and some of the best shots of its crystal clear waters are from the Bow Falls Trail. There are some outdoor installations by local artists along this trail, which follows the river to a short series of rapids called (no prizes for guessing) Bow Falls. 

Another great viewpoint in Banff town is Surprise Corner which looks upon the historic Banff Springs Hotel, a Châteauesque luxury hotel built by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company in 1888, which is around the time the town started to become a hotspot for the well-heeled Victorian traveller.

A popular and relatively easy day hike from the town goes up Tunnel Mountain. The trail is made up of a series of switchbacks through forests of pine and Douglas fir. It only takes an hour to the summit, where you can catch your breath and relax on a pair of quirky red chairs and take in the views of Banff town and Bow Valley.

There’s a number of small museums in town. Running out of time, I could only pick one and chose the Buffalo Nations museum. I was a bit disappointed the museum was almost empty when I went. The silence made the wax statues of First Nations people in full regalia including ceremonial headdresses made from eagle feathers slightly eerie. My favourite exhibit was a diorama of a “buffalo jump”- an ancient method by which Northern Plains Indians hunted buffalo by chasing them over a cliff’s edge.

And this evocative poem that hints at the tragic marginalisation of the First Nations people by white European settlers.

Right next to the museum is the Cascade of Time gardens with extremely photogenic pebbled pathways, cascading ponds and brightly coloured flower beds.

Banff Travel Diary Part 2: Lake Louise & Lake Moraine

The milky teal waters of Lake Louise will be very familiar to anyone who has ever followed a travel page on Instagram. “Roam”, which is the local public transit system, has a Route 8x bus that starts in downtown Banff and takes you to the lakeshore. If you want to also visit Lake Moraine, remember to book a super pass as this lets you take the free shuttle from Lake Louise to Lake Moraine. Ideally, try and book the super pass well in advance as they tend to sell out pretty quickly over the summer!

At Lake Louise, one of the most popular hiking trails is the one up to the Lake Agnes teahouse. Lake Agnes is a small lake nestled in a hanging valley, accessible by a roughly 2 mile trail that starts at the Louise lakeshore. Like a lot of trails in Banff, this one is also mostly winding its way through dense subalpine forest. About half way through in a small clearing is Mirror Lake with the sheer cliff face of the Big Beehive looming above.

Lake Agnes is a delightful place to stop for lunch. I will never get over how clear the waters of rivers and lakes in this part of the world are, with every pebble visible in the shallow bed near the shore. The lake’s waters spill over into a scenic waterfall that you pass by on the final leg of the hike. The teahouse has long queues in the summer but they move quickly. The teahouse is quite a remarkable enterprise, being run without any electricity, with the young staff members drawing water by the bucketful from the lake and hiking up and down daily to bring up fresh supplies and take down the rubbish and waste.

Once refreshed with a sandwich and a cup of tea, I made my way to the Little Beehive – a viewpoint about 900 meters away from the teahouse. The best views are actually a little way before you reach the end of this trail, and on a bright sunny day you get a clear view of all three lakes in the distance – the lighter teal waters of Louise and the deeper emerald waters of Mirror and Agnes – which is simply spectacular.

I couldn’t spend much time at Lake Moraine because of the shuttle bus timings. I quickly clambered up the Rockpile Trail that starts in the parking lot and leads to a viewpoint that gives you the literal “money shot”. This iconic view of the lake framed by ten rugged peaks was once on the Canadian twenty dollar bill. Apparently the unique turquoise colour of these glacier-fed lakes is caused by the reflection of sunlight off the particles of silt (or rock flour) present in the waters. If you have more time than I did, there’s also kayaking and boating facilities on the lake.

Banff Travel Diary Part 3: Sulphur Mountain

Another popular trail that starts a 15-minute bus ride from downtown Banff (Roam Route 1) is the one going up Sulphur Mountain. This is a bit longer and harder than the Lake Agnes teahouse trail, with a series of occasionally steep switchbacks through sun-dappled alpine forests that lead up to the summit. You can also just take a ski gondola up – a more expensive option but much easier on the knees! At the top is a viewing deck with great views over Banff town, Bow Valley and Lake Minnewanka; as well as a couple of restaurants and a coffee shop. The views get even better along a boardwalk to Sanson Peak where a stone weather observatory was built in 1903.

Banff Travel Diary Part 4: Johnston Canyon

This is apparently the most popular trail in Banff, but it was my least favourite. It’s nice enough, but a bit anti-climatic if you’ve already been to Lake Louise or Sulphur Mountain. You have to jostle past crowds on a narrow boardwalk clinging to the side of a rocky canyon with the waters of Johnston Creek rushing past. There are several smaller falls like Twin Falls, Stella Falls and Marguerite Falls along the way, but the two main ones are the Lower Falls and the Upper Falls. A lot of blogs recommend going early morning or late evening to avoid the crowds, but if you don’t have a car like me, you are a bit limited by the bus schedule (Roam Route 9). The buses are about 1.5 hours apart so you do also have to keep up a brisk pace to avoid missing the next bus as I don’t think there is much to do in the area besides the trail to the Falls.

Banff Travel Diary Part 5: Sunshine Meadows

The entire week I spent in Banff was the perfect escape – the pine scented air, the silent grandeur of the Canadian Rockies, their jagged peaks conveying a kind of ancient solidity and permanence that swept away the cobwebs of existential dread in my mind that seem inevitable in the year of our lord 2023… But if I HAD to pick a favourite place, it would be Sunshine Meadows.

In Greek mythology, it’s believed that the majority of people (who are neither very good nor particularly evil but just about average) spend their eternal afterlife in a place called the Asphodel Meadows. I would like to think this place is like Sunshine Meadows in Banff – an alpine meadowland dotted with wildflowers and crisscrossed with paths paved with crushed pinecones, Douglas fir trees decorated with a glistening latticework of morning dew, mirror-like lakes, endless ranges of emerald green, slate grey and Prussian blue mountains stretching out into the horizon. There is an enchanting stillness to the place with the only audible sounds the gentle tinkling of mountain streams, the rustling of squirrels in the undergrowth and cheerful birdsong.

When I went in late June, there were very few hikers as the trails had just opened for the summer season. In the winter, Sunshine Village is a popular ski resort and in the summer, they open up the hiking trails in the Meadows. If you don’t have a car, the easiest way to get here is to take the free shuttle from downtown Banff to Sunshine Village, then hop on a 20-minute ride on the gondola and finally a ski chairlift that deposits you near a boardwalk called the Standish Viewing Deck, which is at an elevation of 8000 feet.

If you can tear yourself away from the stunning views, there are two sets of trails that begin at the Viewing Deck. The first one, which is the more popular one, does a loop around three lakes – Rock Isle Lake, Grizzly Lake and Laryx Lake, before heading back to the gondola station via Rock Isle Road. The other is the Twin Cairns / Meadow Park trail. I was so besotted by the place, I walked both the trails. The former is much more scenic however, with Rock Isle Lake viewpoint being very popular with artists and photographers, and Simpson Viewpoint looking out on a stark grey, slightly charred looking landscape.

It is well worth checking the Sunshine Meadows website for the daily trail report before starting out as sometimes a particular trail can be close because of bad weather: https://www.banffsunshinemeadows.com/trail-report

Apparently grizzly bears have been known to wander these parts so keep a keen eye out for them. But don’t forget to look down as well at the clusters of wildflowers – blue forget-me-nots, pink paintbrushes, yellow alpine buttercups and glacier lilies and Western Anenomes that look like little fuzzy hairballs.