Kootenay National Park

Kootenay National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Kootenay is the least visited of the four contiguous national parks of the Canadian Rockies, on the British Columbia side of the continental divide, and it is in effect a single scenic road with a series of short walks leading off it: Highway 93 South, the Banff-Windermere Highway, which leaves the Trans-Canada at Castle Junction, halfway between Banff and Lake Louise, crosses the divide at Vermilion Pass and runs ninety-four kilometres south-west through the park to the village of Radium Hot Springs. The park gate is thus forty minutes from Banff or Lake Louise and about two hours from Calgary. It is a park for a car, and most people see it as a day's outing from Banff or as the scenic way to the Columbia valley and on to the interior of British Columbia; the tours sold from Calgary and Lake Louise are day trips by van that drive the highway with stops at the main sights and a soak at the hot springs, or private tours combining Kootenay with Banff and Yoho.

The Parks Canada entry pass, per person per day or the annual Discovery Pass, is the same one used for Banff, Jasper and Yoho; the hot pools charge a modest separate admission. The stops, from north to south, are the Continental Divide and the Fireweed loops, Marble Canyon, the Paint Pots, Numa Falls, the Kootenay Valley viewpoint, Olive Lake and Sinclair Canyon. The serious walking includes the Stanley Glacier trail, a fine half-day, the Floe Lake trail, and the Rockwall, a backpacking route of fifty-five kilometres and three to five days beneath a continuous limestone cliff, among the best in the Rockies, for which campsites must be reserved. Guided hikes to the Burgess Shale fossil beds near Stanley Glacier are run by Parks Canada and must be booked.

Visiting Kootenay National Park: what you will see

The park was established in 1920 by an agreement under which British Columbia gave the federal government a strip of land eight kilometres wide on either side of the route, in return for Ottawa's completing the first motor road across the central Rockies, which opened in 1923; it covers 1,406 square kilometres and has been part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site since 1984. It stretches from glaciers on the divide, at over 3,400 metres, to the dry, warm floor of the Rocky Mountain Trench at 918 metres, where, uniquely in the Canadian Rockies parks, prickly pear cactus grows. At Marble Canyon, Tokumm Creek has cut a slot some forty metres deep and only a few metres wide through pale dolomite, mistaken by early visitors for marble, crossed by seven footbridges on a walk of half an hour. The Paint Pots, a kilometre from the road, are three cold mineral springs so charged with iron that they have stained the earth around them orange, red and yellow;

the Ktunaxa, the people for whom the park is named, with the Stoney and the Blackfoot, gathered the ochre here, baked it and traded it as pigment for painting bodies, tipis and rock, and considered the place sacred, and in the early 1900s it was dug commercially for paint. At Sinclair Canyon the road squeezes through a gap between red cliffs, the Redwall Fault, above the Radium hot pools, the largest hot-spring pools in Canada, whose odourless water, at about 39 degrees, takes its name from a faint, harmless trace of radon; bighorn sheep wander the streets of the village. Forest fires have shaped the landscape the visitor sees: the Vermilion Pass burn of 1968 and the vast fires of 2003, which burned more than 17,000 hectares, have left standing silver snags above slopes of magenta fireweed and young lodgepole pine. Grizzly and black bears, wolves, moose, elk, mountain goats at the Mount Wardle mineral licks, and cougars live in the park, and in 2012 a new site of Burgess Shale fossils, 505 million years old and rivalling the original in Yoho, was found at Marble Canyon.

Kootenay National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park and the highway are open all year, though the road is subject to winter closures for avalanche control, and most trails are snow-free only from late June to September. July and August are the warmest and busiest months, with the fireweed in flower on the burns; September brings golden larches at Floe Lake and Stanley Glacier, cool air and fewer people;

winter offers ski touring, snowshoeing at Marble Canyon and the pleasure of the hot pools in falling snow, which are open daily throughout the year. Carry bear spray on all trails, and check for fire or bear closures. Allow a full day. Radium Hot Springs and the Columbia valley wetlands are at the southern end, Banff and Lake Louise forty minutes from the northern, and Yoho an hour.