Explore Banff

The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies on Bear Street in Banff opened in 1968, the idea of the Banff artists Peter and Catharine Whyte. Its art galleries and Heritage Gallery show the art and cultural history of the Canadian Rockies, it holds an archive and library, and its grounds include historic log homes and cabins.

The Banff Park Museum in downtown Banff, built in 1903 to a design by John Stocks, is the oldest building maintained by Parks Canada and an early example of rustic park architecture. Its timber-framed hall holds a natural history collection of about 5,000 specimens of the park's animals, birds, plants and minerals, much of it gathered by curator Norman Sanson.

The Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum stands beside the Bow River in Banff, in a museum Norman Luxton began building in the early 1950s. It presents the cultures of the First Nations of the Northern Plains and Canadian Rockies, among them the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Stoney Nakoda and the Tsuut'ina, with regalia, a decorated tipi, quillwork and hunting equipment.

Bow Falls is a wide, low waterfall on the Bow River in Banff, just above its junction with the Spray River and near the Banff Springs Hotel. Riverside paths from the town centre lead to viewpoints at the foot of the falls. The falls appeared in the 1953 film River of No Return with Marilyn Monroe.

The Cave and Basin National Historic Site in Banff preserves the warm mineral springs whose discovery by railway workers in 1883 led to the reserve of 1885 that became Banff National Park, the first in Canada. Visitors walk through a tunnel into the cave pool, see the open-air basin, and visit exhibits in the restored 1914 stone bathhouse.

Banff Upper Hot Springs is a public outdoor pool fed by hot springs on the slope of Sulphur Mountain, at 1,585 metres the highest hot springs in Canada. The water rises along the Sulphur Mountain Thrust Fault and is kept at about 38 °C, and bathers look across the valley to Mount Rundle. Europeans first learned of the springs in 1883.

The Banff Gondola carries visitors 698 metres up Sulphur Mountain, above the town of Banff, in an eight-minute ride. The summit building at 2,281 metres has an interpretive centre, a theatre, restaurants and a rooftop observation deck, and a boardwalk leads to Sanson's Peak and the Sulphur Mountain Cosmic Ray Station National Historic Site.

Mount Norquay is a mountain and ski area directly northwest of the town of Banff, inside Banff National Park. In winter its lifts serve ski runs, night skiing and a tube park; in summer a sightseeing chairlift climbs to the Cliffhouse Bistro high on the slope, and guided via ferrata routes cross the mountain's cliffs.