Banff

Banff owes its existence to a genuine accident of railway construction. Workers building Canada's transcontinental railway in the 1880s stumbled on natural hot springs on Sulphur Mountain, and the discovery led directly to Banff National Park's creation in 1885 — Canada's first national park, and one of the earliest in the world.

Lake Louise, a short drive from Banff townsite, has become the park's single most photographed feature, its vivid turquoise water a direct result of rock flour — extremely fine sediment ground by glaciers slowly moving over bedrock, which stays suspended in the glacial meltwater and scatters light into that specific color rather than any mineral content or artificial influence.

Wildlife viewing here is genuinely more accessible than in most national parks — elk and bighorn sheep commonly turn up right around the townsite itself, while black bears, grizzly bears, and moose require heading into more remote sections of the park, or simple luck. Park authorities maintain strict distance and food-storage rules given how much human-wildlife contact the park's popularity generates.

The Icefields Parkway, connecting Banff to Jasper National Park further north, is regularly ranked among the most scenic drives in the world, running alongside glaciers, waterfalls, and turquoise lakes for roughly 230 kilometers — a single road that turns transit between the two parks into its own destination.

Banff's popularity has made it one of the busiest national parks in Canada, and summer crowds at Lake Louise and Moraine Lake specifically can mean parking lots filling before sunrise — a real practical consideration that shuttle services and early starts are built around, rather than something visitors can simply plan around casually.