Has Banff National Park reached a tourism tipping point?

Peter Duck has lived in the town of Banff for more than four decades, a period during which he says there's been plenty of change.

"Well, when I came to Banff I kind of thought it was a small, quiet town, a very small community." 

The summers were still a busy time then, said Duck, who's a naturalist by training. But they were nowhere near today's standards.

Now, traffic is so bad that Duck says he won't go into downtown Banff unless he has to, and he can count more than one wetland that's been snuffed out by a parking lot. 

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Have we reached peak tourism in Banff?

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But these shifts aren't just isolated to the townsite, says Duck. 

After all, underpinning the town's identity is Banff National Park itself, and it's into this larger ecosystem that the town of Banff's increasing visitors — and the wider tourism industry built to support them — are overflowing into.

With the park's visitation rates jumping 30 per cent in the last decade, the question some conservationists, like Duck, are asking is whether that stream of visitors has led to a tourism tipping point. 

Some tall orders

From Duck's perspective, it's a question fraught with the inherent friction caused by Banff National Park's dual mandate: ensuring an enjoyable visitor experience, and that the park remain accessible to the public, while at the same time restoring and maintaining ecological integrity. 

As the president of Bow Valley Naturalists, a group advocating for ecological protection throughout the park, Duck is partial to the negative impacts he believes human activity and new infrastructure has had on the park and its ecosystems. 

For one thing, he says wildlife continue to struggle to move up and down the valley the way they might have 200 years ago. 

The Town of Banff may not see the same level of sprawl as other growing communities — a holding of the line Duck credits park managers with — but he says its boundaries have been pushed to the limits, altering water drainage systems and creating noise impacts. 

"Now of course, these days, protecting our communities from the impacts of fire … is a high priority in our society," says Duck. 

"And so we're making huge changes to the landscape around this townsite in order to manage what is under park policy, a natural process, natural fire in the landscape … That might look natural to the typical person driving by in a car, [but] from an ecosystem perspective, the natural processes are being halted and we're selecting for a particular ecosystem state that people want, not that nature would choose."

He sees the other side too. As a person who calls the Town of Banff home, he's not naive to his own position — residents are either directly involved in the Park's tourism, or are at an arm's length away from it. 

"It's an interesting contradiction, between living in a place and benefiting from what is a one horse town," says Duck. 

"We love that [visitors] support our social structure in the town and support our community, but we also have significant social and town planning issues to deal with as a result of it. So it's kind of a catch-22."

With the limited land base Banff National Park has devoted to tourism, Duck says what he's seeing more recently is just a plain old space issue. 

Using the analogy of a phone booth, he says that there are walls around available space for human activity, and as more and more people visit the Park, the glass is starting to bulge.

Changes underway

Duck thinks both the park mandates can coexist, but only if they are held on equal pedestals. 

"The concern is if 'more' is the economic model, then the ecosystem is going to suffer. And the economic model for the Town of Banff needs to be rejigged a little bit to prioritize, yes, the benefits of the economy, but also the benefits to the community and protecting the national park ecosystems." 

Parks Canada has begun to undertake some of that rejigging elsewhere in the park. In recent years, it has restricted private vehicles from popular destinations and started to offer shuttles instead. Its campsite reservation system was also remodeled, now requiring visitors to book spots far in advance. 

Natalie Fay, the external relations manager for Banff National Park, says park managers are aware of the increase in visitation to the park, and the impacts it's having on both visitor experience and wildlife. 

It's the reason why places that garner a lot of attention, like Lake Louise and Lake Minnewanka, are currently in the early stages of developing 'management plans' for visitors, documents that would act as road maps for future usage of the sites.

"[Lake Minnewanka] it's right off the highway, it's easy to get to, but it's not only an important area for human visitation, but it's also really important ecologically speaking, for the wildlife," says Fay.

Fay said that Lake Minnewanka's area plan is only in its public engagement phase, but that nothing is off the table.

Limiting traffic to certain busy sites has been a goal the Park has been working toward for years, says Fay. And even methods being employed at some parks in the U.S., like timed entries, are tactics Fay says the Park watches closely. 

"I don't want to give anyone any ideas because we're really open to everything," she said. 

As for Lake Louise's management plan, Dwight Bourden, acting visitor experience manager for Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay, said it's just wrapped up its public engagement phase, and that details about what measures the plan could entail are still being decided upon.

He did say, however, that it will aim to create "desirable conditions for the Lake Louise area based on the increasing visitation."

"[The plan] is really [about] how a place should look and feel, it's forward thinking for the next 5 to 10 years," says Bourden. 

A clear-cut answer?

While acknowledging recent pressures caused by increasing visitors, both Fay and Bourden say current levels of tourism to Banff National Park are sustainable. 

"You know, there are for sure long weekends in the summer, especially when it's a nice sunny day, it gets very busy, especially, you know, in and around the town site and those easily accessible areas," said Fay. 

"But as a park user myself, you know, I can say that oftentimes if I walk five minutes down a path, even in an easily accessible area, I often find myself alone or just with a few visitors." 

For Duck, the answer to that question isn't as black and white. 

The last in-depth scientific study looking at how human activity affects Banff National Park's ecosystem was undertaken in the 1990s, says Duck. 

He thinks another study like that needs to happen, before the question of whether or not tourism in the park is at a tipping point can be answered. 

"The outcome of that [1990s study] was something like 'we can't handle any more [people] unless we are absolutely sure that we are not affecting the ecosystem'," says Duck.

Coming up on four decades since then, Duck says that some of the more seemingly under-the-radar aspects of the Park's ecosystem need to be properly assessed; going beyond looking at apex species like bears, to things like insects, plant diversity, and water regimes.

Fay said Parks Canada does utilize yearly ecological monitoring data in all of its management decisions, and plans to do the same in the creation of the Lake Minnewanka area management plan.

"We need to have a very rigorous set of criteria in order to assess sustainability," says Duck.

"We need some kind of scientific baseline and then we [can] sit around the table and make some of those hard decisions."