🇨🇦 Canada · West / British Columbia and the Rockies
Kootenay National Park is one of the least known of the Canadian Rockies parks, but one of remarkable variety: it runs along the Banff-Windermere Parkway (Highway 93 South), in British Columbia, dropping from the high mountain passes to warmer, drier valleys near Radium Hot Springs. On a single drive you go from glaciers and snowy peaks to deep canyons, mountain meadows and mineral springs, a contrast that gives the park its particular character.
Its big attractions come one after another along the highway, which makes it an ideal park to drive with stops: Marble Canyon, with its rock walls and turquoise water; the Paint Pots, iron-rich ochre springs in orange tones traditionally used by Indigenous peoples; the mountain-pass lookouts; and, at the southern end, the famous Radium Hot Springs, perfect for unwinding after a day outdoors. Kootenay is part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks group, a World Heritage Site.
This guide covers Kootenay from a practical angle: what to see and do among canyons, hot springs and trails, and how to organize the visit, which is usually combined with Banff and the other Rockies parks. It's the destination for anyone who wants to find a quieter corner of the Rockies, with a soak in hot springs as the final reward.
For thousands of years the territory of Kootenay National Park was a corridor and a source of supplies for Indigenous peoples such as the Ktunaxa (Kootenay) and other peoples of the Rockies, who used the ochre springs of the Paint Pots to obtain pigments. The park was born of an unusual deal: British Columbia handed over land in exchange for the federal government building the Banff-Windermere Parkway, which would open the southern Rockies to the automobile. The park was created in 1920, when the road was completed. The Radium Hot Springs, at the southern end, were developed as a spa and remain its most popular attraction. Today Kootenay is part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks group, a World Heritage Site. The full story is on our history page.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the park existed, the lands of today's Kootenay were a corridor and a source of supplies for Indigenous peoples of the Rockies, among them the Ktunaxa (Kootenay), who give the region its name. The Kootenay valleys connected the plains to the east with the interior plateau to the west through the mountain passes, and were traveled in search of game, plants and resources.
One of the most significant places for these peoples was what are now the Paint Pots: iron-rich springs that stain the ground intense ochre and orange tones. For centuries, Indigenous communities came to gather this ochre, from which they made pigments for body paint, decorating objects and ceremonial practices. The ochre was also a valuable trade good. For all these reasons the site holds a deep cultural and spiritual value that endures to this day.
The region thus carries a double heritage: the natural one, with its canyons, hot springs and mountains, and the cultural one, tied to the age-old use Indigenous peoples made of these places. That bond is recognized today in the park's interpretation and in the respect asked of visitors at places like the Paint Pots.
The origin of Kootenay National Park as such is tied to an unusual agreement between the province of British Columbia and Canada's federal government. In the early 20th century there was a plan to build a road linking Banff, in Alberta, with the Columbia Valley and the Windermere area, in British Columbia, opening the southern Rockies to the emerging automobile tourism. But the project, expensive and technically difficult, stalled.
The solution came through a trade: British Columbia handed the federal government a strip of land on either side of the projected route, in exchange for Ottawa taking on the completion of the Banff-Windermere Parkway. Out of that agreement, in 1920, came Kootenay National Park, which protected the strip that had been ceded and was organized precisely around the new route.
The road, today Highway 93 South, was completed and became the backbone of the park. Unlike other parks conceived around a core, Kootenay is laid out as a long scenic corridor along which the attractions follow one another. This railway-and-road origin explains the character of the park, ideal for driving with stops at canyons, springs and lookouts.
At the southern end of the park, beside the entrance from the Columbia Valley, the Radium Hot Springs were an attraction from early on. Their mineral-rich geothermal springs were developed as a spa and gave the neighboring village its name. The pools, run today by Parks Canada, remain the park's most popular spot, open year-round in a frame of reddish canyons and mountains.
Kootenay's landscape has also been marked by fire. Like much of the mountain forest of western North America, the park has suffered major wildfires over its history, some of great extent, that have left visible marks on its slopes. Far from being only a catastrophe, fire is part of the natural dynamics of these ecosystems, and the regeneration of the forest after the burns is part of the park's living history.
International recognition came when Kootenay, together with Banff, Jasper, Yoho and several adjoining provincial parks, was included in the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks group, declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco. That status sealed the exceptional nature of the mountain landscape, the glaciers, the canyons and the geological phenomena of the region, of which Kootenay is a less famous but no less valuable piece.
Beneath the surface of Kootenay lies one of the most important scientific treasures on the planet. The rocks of the park and of neighboring Yoho and Banff contain outcrops of the Burgess Shale, a fossil bed from the Cambrian period, some 508 million years old, which preserves in exceptional detail the soft-bodied marine fauna of that era, when the diversity of animal life was exploding in the primitive oceans.
The original site was discovered in 1909 by the American paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott on nearby Mount Burgess, inside Yoho National Park. Its value was reassessed during the 20th century for its ability to show strange, extinct organisms that helped make sense of the so-called 'Cambrian explosion'. In 2012 the discovery of a new and extremely rich fossil site was announced in the Marble Canyon area, inside Kootenay National Park, which vastly expanded knowledge of this ancient fauna.
Today the whole set of Burgess Shale beds is protected and is part of the universal value that led to the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks being declared a World Heritage Site. In season, Parks Canada and the Burgess Shale Geoscience Foundation run guided hikes to some of these sites, a unique chance to look in on life from more than five hundred million years ago, high in the mountains.
The park's very name, Kootenay, is an anglicized version of that of the Ktunaxa, the Indigenous people who have lived in this region for more than 10,000 years. The Ktunaxa are a singular case: their language is a linguistic isolate, meaning it is not related to any other known language in the world, which underlines the antiquity and depth of their presence in the mountains and valleys of southeastern British Columbia, southwestern Alberta and areas of what is now the United States (Idaho, Montana, Washington).
For the Ktunaxa, this corner of the Rockies was not just any crossing point. Here were the Paint Pots, the red ochre springs they regarded as a sacred place. They gathered that iron-rich ochre, shaped it into cakes and fired it to obtain an intense pigment with which they painted important symbols on rock, on tipis, on clothing and on the body, in ceremonial contexts. The ochre of the Paint Pots was also one of their most prized trade goods: it traveled along extensive trading networks that crossed the mountains and the interior plateau, and was exchanged for products from distant peoples, such as the salt that came from the Great Salt Lake area, in Utah.
That's why, when you walk the flat trail that leads to the Paint Pots today, you're not visiting only a geological curiosity of orange mud, but a spiritual and economic site of an age-old people. The creation of the park, in 1920, was carried out —as in so many cases— over Indigenous territory without its ancestral owners being consulted, and for decades the official story of Kootenay revolved around the highway, the hot springs and the canyons. Today, by contrast, Parks Canada recognizes and works with the Ktunaxa Nation on the interpretation and care of the park, and the story of the sacred ochre is taking back the central place it always had. It's a reminder that Kootenay, before being a national park, was —and still is— Ktunaxa land.