🇨🇦 Canada · West / British Columbia and the Rockies
Yoho National Park is one of the least crowded treasures of the Canadian Rockies: it spreads across the western slope of the continental divide, in British Columbia, just over the border from Banff (Alberta). Its name comes from an exclamation of amazement in Cree, and it lives up to it: thundering waterfalls, emerald-green lakes, imposing peaks and one of the most important fossil sites in the world, the Burgess Shale.
Despite its relatively modest size and the shadow cast by its neighbors Banff and Jasper, Yoho packs in first-rate attractions: Emerald Lake, its green water ringed by mountains; Takakkaw Falls, one of the tallest waterfalls in Canada; the Natural Bridge over the Kicking Horse river; and the celebrated Burgess Shale fossils, a World Heritage Site, which preserve marine organisms from more than five hundred million years ago. The park is part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks group declared a World Heritage Site.
This guide covers Yoho with a practical eye: what to see and do among waterfalls, lakes and fossils, and how to organize a visit, often combined with Banff and Lake Louise, which are just next door. It is the ideal destination for anyone who wants the spectacle of the Rockies with somewhat less of the crowd, in a corner of pure nature crossed by the Trans-Canada Highway.
The Yoho region was the territory of Indigenous peoples of the Rockies and the interior plateau. Its modern history is tied to the railway: the Canadian Pacific Railway crossed the area at the end of the 19th century through the difficult Kicking Horse Pass, where the famous Spiral Tunnels were later built. The park was created in 1886, one of the oldest in Canada. In 1909 the Burgess Shale fossil beds were discovered, an exceptional window onto Cambrian marine life that revolutionized palaeontology. Today Yoho is part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks group, declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The province of the Canadian Pacific: land of the Haida and Coast Salish coastal peoples, of the Fraser gold rush and the railway, of temperate rainforests, Rocky Mountains and cities such as Vancouver and Victoria.
Read the history of British Columbia →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Cree had a single word for what you feel looking at these mountains: 'Yoho', an exclamation of amazement, something like 'how wonderful!'. It is hard to find a more honest name for a national park. On the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, on the British Columbia side, Yoho packs into barely 1,310 km² waterfalls of 250 meters, emerald-colored lakes, one of the boldest railway passes on the continent and the fossil site that rewrote the history of life on Earth. And yet it is still the quiet, less-visited sibling of the Rockies.
For thousands of years this area was the territory of Indigenous peoples of the Rockies and the interior plateau, who crossed it on their seasonal movements following the hunt and the seasons. The park's modern history, by contrast, is tightly bound to the transcontinental railway. At the end of the 19th century the Canadian Pacific Railway, in its drive to link Canada from coast to coast, had to cross the Rockies through the difficult Kicking Horse Pass. The line dropped down a grade so steep — the dreaded 'Big Hill' — that it was dangerous for trains.
It was in this context of opening up the territory that, in 1886, the reserve that would become Yoho National Park was created, one of the oldest in Canada, barely a year after the first one, Banff. The arrival of the railway not only made access possible: the Canadian Pacific itself promoted mountain tourism, building lodges and drawing travelers and climbers to these places that until then had been almost unreachable.
The descent of the 'Big Hill', in Kicking Horse Pass, was one of the Canadian Pacific Railway's biggest headaches. The grade was so severe that it caused accidents and forced extremely risky braking operations. To solve it, at the start of the 20th century one of the most ingenious pieces of railway engineering in North America was undertaken: the Spiral Tunnels.
The solution was to dig spiral-shaped tunnels inside the mountains themselves, so the track loops through the rock to gain or lose height more gradually, easing the grade. The result is odd enough that the very long trains can be seen crossing over themselves: the locomotive coming out of a tunnel while the last cars have not yet gone in.
The Spiral Tunnels, opened around 1909, became an attraction in their own right. Today there are viewpoints beside the Trans-Canada Highway where, with patience, you can watch a train work its way around the spiral, a sight that combines the grandeur of the Rockies with human ingenuity. They are a living testimony to the railway epic that opened this region to the rest of the country.
The discovery that gave Yoho worldwide scientific fame came in 1909, when the American palaeontologist Charles Walcott found, high in the park's mountains, a rock outcrop of extraordinary fossil richness: the Burgess Shale. What makes the site exceptional is that it preserves, in astonishing detail, not just the hard parts but also the soft tissue of marine animals from more than five hundred million years ago, in the Cambrian period.
These fossils offer a unique window onto the so-called 'Cambrian explosion', the geological moment when the major animal groups that would fill the seas appeared over a relatively short span. Strange creatures, often with no clear kinship to present-day forms, were preserved in this rock, transforming our understanding of the early history of life and making the Burgess Shale one of the most celebrated and most studied fossil sites on the planet.
Its scientific value was one of the reasons Yoho, along with other Rockies parks, was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco. To protect it, access to the main outcrops is strictly restricted and allowed only on official guided hikes, on which collecting fossils is prohibited. So the Burgess Shale remains both a nature destination and an open-air laboratory of evolution.
If the railway and the fossils gave Yoho its history, the water gave it its shape. Emerald Lake, the largest in the park, owes its incredible green color to 'rock flour': an extremely fine sediment dust the glaciers grind off the mountain and carry down to the lake, where it stays suspended and refracts the light in emerald tones. It was 'discovered' by European eyes in 1882 by Tom Wilson, the same guide who made Lake Louise known, while he was tracking lost horses. The Canadian Pacific was quick to build a lodge there for its passengers, and it still welcomes visitors on the shore today.
A little further north, Takakkaw Falls roars, with a drop of about 254 meters that puts it among the tallest waterfalls in Canada. It is fed by meltwater from the Daly Glacier, so its volume grows as the summer advances: in June and July it is a thundering torrent. Its name, also of Cree origin, means 'it is magnificent' — once again, the Indigenous peoples picked the exact word. The road that gets you there, the Yoho Valley Road, includes a set of switchbacks so tight that large buses have to back up and go again, and it only opens in the summer season.
And then there is Lake O'Hara, the alpine sanctuary many people consider the most beautiful corner of the Rockies: an amphitheatre of turquoise lakes, high meadows and glaciated peaks laced with a network of legendary trails. Precisely because it is fragile, access is limited to a bus reserved through a draw, and that restriction, far from putting travelers off, has preserved a silence that is almost extinct in the rest of the Rockies. All three — lake, waterfall and valley — are the patient work of ice and water, and they explain why Yoho, modest in size as it is, holds some of the most memorable landscapes in the country.
Through the 20th century, Yoho consolidated its double value: an exceptional mountain landscape and a first-rate scientific treasure. The protection of its nature — glaciers, lakes like Emerald, waterfalls like Takakkaw, alpine valleys like Lake O'Hara — was gradually refined, and fragile areas such as Lake O'Hara itself were given restricted access regimes (with quotas and controlled transport) to shield their alpine setting from tourist pressure.
In 1984 Yoho was inscribed by Unesco as a World Heritage Site, first for the Burgess Shale and later as part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks group (alongside Banff, Jasper, Kootenay and the provincial parks of Mount Robson, Mount Assiniboine and Hamber). That international recognition celebrates both the beauty of its glacial landscapes and its universal geological and palaeontological value.
Today Yoho is managed by Parks Canada, which balances conservation with responsible visiting. Even though it is crossed by the Trans-Canada Highway and by the rail line, it keeps corners of almost untouched nature and fewer visitors than its neighbor Banff, which makes it a destination valued by anyone after the Rockies with a bit more quiet. The village of Field, inside the park, is still a small mountain community serving travelers and scientists.
For the visitor, Yoho offers a unique combination: the alpine grandeur of the Rockies, the epic of the railway that opened the region, and the chance to look, at the Burgess Shale, into the very dawn of animal life on Earth. A park small in size but immense in meaning, whose Cree name — that exclamation of amazement — is still the best description of what it feels like to walk through it.