Banff National Park - Alberta, Canada
N 51° 10.163 W 115° 35.446
11U E 598522 N 5669605
Canada's first National Park. The co-ordinates are for the hot springs that are considered the birth place of Canada's National Park system.
Waymark Code: WM4AGA
Location: Alberta, Canada
Date Posted: 07/29/2008
Views: 88
In the fall of 1883, three Canadian Pacific Railway construction workers stumbled across a cave containing hot springs on the eastern slopes of Alberta's Rocky Mountains. From that humble beginning was born Banff National Park, Canada's first national park and the world's third. This part of the Park is a Canadian National Historic site.
With conflicting claims over discovery of hot springs in Banff, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald decided to set aside a small reserve of 26 square kilometres (10 sq mi) around the hot springs at Cave and Basin as a public park in 1885. Under the Rocky Mountains Park Act, enacted on 23 June 1887, the park was expanded to 674 square kilometres (260 sq mi) and named Rocky Mountains Park.
In 1902, the park was expanded to cover 11,400 square kilometres (4,402 sq mi), encompassing areas around Lake Louise, and the Bow, Red Deer, Kananaskis, and Spray rivers. Bowing to pressure from grazing and logging interests, the size of the park was reduced in 1911 to 4,663 square kilometres (1,800 sq mi), eliminating many foothills areas from the park. Park boundaries changed several more times up until 1930, when the size of Banff was fixed at 6,697 square kilometres (2,586 sq mi), with the passage of the National Parks Act. The Act also renamed the park as Banff National Park, named for the Canadian Pacific Railway station, which in turn was named after the Banffshire region in Scotland. With the construction of a new east gate in 1933, Alberta transferred 0.84 square kilometres (207.5 acres) to the park. This, along with other minor changes in the park boundaries in 1949, set the area of the park at 6,641 square kilometres (2,564 sq mi)
Fees for the park can be found here
Information for this waymark came from the Parks Canada web page and the Wikipedia entry.
Visit Instructions:A log will require a recent photograph at the coordinates. Some of these locations will be placed for the scenery, so a gpsr will just ruin the picture.
If you don't have a digital camera post a descriptive log.