Covering 6,641 square kilometers (2,564 square miles),Banff National Park lies on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains inAlberta, Canada. Banff was the first national park declared in Canada, andthe third national park in the world. The park’s origin lies in anaccidental discovery of a cave containing hot springs in 1883. The parkbegan as a 26-square-kilometer hot springs preserve.
The Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) instrument on NASA’sLandsat satellite captured this true-color image of Banff National Park onSeptember 14 and September 23, 2001. In this image, bodies of water appearroyal blue, snow-capped peaks appear white, and the land appears in varyingshades of brown. The park’s contours are outlined in pale beige.
Banff’s mountainous terrain includes glaciers, valleys, rivers, andmeadows. Parks like Banff that span a wide range of altitudes have a treeline, below which trees flourish and above whichfew trees can grow. Vegetation in the park ranges from conifer and aspentrees below the treeline to alpine shrubs and even bare rock above thetreeline. Besides fish in its waterways, Banff’s wild inhabitantsinclude black bears, grizzlies, wolves, moose, mountain caribou, hoary marmots, pikas, ground squirrels,eagles, and harlequinducks.
References & Resources
NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data provided courtesy of the University of Maryland’s Global Land Cover Facility.
