Banff National Park Trivia
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42 free Banff National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Banff National Park trivia quiz covers Canada's first national park from the railway workers who stumbled on the hot springs in 1883 to today's three million visitors a year. It asks how the park got its Scottish name, which prime minister set aside the first 26 square kilometres, why the Canadian Pacific Railway built the Banff Springs Hotel and Chateau Lake Louise, who built the early roads (First World War internees and Depression relief crews), and how three Winter Olympic bids all failed. It also covers the landscape and wildlife: the Bow River, Lake Louise's rock-flour turquoise, the 'Twenty Dollar View' at Moraine Lake, the Icefields Parkway and Bow Summit, the Columbia Icefield and its three-ocean apex, retreating glaciers, grizzlies, elk imported from Yellowstone, the reintroduced bison, the lost caribou, wildlife overpasses and the endangered Banff Springs snail. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on the park, its lakes and hotels, and each explanation adds one further fact. Good for Canadian geography classes, road-trip planning and pub quizzes.
30 of 42 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Canadian province is Banff National Park?
Alberta
Alberta is younger than the park: when the first reserve was set aside here the land was still part of the North-West Territories, and the province was only created in 1905.
Q 02Banff is Canada's oldest national park; which American one is the world's oldest?
Yellowstone
Yellowstone opened in 1872. Banff followed in 1885, when a fight over private claims pushed Ottawa to reserve 26 sq km for the public, and it became a full national park two years later.
Q 03What natural feature, found by railway workers in 1883, led to the creation of Banff National Park?
Thermal springs
Thermal springs on Sulphur Mountain, reached through a cave by railway workers in 1883, prompted the reserve; competing private claims to the springs pushed Ottawa to keep them in public hands.
Q 04Which prime minister's government set aside the 1885 reserve that grew into Banff National Park?
John A. Macdonald
John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister, had his government reserve the disputed site to block private claims; those 26 sq km were the seed of Canada's national park system.
Q 05Under what name was Banff known officially from 1887 until 1930?
Rocky Mountains Park
Rocky Mountains Park was the name set by the 1887 act that made the small reserve Canada's first national park; the National Parks Act of 1930 swapped it for Banff, the name its railway stop and town had carried for decades.
Q 06The name Banff was borrowed from a town and county in which country?
Scotland
Scotland supplied the name: a Scottish-born railway director named the new stop in the Rockies after Banff in his homeland, and the town and the park inherited it.
Q 07Which company built the Banff Springs Hotel and Chateau Lake Louise to attract tourists?
Canadian Pacific Railway
The Canadian Pacific Railway built grand hotels along its line to give wealthy travellers a reason to ride it; the Banff Springs opened in 1888 and became known as the Castle in the Rockies.
Q 08What flows through the town of Banff, tumbling over falls on its outskirts?
Bow River
The Bow River drops over Bow Falls on the edge of town, then runs east across the prairies, turning turbines and watering farms before its water finally reaches Hudson Bay.
Q 09Which city, about 130 km east on the Trans-Canada Highway, is the nearest big city to Banff?
Calgary
Calgary is the usual gateway, about 130 km east on the Trans-Canada Highway; early tourists arrived by train, and cars were barred from the park's roads until about 1910.
Q 10Which national park borders Banff to the north, linked to it by the Icefields Parkway?
Jasper
Jasper takes over where Banff ends, at Sunwapta Pass on the Icefields Parkway, and it is much the larger of the two, covering about 11,000 sq km of the Rockies.
Q 11Which pass carries the Trans-Canada Highway over the Continental Divide out of Banff?
Kicking Horse Pass
Kicking Horse Pass was named in 1858, when James Hector, geologist of the Palliser Expedition, was by his own account kicked in the chest by his horse and knocked senseless; the first transcontinental railway later took the same gap.
Q 12After whom is Lake Louise named?
A daughter of Queen Victoria
A daughter of Queen Victoria, Princess Louise, was married to Canada's governor general; railway workman Tom Wilson had named it Emerald Lake in 1882, and it was renamed in her honour two years later.
Q 13What gives Lake Louise its turquoise colour?
Q 21Which group built much of Banff's early road infrastructure during the First World War?
Wartime internees
Wartime internees, many of them Ukrainian immigrants held as enemy aliens, were used as forced labour: from a camp at Castle Mountain in 1915, their main job was to push the road from Banff on toward Lake Louise.
Q 22What do scuba divers visit on the bottom of Banff's Lake Minnewanka?
A flooded resort village
A flooded resort village, Minnewanka Landing, lies under the lake: a dam built in 1912 partly drowned it and a bigger one in 1941 finished the job, so divers now swim among its house foundations.
Q 23Which ski resort in Banff National Park was developed by the Brewster family in the 1930s?
Rock flour from glacial meltwater
Rock flour from glacial meltwater does it: the glaciers above the lake grind bedrock into a silt so fine that it hangs in the water instead of sinking, and it scatters blue-green light.
Q 14Which body of water in the Valley of the Ten Peaks was on the Canadian $20 bill from 1969?
Moraine Lake
Moraine Lake, in the Valley of the Ten Peaks, appeared on the back of the 1969 Scenes of Canada $20 note, and the viewpoint from its rockpile became known as the Twenty Dollar View.
Q 15Hikers who walk 3.5 km uphill from Lake Louise reach a lakeside cabin that has served what since 1905?
Tea
Tea has been poured beside Lake Agnes since 1905, at a refuge for hikers first built in 1901; it still has no electricity, so everything on the menu is made by hand.
Q 16Which icefield, the largest uninterrupted glacial mass in the Rockies, straddles Banff's northern border?
Columbia
The Columbia Icefield lies across the Continental Divide, so its meltwater leaves three ways: to the Pacific by the Columbia, to the Arctic by the Athabasca and to Hudson Bay by the North Saskatchewan.
Q 17Which royal couple stayed at Banff's backcountry Skoki Lodge during a 2011 tour of Canada?
William and Catherine
William and Catherine, married that spring, stayed at Skoki on their first tour together; the 1930s log ski lodge lies at the end of an 11 km trail from Lake Louise that guests hike in summer and ski in winter.
Q 18Which long-studied Banff glacier has lost about 70% of its mass since measurements began?
Peyto
Peyto Glacier has one of the longest measurement records of any glacier, and federal scientists say it has lost about 70 per cent of its mass; the prairie rivers it feeds are losing that water.
Q 19Which pyramid-shaped peak on the edge of Banff National Park is nicknamed the Matterhorn of the Rockies?
Mount Assiniboine
Mount Assiniboine, 3,618 m, stands on the Continental Divide with one flank in Banff; several attempts failed before James Outram and two Swiss guides reached the top in 1901.
Q 20Which wedge-shaped mountain beside the Banff townsite is a textbook example of a 'dip slope' peak?
Mount Rundle
Mount Rundle's rock layers tilt steeply to the southwest, which gives it one long smooth back and a wall of cliffs on the other side; it is named for Robert Rundle, a missionary who visited in the 1840s.
Sunshine Village
Sunshine Village grew out of a railway company log cabin high in the alpine meadows, which the Brewsters took over in the mid-1930s to put up paying ski guests.
Q 24Which city beat Banff to host the 1972 Winter Olympics?
Sapporo
Sapporo won the 1966 vote in Rome by 32 to 16; Banff's bid had been fought at home by conservation groups, who feared large-scale building inside a national park.
Q 25Castle Mountain bore the name of which American general from 1946 until 1979?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower was given the honour in 1946, fresh from commanding the Allied armies in Europe; after protests the old name came back in 1979, and his name was left on a single tower of the mountain.
Q 26Which international designation did Banff and its neighbouring parks receive in 1984?
World Heritage Site
World Heritage Site status came from UNESCO in 1984 for four adjoining national parks, listed together for their peaks, glaciers and canyons and for the half-billion-year-old fossils of the Burgess Shale.
Q 27Roughly how many visits does Banff National Park record in a typical year?
About 4 million
About 4 million visits a year make Banff the busiest national park in Canada; the crush of cars grew so heavy that in 2023 Parks Canada closed the road to one famous lake to personal vehicles.
Q 28What must most people have before they may live in the town of Banff?
A job in the park
A job in the park is the usual test: a 'need to reside' rule keeps housing for people who work or run a business there, so a home in Banff can't be bought simply as a getaway.
Q 29How does Parks Canada tell Banff hikers to travel through bear country?
Loudly, in a tight group
Loudly, in a tight group: hikers are told to call out, clap or sing so that bears hear them coming, to stay together and to keep bear spray within easy reach.
Q 30Which animal, often seen grazing in the town of Banff, can attack without warning during its autumn rut?
Elk
Elk bulls turn belligerent in the autumn rut and cows defend their calves in spring, so visitors are told to stay at least 30 metres away, about three bus lengths, even on a town lawn.