By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, December 20, 1996; Page A43

Born during railroad days and nurtured as a place for the well-to-do to soak in a mineral bath, this mountain hamlet has succeeded in its mission of attracting travelers to the surrounding Banff National Park and the Canadian Rockies.

So successful, in fact, that the march of millions of people annually to the town's designer shops and well-appointed hotels is being cited as a cause of environmental decline in the park itself, the original and still perhaps shiniest jewel in Canada's impressive park system.

Growth around Banff and use of the entire park has become so intense, a task force found, that one of Canada's grandest assets is in danger of becoming a sort of scenic parody, overrun with shoppers, sightseers and hard-driving adventure seekers. Its recommendations were severe: Tear down three outlying hotels and move their business inside the city limits, close the airstrip, move local institutions including the school and hospital outside the park, limit the use of some hiking trails and generally shift the balance in Banff away from economics and back toward ecology.

"There is not one corner of this huge, protected area that has not felt the effects of human use," the panel of academics and consultants stated. "Unless we take immediate action, the qualities that make Banff a national park will be lost. We will have failed."

Canadian Heritage Minister Sheila Copps quickly adopted some of the panel's recommendations, such as a population cap of 10,000 and elimination of the local airstrip, while rejecting demolition of the three hotels and relocation of the school and hospital. Dozens of other ideas have been referred to a separate group developing a new park management plan.

The tension between human use and ecological preservation in U.S. public areas has been common. Sites including Yellowstone National Park have seen threats to the very qualities that make them special. In some cases, restrictions have been established to manage human access. At Denali National Park in Alaska, for example, visitors hoping to spot a grizzly bear must leave their car at the park perimeter and take a bus into the interior.

In Canada, a geographically vast and sparsely populated nation, that same sense of limits is setting in. Banff is only one example of a debate that is joined episodically throughout the nation, whether the issue is the logging of British Columbia's old-growth forests or the depletion of fisheries in the Atlantic.

Banff "is a real test case for how well we are going to deal with the fact that we live on a finite planet," said Wendy Francis, conservation director for the local chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. "We have a finite national park where the rules are pretty clear that it is supposed to be managed for nature and managed for wildlife. . . . It is not appropriate that you come and go bowling or go to a convention or shop at Ralph Lauren. You can have those experiences anywhere."

The park is one of Canada's premier attractions, a piece of land as bound to the national identity – perhaps even more so – as Yellowstone is to that of the United States. Banff's rugged peaks, glacial rivers and lush valleys inspired Canada's most significant artists, the Group of Seven; the emerald glint of Lake Louise is one of the country's iconographic images, an embodiment of Canada's natural grandeur.

The park's founding is tied to Canada's emergence as a nation. After Canadian Pacific Railroad workers hit a thermal spring, the company decided to build a hotel nearby, the federal government reserved about 10 square miles surrounding it, and general manager Cornelius Van Horne uttered words that would prove prophetic a century later: "If we can't export the scenery, we'll import the tourists."

At least 4 million people are estimated to visit the 4,000-square-mile park annually, and increasing numbers come from the United States, Europe and Asia. According to some forecasts, the figure will triple or more within 30 years. Even if growth is slower than that, the combination of lower international airfares to Canada, a usually favorable currency exchange rate for visitors and sophisticated marketing is likely to keep the traffic growing steadily.

The town was established inside what would become the park boundary with the modest aim of serving the hot springs clientele. But with European and Asian tourists sometimes dropping as much as $1,000 per person each day, Banff blossomed into a full-fledged year-round tourist mecca: 14,000 hotel beds and campsites; a Main Street stuffed with jewelry, mountain gear and Ralph Lauren clothes; and annual tourist receipts in the neighborhood of $300 million – nearly $40,000 for each of the town's 7,500 residents.

There is a McDonald's, a Hard Rock Cafe and a 27-hole golf course in the town, and three ski resorts are within an hour's drive. Visitors can mush on dog sleds in the winter and take bus rides onto glaciers in the summer; stick to the safe trails and lounge in a jacuzzi, or strike into the back country on a mountain bike.

The resulting development and traffic have altered the natural balance in profound ways. The town, for example, has so clogged the environmentally important Bow Valley that radio-collar studies show herds of elk clustered safely on the east side of town, while wolves salivate to the west, too timid to go around the village to reach the prey. When fences were erected to keep animals away from the busy Trans-Canada Highway, one cliff top became a killing ground for mountain sheep who lost their usual escape route from coyotes.

The growth represents a schism in the agenda of Canadian parks officials. Mandated to preserve the nation's scenery and wildlife, they also have wanted to promote it, so aggressively at times that in the 1960s they helped pitch the Banff park as a possible site for the Winter Olympics, according to the task force study.

Park director Charlie Zinkan said the types of environmental issues considered important today are based on subtleties of ecology and animal behavior not fully understood even a few years ago. The importance of valley-level corridors for animals to move through as they hunt, forage and mate, for example, was not part of town planning debates as recently as four years ago; now it is a central theme.

While some human activities in the park are uncontrollable – traffic on the Trans-Canada Highway is probably in excess of 5 million vehicles annually, and the road is being widened to four lanes from two – there are ways to lessen the impact. For example, the park is spending more than $3 million on two experimental animal overpasses which, combined with fencing along the side, are intended to give coyotes, bears, wolves and others free movement without the danger of becoming road kill.

How much further federal officials will go is uncertain. The study's conclusions and recommendations have rubbed some raw nerves, not least with the contention that the town should exist solely as a sort of service center for tourists and have only the residents and facilities needed for that purpose.

City officials and residents resent the idea and say they already are restricting growth for their own environmental and economic reasons. Some business owners, meanwhile, worry that proposed regulations will creep too deeply into their livelihood.

Banff Mayor Ted Hart said the population cap of 10,000 is approximately what the town had planned anyway. The number of hotel beds might increase by another few thousand, but only if existing space is used, he said; there is no more commercial land available within the town, and its borders are fixed by federal law, so it can't get any bigger.

Hart said most of the town's residents and business owners now see growth limits as a good thing. Although the land is still owned by the federal government, leaseholds for houses and stores can be bought and sold on the market just like deeds, Hart said, and Banff's exclusivity means higher prices as demand increases.

The study "made it look like all we want to do is build 12-story buildings," Hart said. "There has been a marked change in people's point of view about this, a growing recognition that they are in a national park and are going to have to accept constraints. . . . Ten years ago people were pretty hard-nosed: Expand or die."