The breeze howling down from the icefield [Banff’s Columbia Icefield] cuts through every stitch of clothing I have on, so I stop in the lee of a truck-size boulder to pull on another sweater and chew on the view. It’s a primeval landscape, raw and unspoiled and faintly threatening. From where I sit, the hand of man is nowhere apparent.

But that, sadly, is an illusion not easily sustained. On a warmer afternoon we would have company, lots of it. Lower down on Parker Ridge the tundra has been trampled by so many hikers that in places the route resembles a boggy, 20-foot-wide [6-meter-wide] cattle trail.

Banff is Canada’s flagship national park, the most visible symbol of the dominion’s natural splendor. Its scenery is known and loved by people around the globe. But some say Banff is loved too much, that the park has grown too popular for its own good.

More than four million people visit Banff annually. Canada’s main transcontinental railway and transcontinental highway roll side by side down the length of Banff’s main valley. On the busiest weekends the road is clotted with cars, recreational vehicles, and tour buses, and a gauzy brown haze of exhaust fumes veils the celebrated vistas. Within the park lie 3 ski resorts and the town of Banff—home to 7,000 permanent residents. On a typical summer day the townies may see 25,000 tourists streaming through their streets.

Among the people who live and work in Banff, there is considerable disagreement over whether this crush of humanity bodes serious ill for the park’s future. Mike McIvor, a resident for 33 years and former grounds foreman at the Banff Centre, an internationally renowned arts institute, believes overdevelopment is fast destroying the place he loves. “The kind of experience that is supposed to be available in a national park has been completely perverted here. This should be a place where people learn to reconnect with the natural world, but that’s hard to do sitting in a traffic jam on Banff Avenue.”

Such talk rankles Ossie Treutler, a local businessman and town council member. “Environmentalists like McIvor love to talk about doom and gloom,” Treutler grouses, “but all you have to do is drive five miles [eight kilometers] out of town and you’re in the middle of miles and miles of nothing but nature. You get tired of looking at all these big bare mountains; what’s wrong with putting a restaurant or a chalet up there to make it nicer for the people who come here?”

One thing that’s wrong with it, according to Paul Paquet, is that the human presence in Banff is wreaking havoc on the area’s fragile makeup. “I’d say the park is in very, very poor condition compared with what it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago,” declares Paquet, a biologist who has studied wildlife throughout the Rocky Mountains. “There’s been a major decline in most of our large predators—black bears, grizzlies, wolverines, lynx, cougars. Such species are one of our best indicators of overall ecological health, and the way things are going, most of these animals will not survive here.”

Nonsense, insists Rick Kunelius, a former wildlife warden with the park service. “The large-mammal population is higher than it’s ever been,” Kunelius says. “Development has actually increased habitat for wild ungulates by creating more forage: the golf course, the recreation grounds, everybody’s yard.”

Paquet says that although there is a vast amount of undeveloped acreage remaining in the park, most of it lies at high altitude, in harsh alpine zones. Many species of wildlife can’t live in the rugged, inhospitable landscape of the high country, at least not year-round; the best habitat is the riparian bottomland, which also happens to be the preferred habitat for humans. The bucolic floor of Bow Valley is where people construct homes, build roads, put up shopping malls. The town of Banff and surrounding development already fill the valley wall to wall, acting like a noose that chokes off one of the most important wildlife corridors in the northern Rockies.

Excerpted from “Rocky Times for Banff” in the July 1995 issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC