Changelog

When Council Meets shows the next Banff Town Council and Governance & Finance Committee sittings, with how to register as a delegation, write in, or watch the stream. Built from the Town's published 2026 calendar, so it knows the months the usual pattern breaks: council sits once only in July and once in August, and December's second sitting is the 15th rather than the 22nd. We corrected our own earlier note while building it — council meets on Tuesdays, not Mondays.

Is the Road Open? reads 511 Alberta's live event feed for Highway 1, the Bow Valley Parkway and the Icefields Parkway, from the east park gate up to Sunwapta Pass — closures, crashes and roadwork, refreshed every few minutes. It also carries the park rules a traffic feed never shows: the Bow Valley Parkway's 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. spring closure, the snow-tyre law on Highway 93N, and why Moraine Lake Road is deliberately left off the list. For the British Columbia side of Kicking Horse and Vermilion passes, it points you at DriveBC.

Banff shares its streets and trails with grizzly and black bears, and the town lives by a plan for it. The new guide gathers that plan in one place: how to carry and use bear spray, how far to stay back (100 m from bears, 30 m from elk), how to avoid a surprise on the trail, and what to do in an encounter — the difference between playing dead in a defensive one and fighting back in a rare predatory one. It also covers elk in calving and rut season, and it leads with the one number to call the moment you see a bear or aggressive wildlife: Banff Dispatch, 403-762-1470. It's a safety guide, not a live alert. The content is drawn from Parks Canada's mountain-parks bear safety pages and Bow Valley WildSmart. The season banner shows whether bears are active right now, and the guide is pinned to the town page for the summer.

Banff's town page now opens with a sketch of the Bow River curving past the townsite beneath Cascade Mountain's tiered rock face.

Environment Canada's weather warnings in force for the valley, in plain words — the winter-storm, extreme-cold and wildfire-smoke warnings the town actually gets — with the wind at the townsite now and the official channels for evacuation orders, highways and park closures. When nothing is in force, it says so.

A new page shows how the Bow is running through town right now — its live flow and level from the Water Survey of Canada gauge at Banff, where today sits against the past month, and the official Alberta flood-warning link. It describes the river; the flood warnings live with Alberta Rivers. The 2013 flood (about 466 m³/s at Banff) is the year it's measured against.

Four tools to start: how busy downtown will be on any day, the cheapest way to park (the free Train Station lot versus the downtown pay zone), today's air and wildfire-smoke reading, and straight answers on residency, park fees, the buses and wildlife.