Skijoring thrills fans but brings familiar crowd pressures to Banff
Traffic, parking and safety concerns follow busy festival kickoff
Large crowds packed Banff Avenue for skijoring this weekend, catching both organizers and town officials off guard.
According to the Town of Banff, nearly 24,000 vehicles entered the community on Saturday and almost 20,000 on Sunday.
That is about 24 per cent more vehicles than last year’s skijoring weekend.
Jason Darrah, who works for the Town of Banff, says the vehicle counts don’t fully reflect everyone who attended, as visitors were parking outside the town boundary and walking in.
Skijoring has deep roots in Banff, where it was part of winter carnivals in the early 1900s. It involves horses pulling skiers and snowboarders down a race course and doing jumps and tricks.
SnowDays organizer Kristina Macdonald says that history inspired organizers to bring the event back to the town.
For the past four years, a section of Banff Avenue, the town’s main tourist street, has been shut down and transformed into a snow-covered race track with jumps, while crowds line the sidewalks to watch.
Macdonald says this was the busiest Saturday morning she’s seen in four years, with people lining up at venues before they opened to get seats for the show. She says the crowds were larger than organizers were expecting.
The fact that skijoring only runs a few days a year, she says, and combines two Alberta favourites — cowboys and skiing — is part of what draws the large crowds.
“It's truly unique worldwide, and people have taken notice,” Macdonald said.
“We have folks here from all over the United States, Saskatchewan, across Canada. It’s gone viral on social media. And this is why the town is literally full.”
Professional skier Cole Carey, who has competed in Banff for the past four years, agrees the event has grown rapidly. He says the energy from the crowd is a big part of what makes it special.
“It’s blown up. Every year it’s bigger and better. It’s unreal,” he said.
In order to deal with more visitors, organizers shifted the race’s starting point slightly so that they could set up a large viewing zone with a big screen in the field at Banff Community High School.
More restaurants participated than last year as well, so that visitors could watch the show inside.
Even with these additions, the Town of Banff says the crowds this year were too large to be managed well.
The town recorded its highest-ever hourly entrance volume between noon and 1 p.m. Saturday, followed by a record number of vehicles exiting between 3 and 4 p.m., shortly after the event ended.
Officials say parking filled early, with the train station lot reaching capacity by mid-morning.
Darrah says 160 illegal parking tickets were issued and numerous vehicles were towed for blocking lanes, fire hydrants, driveways and bus stops.
Darrah says that while there were crowd-related issues, the event brought economic benefits to the town and helped draw visitors during the park's slower winter season.
The town will be reviewing the event ahead of next year’s show, he says, to determine what changes are needed to better manage the crowds.
SnowDays continues until Feb. 8. Upcoming events include film screenings, line dancing and ice carving competitions on Bear Street.
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