Banff in winter is more than skiing: snowshoeing, sauna rituals and sleigh rides

Banff National Park gets filed under "ski trip," but a week in the Alberta Rockies this winter proves the place works just as well for people who never touch a chairlift. Between brand-new Nordic spas, guided snowshoeing and horse-drawn sleigh rides around a frozen Lake Louise, the non-skiing options have quietly caught up to the slopes.

Condé Nast Traveler's Jen Murphy went in early January, straight after one of the snowiest Decembers on record, and based herself at the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise, the century-old castle-style hotel that overlooks the glacier-fed lake. The resort has seven snowshoe trails, and with a 61-inch base plus another foot of fresh powder, guests could leave the groomed paths behind and go "off-roading" up the shoulder of Fairview Mountain.

The new draw: Basin Glacial Waters

The hotel's biggest recent addition is Basin Glacial Waters, a guests-only thermal bathhouse designed by Italian architect Matteo Thun. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the lake and peaks from the hot-stone room, a silent salt chamber and an indoor-outdoor vitality pool. The headline act is the Aufguss sauna ritual, a choreographed performance popular in Europe that has only just landed in North American spas. A sauna master waved a towel over the stones and smashed snowballs scented with aromatic oils to fill the 185-degree room with the fragrance of Siberian fir, all set to a Luis Fonsi soundtrack.

Not everything skews luxurious. For a cross-country-skiing novice, a guide named Clare McCann of Bikescape led a halting loop along the four-mile Bow River Loop, repeating "shimmy, shimmy, shimmy, glide" through a trail so quiet the loudest sound was a ski pass flapping on a jacket. McCann has also partnered with Heather Black, a guide from the Kainaiwa Nation, who weaves Indigenous storytelling and a smudge ceremony into the Nordic experience.

Down in the town of Banff itself, the food and sleep scene has grown up too. Locavore restaurants Good Folk and Farm and Fire, plus the 67-room boutique Kenrick Hotel with its thermal spa and standout Italian restaurant The Fat Ox, have enlivened a downtown where even the Starbucks is built from local stone and wood. The horse-drawn sleigh ride is still the classic entry point to it all: two shaggy draft horses pulling a vintage sleigh past life-size snowmen on the frozen lake, with an ice-sculpted castle glinting in the distance.

The takeaway for non-skiers is that Banff no longer requires one. As Murphy put it, the trip "ended up being more about appreciating nature than conquering it on the slopes."