“We thought we would do our normal ‘scoop the calf kind of thing’ but as we got fairly close to the calf, a few metres away, it ran upstream a little bit on the ledge and then it jumped into the river,” Fyten said. Parks Canada’s resource conservation specialists called in the visitor safety team to help with a rope system to lower two people down the cliff to the calf. It is not uncommon for elk to swim across the river, but the calf would not yet be a strong enough swimmer for the fast-flowing water. “The river is quite high and swift, so it got swept down a little bit further where it ran up against the cliff face and struggled to get out and found itself on a little bit of a ledge – the last edge essentially before you would be swept over the falls.” “Probably what had happened is the cow and calf had attempted to swim across the river, and the cow made it and was able to climb out, but the calf got swept downstream a little bit,” said Fyten.
The four-and-half-hour ordeal on June 18, witnessed by a large crowd of bystanders, ended when the calf was tranquillized, hauled up a cliff face above the falls and eventually reunited with its mother near The Banff Centre.īlair Fyten, a human-wildlife coexistence specialist for Banff National Park, said the anxious cow elk was vocalizing high up on the bank of the Bow River as the calf was stranded below on a small ledge. BANFF – Parks Canada saved a baby elk stranded on a narrow ledge above the treacherous Bow Falls in a dramatic cliffside rescue.
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