UNESCO's listing describes marked drive lanes, a processing camp below, and a deep deposit of bison bones as evidence of a communal hunting method practiced on the North American plains for nearly 6,000 years: herds, chased along prepared lanes with knowledge of topography and bison behavior, were driven over the precipice and butchered below. The Blackfoot name is Estipah-skikikini-kots; the English name comes from a told story in which a young man watching from beneath the cliff was found dead after the jump, his head smashed by falling bison, as the site's own interpretation presents it. UNESCO treats the jump as the outstanding preserved example of its type within the broader family of plains buffalo jumps.

The interpretive centre, opened in 1987, was deliberately sunk into the landscape rather than perched above it, and its seven levels of exhibits interpret the hunt largely in Blackfoot terms; the gift shop, Napi's Creations, carries Blackfoot-made work. This is a place of mass animal death sustained over millennia, an engineering and ritual system of the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot Confederacy) world, and it reads very differently from inside that world than as a scenic stop. UNESCO's description attributes the method to the aboriginal peoples of the North American plains; the interpretive program centers the Blackfoot narrative.

Visiting

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. Adult $18 CAD, senior $14, youth 7-17 $11, family $45, children 0-6 free. Open year-round except Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Day, and Easter Sunday; winter hours run 10-5 with Monday closed. Allow at least two hours; the 1.2 km lower trail stays open after the centre closes, and the upper viewpoint locks at 4:45 pm. 18 km northwest of Fort Macleod on Highway 785.

Photo: Thomas Fuhrmann, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons ([source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Head-Smashed-In_Buffalo_Jump.jpg))

Associated traditions & practices

Native American Traditions