Lake Louise is a turquoise lake in Banff National Park, in the Canadian Rockies of Alberta, lying under the hanging ice of the Victoria Glacier with a château hotel on its eastern shore, and it is the most photographed lake in Canada. The colour is glacial rock flour, fine powder carried in by meltwater that scatters blue light, and the lake glows its most electric turquoise in July and August when the melt runs hardest; at dawn, before the wind, the water lies dead still and the peaks around Mount Victoria stand upside down on it with the glacier between them. Red canoes go out from the boathouse toward the ice, over water fed straight off the glacier and cold enough to numb a trailing hand, and the far end of the lake, under the cliffs, is where the crowd on the shore is not.
Two trails climb from the shore, each ending at a log tea house the railway built a century ago and still supplied by horse and helicopter: one to Lake Agnes, a small lake in a hanging valley above, and one to the Plain of Six Glaciers, where the path runs out onto the moraine below the ice with the sound of the glacier cracking and the Victoria's face above; the glacier once reached far closer to the water, and the walk crosses the ground it has left. In the last two weeks of September the alpine larches above Larch Valley and Sentinel Pass, reached from nearby Moraine Lake, turn gold before dropping their needles. In winter the lake sets hard, crews clear a skating rink on the ice in front of the château, floodlit after dark, and an ice castle is built on it; the ski hill across the valley is one of the largest in Canada. The château is not the original: the first burned twice, and the present one dates from the 1920s. Lake Louise is a lake with a hotel that has watched it for a century, and the ice at the far end is still moving.