Moraine Lake once filled the back of Canada's twenty-dollar bill — a row of ten sharp, snow-veined peaks mirrored in water the colour of raw turquoise, a scene printed on the 1969 and 1979 notes and still called the "twenty-dollar view." That colour is physics, not a trick of the eye: glaciers upstream grind bedrock into an ultra-fine powder called rock flour, which hangs suspended in the meltwater and scatters the blue end of the sunlight back at you. The effect runs strongest from late June to early September, when glacial runoff peaks and the lake reaches its most saturated tone. The water sits at 1,884 metres in the Valley of the Ten Peaks, inside the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Alberta's Banff backcountry.
Climb the short, steep path up the Rockpile — a jumble of shattered stone at the lake's outlet — and the whole banknote panorama opens beneath your feet. Come at dawn and the tips of the Ten Peaks catch fire in copper-orange while the water lies dead still and mirrors them; by midday the turquoise reaches its deepest note. Red canoes push off from the dock and glide across a surface that stays icy even in August, because it is fed straight off the ice. Trails climb on to Larch Valley, where the alpine larches turn brilliant gold for a few weeks each autumn. Today you cannot simply drive here: since 2023 the access road has been closed to private cars, and every visitor arrives by shuttle, bus, or bike.