Spirit Island is barely fifty metres of gravel and a handful of wind-bent spruce, yet it is one of the most photographed places in the Canadian Rockies. A Kodak photographer's picture of it hung in New York's Grand Central Terminal in 1960, blown up as a backlit Colorama transparency eighteen feet tall and sixty wide. Millions saw it there before the image travelled the world. The islet lies fourteen kilometres down Maligne Lake, the largest natural lake in the Rockies. That lake is a glacier-fed trough twenty-two kilometres long and ninety-seven metres deep, its water the pale turquoise of rock flour ground fine by the ice upstream. It is not quite an island. A low gravel bar ties it to the shore, and only the spring melt covers the bar. Long before any map named it, the Stoney Nakoda knew this shore as a sacred place of healing.
There is no trail to Spirit Island; you reach it by a ninety-minute tour boat from the boathouse at the lake's north end, or by paddling most of a day down the water. The cruise glides between sheer walls of rock, the lake so still that peaks and sky lie doubled on its surface, until the boat pauses at a wooden platform on the shore facing the islet. No one steps onto Spirit Island itself — you have fifteen or twenty minutes to take in the scene the whole world knows, then the boat turns back. The wall behind the islet is Mount Charlton and Mount Unwin, both over 3,200 metres, rising straight out of the water on the west shore.