During our Canada trip, we spent a few days exploring the Lake Louise area of Banff National Park. This area is well known for its amazing turquoise colored lakes, which get their color from the glaciers. These glaciers grind the rocks below them, creating rock flour, which gets carried with glacier melt and is dumped into the lakes. The rock flour suspends in the water and reflects the sunlight creating the amazing torquoise color. #nowyouknow
We had a few things we wanted to see and hikes we wanted to do while in the Lake Louise area, but honestly, everything is kind of a pain to deal with there. A victim of its own success, Lake Louise is very crowded. It is virtually impossible to park at Lake Louise after 8am, after which time you have to drive 5km down the highway and park at a large park and ride lot, then get in a long, inefficiently slow line to pay (credit card only) to board a shuttle bus back to the lake. We tried this one afternoon, but the line was SO long to pay, and calculating the time it would take for the few machines running credit cards to process payments for everyone ahead of us, we gave up. The next two mornings, we were up at 5am.
Check out the line wrapping from the green tent on the left all the way behind the buses and to the lady in brown standing in front of us. This line was not moving fast.
Though we weren’t super lucky with the weather (lots of rain and clouds obscuring our views of the mountains), we managed to see the lakes we wanted and do a few hikes.
Lake Louise & the Plain of the Six Glaciers Hike
This was one of the toughest hikes we did in Canada. It was also one of our favorites. After our hike up Ben Lomond the week before, I now had a better idea of exactly what our hiking limit is (limit = a little less than Ben Lomond!) and I could gauge whether the hike would be difficult. In this case, the length of this hike was similar to Ben Lomond (about 9 miles round-trip), but with less elevation gain (420 meters, instead of a killer 900+ meters with Ben Lomond). So, going into it, I knew it would be long and somewhat tough, but definitely do-able.
Early morning clouds over Lake Louise
The morning of the hike, we woke up to overcast skies, but drove to the lake, and were parked by 6am. Unfortunately, it then started to rain, but since the forecast didn’t call for rain that morning (and it did call for rain at some point for nearly every day we were in Canada), we decided to go ahead with the hike.
The clouds were low over Lake Louise, so while the water color was pretty spectacular, I couldn’t help but feel like the views would be even more amazing if we could see the mountains ringing the lake.
I suspect there are mountains behind those clouds!
Nonetheless, we carried on around the lake, to the far end where the official trail for our hike started.
Our trail started with us walking in the shadows of an enormous tall wall of rock. It was easy to feel small and insignificant next to it.
As we followed the trail that left Lake Louise behind us, we started to get glimpses of mountains when the clouds would part for a moment and the sun would peek out.
The trail continued to slowly ascend, as we walked through a forested area, while to the left of us was gravel, likely ground up from a glacier that had receded, and mountains behind it.
Though most of the hike was a fairly gentle incline, the path eventually got steeper, and we followed switchbacks up the mountain until we finally reached a teahouse.
But….we weren’t done yet. Just beyond the teahouse was a viewpoint over a glacier. So we continued on. But when we arrived at the viewpoint (or what we think was the viewpoint), this was all we got:
Glacier, where are you??
We couldn’t see a single thing through the cloud that seemed to be sitting right on top of us. It was sort of a strange sensation, and when we started hearing thunder-like sounds coming from (what we thought was) the glacier, we decided to get out of there and head to the teahouse.
The teahouse was great in a way that restaurants after a long hike always are, and we enjoyed a quick snack before heading back down the mountain.
Waiting for our well deserved hiking snacks.
The hike back down was still scenic, as we got closer to Lake Louise, and the clouds even parted a little bit so we could get a glimpse of the glacier.
We got great views of Lake Louise (behind the boys) as we headed closer to it.
Once we got back to the lakeshore, we were able to see the mountains peeking out behind the lake.
We also got a glimpse of the horde of tourists that had arrived since we were last there at 6am. It was only about noon, but we all agreed we got our work done for the day (about 9 miles and 22k steps), and went back to hang out at the hostel we were staying in a few miles from Lake Louise.
