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While doing some research on good day hikes in the Banff area, I came across one called The Plain of Six Glaciers. It's located around Lake Louise, which is about 45km (that's right, one week in Canada, and I'm all metric) from Banff.

After parking at the lake site, you walk along a short path to the lake where you are greeted with this amazing first sight (couldn't do anything about being directly into the Sun).

What you see straight between the two mountains and behind the Lake is Victoria Glacier... where we would be in about 3 hours! The first part of this hike traditionally involved taking the flat path along the Northern shore of the lake before climbing up to the Plain of Six Glaciers. The owner of the bed and breakfast where we were staying mentioned to us that there is an alternate route one can take that involves climbing a little more steeply right in the beginning and the traversing along the mountain side, as opposed to the lake shore. She promised some terrific scenery from that vantage point, and she wasn't lying.

So we started off right in front of the Chateau and at this point we had made it pretty close to the end of the lake with a great view back. The color of the water in all of the lakes here is this amazing blue. The water that flows into them comes from the nearby glaciers which carry with them white sand-like rocks (from the erosion process) and this sand refracts the sunlight passing through to give it this color. If this had been a cloudless day, you would see that the color of the lake almost matches the color of the sky!

While this view was great, we couldn't hang around forever, as we were only halfway to the teahouse... that's right a teahouse. Lake Louise actually has a couple of teahouses. The Lake Agnes teahouse is a little more popular and is just slightly higher up from the path we took along the mountain side. There is also the Plain of Six Glaciers teahouse where we were headed.

Once you get to the teahouse, there is an extra 1.3km trail you can take to the very end. From there, you are looking up at Mt. Victoria, down at Victoria Glacier, and back across the entire lake and Chateau. After almost 3.5 hours (thanks to many stops for pictures), we finally reached the end.

Oddly enough the flat portion on the left side of the picture that just looks like loose rock, is actually Victoria Glacier. If you look closely, you will see that the rocks are covering a crevace filled layer of ice. It's was pretty cool to look back down the mountain and see where we started the trek from. Although, we only saw one glacier here, not 6!



This was an interesting little cabin, with two levels of outdoor seating. The people who work here have there own cabin behind the teahouse where they stay Mon through Fri. The go home Friday evening for the weekend. Just the week before we arrived there was a bear sighting here... we JUST missed it, which kind of sucks. Although it was a grizzly apparently, so maybe that was a good thing.

We reached Canmore that evening around 7pm, found some dinner and were in bed by 9... this turned out to be a theme of this vacation!