On Saturday, September 23, 2017, Laura and I hiked in the Lake Louise area. Lake Louise is a small hamlet with a big ski resort, a big campground, and many hotels and motels including the famous Lake Louise Chateau, seen here in the distance from the Plain of Six Glaciers trail:

We hiked all day. It was cloudy with sunny breaks, quite cool in the morning, but beautiful for hiking! There are a number of trails that start at Lake Louise. We first took the trail to Lake Agnes and the teahouse there. Lake Agnes is medium in size, quite green, with steep mountains on three sides. There are larches close to the lake and going up the mountainsides. We had hot chocolate at the teahouse.

Then we went around the lake, on the side with the larches in the picture above, and up the Big Beehive trail. This is a closeup of sun-sparkles on Lake Agnes:

There were numerous larches by the trail. There also was a bit of snow/ice left, that made some of the switchbacks slippery.

From there we hiked down the other side of Beehive, towards the Plain of Six Glaciers trail.  This trail goes up to another teahouse, from where you can hike another couple kms to view Victoria Glacier close up. It is a rather arid landscape, harsh, dry looking to my BC eyes, but spectacular:

We hiked as far up as we could, and were at a place where we could see Upper Victoria Glacier above us and Lower Victoria Glacier below us. At the top of a cleft where Upper Victoria winds down towards the lower part of the glacier is an alpine cabin, which looks sort of out of place among all that ice and those tall, pointy, rocky mountains:

Glaciers closeup are quite dirty.  They have dust and rocks and other debris on the surface, and don’t look white and pure like they do from a distance:

Still, the shapes and colours are beautiful!

We had to hurry back to Lake Louise to catch the last bus back down the mountain. We almost ran downhill, and made it! We ended up hiking more than 20 kms total, up and down, over rocks, ice, snow, and were quite worn out at the end of the day, but it was worth it.