Lake Louise, a turquoise lake under the hanging ice of the Victoria Glacier in the Canadian Rockies, was sold before it was visited. A railway company built the hotel on its shore in 1890, cut the trails, and put a log tea house at the end of each one. Even the composition is theirs. If you are down at the shore at first light, before any wind touches the surface, the peaks around Mount Victoria stand upside down on the water — the picture the railway posters used to sell the Rockies. The window closes with the first breeze. The colour is the glacier's doing, milled rock carried down in the meltwater, at its most electric in July and August when the melt runs hardest. The Stoney Nakoda had called it Horâ Juthin Îmne, the Lake of the Little Fishes, for the fish that stay small in cold like this.
Canoes go out from the boathouse over water straight off the ice, cold enough to numb your trailing hand. Once you are past the noise of the shore, the Victoria fills the view ahead. The two trails still end at those tea houses. Lake Agnes, in a hanging valley under the Big Beehive, has poured tea since 1905; the other traverses to the Plain of Six Glaciers, where six ice fields hang over the path. You cross ground the Victoria has given up: it has pulled back hundreds of metres in a century, and the bare rock between its front and the shore is all within living memory. In winter the lake sets hard and a rink is cleared in front of the château, floodlit after dark, with an ice castle carved beside it at midwinter. The château is not the first building here, or the second: the chalet of 1890 and its successor both burned. The railway's president had worked it out at the start — if the scenery could not be exported, the tourists would be imported instead.