Canada put Moraine Lake on its twenty-dollar note: half a kilometre of turquoise water in the Alberta Rockies, ten snow-veined peaks crowded along the far shore. The picture was never a photograph. Trees blocked part of the shoreline, so the artists cut and taped several pictures into one clean view for the engraver. The colour has a plain cause. Glaciers above the lake grind rock into a powder fine enough to hang in the water and throw blue light back out; the turquoise is deepest in July and August, when the melt runs hardest. A wall of shattered stone holds the water in at the outlet — the Rockpile, which gave the lake its name — and the view on the note is from its top. The scramble up is short and steep. If you are up there before the sun clears the ridge, the highest peaks go copper-orange first, and the lake is still enough to hold them upside down. By the time the little summit fills with people, the reflection has gone. The peaks were first counted one to ten in the language of the Stoney Nakoda, whose valley this is, and the tenth keeps its Stoney name, Wenkchemna, which means ten.
The canoes go out from a dock below the Rockpile, red on water that comes off the ice and is glacier-cold in August. Once you are past the outcrop everyone photographs from, the Ten Peaks close into one wall and the shore noise drops away. A trail climbs from the far shore to Larch Valley, where for two weeks from mid-September the alpine larches, conifers that shed their needles, turn gold under the peaks. The walk you can have almost to yourself is the flat one: a kilometre and a half past boulder fields to the head of the lake, under Mount Fay and the ice beneath its summit. It ends on a boardwalk where the meltwater comes in over grey gravel, a long way outside the frame Canada printed.