Spirit Island is fifty metres of gravel and wind-bent spruce, fourteen kilometres down Maligne Lake in the Canadian Rockies, and there is no way to it but water. The boat takes ninety minutes to get you there. It threads between sheer rock walls with the surface dead still, and the colour deepens from milky green toward the glaciers at the far end. The island shows itself only at the last bend. The boat ties up at a wooden deck on the shore opposite: the tuft of spruce, the flat water, the peaks behind it. You get fifteen or twenty minutes there, and nobody steps onto the islet at all. The Stoney Nakoda hold it sacred: a place of healing, and in their telling the meeting place of two lovers from rival tribes. That is part of why the looking is done from across the water.
The first sailing of the day is the one with the mirror on it; the wind usually takes that away later. Mary Schäffer came in 1908, the first non-Indigenous traveller to reach the lake, following a map a Stoney Nakoda man, Samson Beaver, had drawn from memory. She called the valley the Hall of the Gods. At the north end a flat loop of 3.2 kilometres passes the log boathouse Curly Phillips built in 1928 and ends at a viewpoint where panels hold her photographs up against the same water. The lake's name is French for wicked, given to the river below it for a dangerous ford rather than to this water, which is famous for lying still. The other way down is your own boat: fourteen kilometres of open water with no trail and no way back except paddling. Three small campgrounds break the trip, and the one at Fisherman's Bay lies two kilometres short of the island: a night there puts you on the deck before any cruise boat has left the north end.