Moraine Lake appeared on the back of the Canadian twenty-dollar bill from 1969 to 1979, a decade of national currency printed from a viewpoint most Canadians had never stood on. The lake sits at roughly 1,884 metres in the Valley of the Ten Peaks, fourteen kilometres by road from its more famous neighbour. Lake Louise rests lower, at 1,731 metres, beneath the Victoria Glacier. Both lie inside Banff National Park, established in 1885 as Rocky Mountains Park, Canada's first. Most Lake Louise and Moraine Lake Tour from Calgary tours trace the same 183 kilometres of Trans-Canada Highway 1 that Canadian Pacific Railway surveyors opened in the 1880s. The water owes its colour to rock flour: glacial silt ground fine enough to stay suspended, scattering blue and green light back through the meltwater. Tom Wilson, a CPR packer, reached Lake Louise in 1882, led there by Stoney Nakoda guides who knew it as Ho-run-num-nay, the Lake of the Little Fishes. He called it Emerald Lake. Two years later it was renamed for Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, daughter of Queen Victoria. Walter Wilcox named Moraine Lake in 1899, believing the rockpile at its outlet to be glacial moraine; geologists now read most of that debris as rockslide material shed from the Tower of Babel. Architecture followed quickly. A single-storey log chalet went up above Lake Louise in 1890, burned, and was replaced. Walter Painter's concrete-and-steel wing of 1913 and the Barott wing of 1925 gave the Chateau the mass it still carries, more than 500 rooms facing a lake 2.4 kilometres long. Moraine Lake never received a hotel of that scale, only a modest lodge and a road that has been closed to private vehicles since 2023. That single decision reshaped access. Shuttles, bicycles and licensed operators now carry every visitor in, which is why Lake Louise and Moraine Lake Tour from Calgary tickets function as the practical key to the Valley of the Ten Peaks. Both basins fall within the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1984 for its glaciers, fossil beds and limestone ranges. Entry to the park itself carries a daily adult conservation fee of 12.25 CAD. The wider Canadian Rockies lakes circuit — Emerald Lake, Johnston Canyon, the Bow Valley Parkway — grew outward from these two shorelines, and Calgary day trips to Banff still orbit them. A Lake Louise and Moraine Lake Tour from Calgary is, in that sense, a route older than the park's asphalt: the same corridor, walked, ridden and now driven, toward two bodies of glacial water that the mountains keep cold through August.