Moraine Lake owes its colour to powdered rock, not pigment. Meltwater from the surrounding icefields carries glacial flour — quartzite ground to particles finer than sand — and that suspension scatters the blue end of the spectrum back toward the surface. The lake sits at 1,884 metres beneath the Wenkchemna Peaks, the ten summits that give the Valley of the Ten Peaks its name. Walter Wilcox, the first recorded visitor, assumed the natural dam holding the water was a glacial moraine. Geologists later credited a rockslide off the Tower of Babel. The name stayed. Twelve kilometres north, Lake Louise lies under the Victoria Glacier at the head of a hanging valley, its far shore closed by ice that has retreated visibly within a single human lifetime. Both lakes fall inside Banff National Park, Canada's first national park and a component of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks UNESCO World Heritage Site. Access has narrowed as visitation has widened. Parks Canada bars private vehicles from Moraine Lake Road outright, which is why a Lake Louise and Moraine Lake Tour from Canmore now functions as infrastructure rather than indulgence. The setting has been staged for viewing for more than a century. The Château Lake Louise began as a single-storey log chalet raised by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1890 and grew into the stone-and-concrete hotel that anchors the eastern shore. Above it, the Lake Agnes trail climbs some 400 metres to a teahouse still provisioned by horseback. Moraine Lake keeps almost nothing by comparison: a small lodge, a canoe dock, and the quartzite rubble of the slide itself, a view once reproduced on the back of the Canadian twenty-dollar note. The two shorelines sit fourteen road kilometres apart, which is why Lake Louise and Moraine Lake Tour from Canmore tours treat them as one itinerary. Roughly two million people reach these shores each year, drawn by a narrow coincidence of conditions: the right rock, the right ice, and light striking water held motionless by surrounding walls. Larch Valley turns gold above the basin for a fortnight each autumn. Canmore, twenty minutes east of the park gate, sits at the mouth of the Bow Valley corridor, and guided Banff National Park lake tours and Canmore to Lake Louise day trips departing from it have absorbed traffic the road can no longer hold. Anyone weighing Lake Louise and Moraine Lake Tour from Canmore tickets is buying access to a route that private cars have lost.