Moraine Lake was famous enough by 1969 to appear on the back of the Canadian twenty-dollar bill, where the Valley of the Ten Peaks stayed in circulation for a decade. Lake Louise carried an older name first: the Stoney Nakoda knew it as Horâ Juthin Îmne, the Lake of Little Fishes, long before a Canadian Pacific Railway packer named Tom Wilson was guided to its shore in 1882. The English name arrived two years later, honouring Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, fourth daughter of Queen Victoria and the namesake of the province itself. Demand for Lake Louise and Moraine Lake Tour Packages tours has since made these two basins the most photographed water in Alberta. Both basins owe their colour to rock flour. The Victoria Glacier and the Wenkchemna icefields grind bedrock into particles a few microns wide; suspended in meltwater, those grains scatter blue and green wavelengths back toward the surface. The shade shifts through the season — pale milk in early June, deep turquoise by mid-August. Moraine Lake sits at 1,884 metres, roughly 130 metres higher than Lake Louise, held behind a rubble dam that Walter Wilcox misread in 1899. He assumed a glacial moraine and named the lake for it. Later surveys credited rockfall from the Tower of Babel instead. The name stayed. Architecture followed the railway. Canadian Pacific opened a single-storey log chalet on the Lake Louise shoreline in 1890; fire took it in 1893 and again in 1924, and the concrete Château that replaced it now carries more than 500 rooms. Higher up the slope, the Lake Agnes Tea House has poured tea since 1905, its supplies still hauled in by hand and by helicopter. Moraine Lake stayed deliberately rougher: a lodge, a canoe dock, a rockslide to climb. Since 2023, Parks Canada has kept Moraine Lake Road closed to private vehicles, a decision that quietly redrew access to the whole valley. Guided Banff lakes tours and scheduled shuttle transfers absorbed the traffic that cars once carried, and these Canadian Rockies landmarks are now reached more deliberately than they were a decade ago. A Lake Louise and Moraine Lake Tour Packages tour typically threads both shorelines with Johnston Canyon or Emerald Lake in neighbouring Yoho National Park, running the Bow Valley Parkway between stops. Park entry itself is unchanged: 12.25 CAD per adult, daily, for anyone crossing the gate.