Banff NP - Lake Moraine and Lake Louise

As we found out on the arrival day in Lake Louise, you can no longer drive to Lake Moraine with your own car, as the access is closed at the latest at 7 a.m. due to a full parking lot. A shuttle service, which had to be reserved in advance, had to be booked online. The booking cost us some nerves, as the system was very complicated and felt like it required 100 steps, and also the preferred time slots were already fully booked. Well, in the end, we had to accept it - what else could we do - and used the (un)desired shuttle transport. At least we managed to catch the next bus after our arrival at the P&R parking lot and checking in, even before the booked time...

First, we had ourselves driven to Lake Moraine. It is still in the shade, so we started with another hike. This led us to Consolation Lake, a pretty little lake in an alpine environment. Back again, we climbed up to the viewpoint of Lake Moraine - just to find out that the lake was still mostly in the shade (even though it already offered such a magnificent view) - and we were already glad that we didn't get an earlier shuttle ... Then we took the lakeside hike, which offered many beautiful views of the lake, and then (equipped with a quickly purchased cappuccino) climbed up to the viewpoint again - now the lake was completely in the sun and looked absolutely amazing!

After tearing ourselves away from the sight of this absolute natural beauty, we took the next shuttle bus to Lake Louise. After taking some warm-up photos, we immediately started the next hike: first to Lake Agnes (always uphill), from there to a viewpoint overlooking Lake Louise (Big Beehive, still uphill only) and then back to the starting point via the "Plain of 6 Glaciers". Since the hike was about 14 km long due to our various extensions, we reached the last shuttle bus back to our car - quite exhausted (after the hikes at Lake Morraine we had a total of 23.8 km of hiking in high mountain terrain with 605 meters of altitude in our legs) ...