Your tour bus grinds to a halt after a long, slow climb from the Trans-Canada highway; and you climb from down from the seat where you've spent the last few hours gawking at the spectacular scenery of the Canadian Rockies. You've reached the elegant outpost in the wilderness that's one of the Canadian Railway's jewels; the hotel called Chateau Lake Louise.

The entry hallway is cavernous, voices babbling in half a hundred languages echoing off the stone floor and walls. Yet even the chaos of a half-dozen tour groups all arriving simultaneously does not seem to faze the efficient teams behind the registration desks. Your patience is rewarded when you reach the front of the line, as you're assigned a lake-side room for your stay. This may be one of the luckiest scores of your tourist career! With that view of Lake Louise out your room window, you may not ever turn on your television, even to catch the latest from CNN!

To understand the setting of Chateau Lake Louise, you need to remember a bit of the alpine glacial geology you learned in your introductory geology class. You slept through it? Well, here's a refresher course:

An alpine glacier is a river of ice slowly creeping down the stream valley it's continually reshaping into a characteristic U shape: broad, flat valley floor and near-vertical walls. Where a tributary glacier enters the main valley, the floor of the smaller valley often lies hundreds or thousands of feet above the main valley floor. Such "hanging valleys" are often the site of spectacular waterfalls (see any review of Glacier National Park or Rocky Mountain National Park).

A glacier's cradle, if you will, is called a "cirque." These bowl-shaped basins are gradually deepened as the frigid ice of the glacier plucks solid rock from the floor of the cirque. As a result this basin is almost always deeper than the valley just downstream. In warmer times (like now) the glaciers recede far uphill, leaving their cirques abandoned, filled with water. The resulting lake is known as a "tarn." Quite frequently, a string of lakes will form in the low spots along a glacial valley; the lakes' resemblance to a string of rosary beads has given them the name "paternoster lakes."

Chateau Lake Louise sits at the lip of a cirque filled with a brillant turquoise lake. The color of the lake comes from the finely ground limestone and sandstone still being dumped into the lake at its upstream end. This finely ground rock is called "rock flour." It's also responsible for the brilliant blue-green of the waters in Banff and Jasper national parks.

From a lake-side window of the Chateau, the water is luminous; early-morning fog rises silver and gold from the reeds along its edges as you take the obligatory pre-breakfast stroll on the trails that circumnavigate the brilliant oval of icy water (about 2-1/2 miles in circumference, if I remember aright). You can also climb along the streams at the upper end of the lake to reach the remnants of the glaciers that formed this valley 15,000 years ago, hiking through limestone strata more than 500 million years old.

Meanwhile, back at the Chateau...

The hotel boasts fitness facilities, the requisite business center for those who don't seem to know how to take a vacation, and a slew of restaurants. The numerous restaurants, which range from a raucous pizza joint/saloon combination to tuxedo-clad witers and white linen napkins, are a necessity since -- especially if you came in a tour -- you're trapped in paradise. The nearest offsite restaurants are down the hill at the railway station, and it's a long hike. Sure, you can catch a cab, but why bother? Any food you might want can be had with superb service right in the Chateau. Oh, and they'll be happy to pack a bag lunch for your day-hike up the bergschrund (the near-vertical wall at the far end of the cirque).

More about your room: it's cozy, which is real-estate lingo for "small." Opening the entertainment center to see the television (should you actually want to) can effectively cut the room in half. Older rooms (one wing dates to the early 20th century; the second was added in the late 1980s) can be somewhat idiosyncratic, though they've been refurbishing since I was last there. And, if you don't get a lake-side view; you're likely to end up looking our onto the stables or the bus barn. You might also get lucky enough to have a clear view of Lake Louise ski area on the opposite side of the Fraser river valley.

No matter what the view out your room's window; no matter what you eat; no matter how long you stay; Lake Louise is one of the most beautiful sights in North America. Don't miss it!

Recommended: Yes