Calgary Trip: Lake Louise

In May when I went to Lake Louise it was still mostly frozen. So I went back to see Lake Louise in July. (May photos are half way down this posting)

	Road side pull over just past the entrance to the Bow Valley parkway. I skipped the parkway this time to get to Lake Louise quicker.
	A panaroma view at the second pull over

The first few flowers were in the garden at the Fairmont hotel at Lake Louise. The others are wild flowers growing in the area. I followed a walk around the edge of the lake. The lake is 70 meters deep and warms up to 10C (50F). The colour of the lake is from the rock flour (finely ground rock dust from the glacier) that comes into the lake with the glacier melt. As more melt comes into the lake, the colour turns from a blue to green. Later in the summer as the flour settles to the bottom of the lake, the colour turns back again. There wasn't time to go the whole way as I was due in Banff at 6:10 for a wilderness tour. The tour was interesting -- we didn't do well at seeing lots of animals as its been so hot in Alberta, many of the animals have gone further up the mountain looking for cooler air. But I learned some interesting things from the tour guide.

• If you want to know if a lake or river is glacier feed, the colour (especially this time of year) will tell you. Green is glacier, blue is not.
• There are only 70 grizzly bears and 50 black bears in the whole 7,000 sq km of the park so seeing black bears is really unusual.
• When grizzly bears hibernate they shiver the whole time they are asleep because that helps their muscles stay limber so they can get up and move as well after 6 months of hibernation as when they went to sleep.

The lake looks so still in the lake but this is where the water is flowing out	One of Callie's friends?
	This is from the tour. Its an osprey nesting on top of a pole. Taken from the bus window.