Moraine Lake

The photograph has been reproduced so many times that the original location has become difficult to encounter fresh. Moraine Lake appeared on the Canadian twenty-dollar bill from 1969 to 1979. It is one of the most photographed lakes on Earth. Most people encounter it as an image before they encounter it as a place, and the image precedes the experience.

The colour is genuine. Moraine Lake sits at 1,885 metres in the Valley of Ten Peaks in Banff National Park, fed by glaciers. The turquoise is produced by rock flour — glacial sediment so fine it stays suspended in the water rather than settling — which refracts light at the specific wavelength that reads as blue-green. In June, when snowmelt first fills the lake, the water is often deep navy. By July it shifts toward turquoise. By late August, at its peak, the colour is the bright vivid cyan that appears in the famous photographs.

The ten peaks above the lake — the Wenkchemna Peaks, named for the Stoney First Nation number ten — rise in a row along the valley's south wall, reaching 3,505 metres at the highest. On calm mornings their reflections complete the lake's surface in near-perfect inversion. The rockpile on the western shore provides the famous elevated viewpoint and fills before sunrise in peak season with photographers who have hiked in before the shuttle road opens.

But the lake is larger than any single photograph suggests. Walking the lakeshore trail in the early morning, before most visitors arrive, the scale becomes apparent: the peaks are much closer than they look in wide-angle images, the lake is much wider than a single frame captures, and the colour changes in quality as clouds move across the sky above. There are hours when the water is too blue to look credible. You check whether you are still looking at water.