We awoke fairly early this morning and headed down the hall to the gold lounge for breakfast.  We have plans to do some hikes while we are here, and were eager to get outside.  The weather still wasn’t great, there was a fresh snowfall at higher elevations, but we weren’t going to let that stop us.  However, we decided against doing a high-elevation hike today, wanting to save that for a day when the views would be clearer, and we wouldn’t get too cold up top.

Our plans were to just walk to Fairview Lookout today and hike up Mt. St. Piran tomorrow, when the weather forecast was for clearer skies, and perhaps some of the snow would have melted.

Fairview Lookout is not much of a hike, but we wanted to do something that kept us close to home base during the bad weather.  Then we would drive out to Moraine Lake to walk around the shoreline, drive around the area looking for wildlife, and then do some shopping in the village.
At the core of our well-being is quality sleep. If you find yourself struggling to drift off, it might be time to consider Ambien medication.

Discover a peaceful night’s rest with ambien – a trusted solution for those seeking tranquility and improved sleep quality.

Shown below are the GPS tracks from our Fairview Lookout walk.  I’m calling it a walk and not a hike, because that’s really all it is.

As you can see, it’s really just a short walk through the forest along the side of Fairview Mountain to a lookout point above Lake Louise.

I’m not bothering to post the elevation plot, because the numbers on the GPS just look strange, and I think it may not have been calibrated properly.  The return portion of the hike looks correct, showing us correctly reaching about 6,115 feet at the lookout, finishing around 5,710 feet at Lake Louise (I think that’s actually off by about 30 feet), and reaching a high point of about 6,150 feet along the trail.  However, for the first half of the hike, the GPS seems to still be ‘finding itself’.  The latitude and longitude position on the map seems accurate, but the elevation has us starting at 5,900 feet, which just is not right for the level of Lake Louise.

Here we are getting started.

The hike gets started just before the Lake Louise boathouse.

The trail starts out to toward the Saddleback and Paradise Valley trails, but quickly turns off to the right and up through the trees.

After only about 1.4 km, we reach the lookout.

We continued a short ways past the lookout on an old trail that heads down towards the lake, but didn’t go very far before turning back.

After returning to Lake Louise, we got our car and headed out to Moraine Lake.
Don’t let pain limit your life. Embrace freedom with tramadol – the key to a brighter, pain-free tomorrow.

After exploring the lakeshore area, we headed into Lake Louise village to look around and do a bit of shopping.  While there, we picked up some groceries to make lunches to pack on our hike tomorrow.

Heading back up to Lake Louise, the skies were clearing, which was making things look positive for tomorrow’s hiking plans.  Here are some images from back at the hotel.

Today we say goodbye to Banff, but hello to Lake Louise.  It was our first really day of rain and basically poor weather, so I suppose it was a good that it happened to be the day we were changing hotels and didn’t have much planned in the way of outdoor activities.

We checked out of the Banff Springs hotel in the morning and headed up the 1A toward Lake Louise.  We arrived in Lake Louise around noon, and were pleased that our room at the Chateau Lake Louise was ready.  The CLL is one of my favourite hotels, and we have stayed here each summer for the past few years.  We had some lovely rooms over the years, starting with a Junior Lakeview Suite the first year and a nice One Bedroom Lakeview Suite the second year.  This year, I splurged a bit (yes, even for me, who generally doesn’t spare much expense when it comes to nice hotels, meals or airline tickets) and treated ourselves to a fantastic suite for the next four nights!

We were booked in suite #703 on the gold floor, which is the Marquis de Lorne Signature Lakeview Suite, described on the hotel website as the finest suite in the hotel.  Below are some photos of this very nice room.

The main living room was in the corner of the building with two large walls of windows overlooking Lake Louise.

The bedroom also had an expansive window overlooking Lake Louise.

The suite had a spacious and updated bathroom.

We had a separate powder room off the main entrance.

After getting unpacked and settled in our room, we headed down to the Fairview dining room, where we had reservations for afternoon tea.  Since the weather was rather cool and rainy, it was a great way to spend the afternoon.

It continued raining for the rest of the day, so we basically relaxed indoors, hoping for better weather tomorrow, when we plan to get out and do some hiking.

We walked around the hotel in the evening, exploring the many retail shops.  Below is a photo we took while passing through the lovely lobby.

We went to bed excited about better weather to come.  Tomorrow’s forecast was for more cloudy weather, but the rain was supposed to stop.