Banff Nat'l Park, Canada. A cerulean-hued glacial lake provides sublime paddling beneath soaring glacier-draped mountains here in Banff National Park. The Canadian Rockies reach their most dramatic proportions along the Icefields Parkway between the towns of Lake Louise and Jasper. These valleys were filled with enormous glaciers at the maximum extent of the ice sheets at the height of the Pleistocene Epoch about 20,000 years ago. As these ice sheets melted, they left in their wake a string of glistening lakes all along this valley. The stunning color of the lake is due to light being scattered by tiny particles of glacial silt suspended in the water and introduced into the lake by the meltwater from glaciers on the ridgelines above.