Banff National Park, Canada. The Canadian Rockies reach their most dramatic proportions along the Icefields Parkway in Banff and Jasper National Parks. A collection of cerulean-hued glacial lakes provide sublime paddling beneath soaring glacier-draped mountains. The 200-km long Icefields Parkway begins in Lake Louise to the south of here and ends in the town of Jasper after traversing some of the most spectacular high-mountain scenery in the world. The waters of this lake take on a cerulean hue in summer as the meltwater from glaciers along the crest of the Continental Divide flows into the lake with its burden of ground-up glacial silt. Suspended in the water of the lake, this milky solution absorbs the light at the short end of the visible-light spectrum causing the water to appear blue green.