Best Way to Get to Lake Louise
Why visit Lake Louise and Moraine Lake?
Lake Louise and Moraine Lake have some of the most iconic vistas in all of Banff National Park. There is a reason the famous Fairmont Hotel is situated on the shore of Lake Louise. The dramatic sheer cliff falling off into Lake Louise with the glacier high in the background is stunning. The deep blue-green color of Moraine Lake surrounded by tall peaks is also something to behold. There are also tons of hiking trails of various levels the start from the bases of the lakes, The Beehive and the Plain of Six Glaciers being some of the more well known. We hiked the Plain of Six Glaciers with a stop at the picturesque tea house about 3/4 of the way up the trail. As crowded as the lakes can be during peak daytime hours, they still are worth seeing. Definitely use the options below and pick a time either early in the morning or late in the afternoon (before 9am or after 5pm) if you want to avoid the crowds.
What's NOT the way to get to Lake Louise from town?
By Car. There is VERY limited parking at the lake. Typically you need to arrive before sunrise to guarantee a spot for yourself at the parking lot. If you also want to visit Moraine Lake, this option is out anyway as private vehicles are no longer allowed to travel down the road to or park at Moraine Lake. We did see that after 5pm there was limited parking available at Lake Louise if you want to come up for sunset or are not going to do one of the famous hikes that start from the lake (which you'll need to have daylight hours for).
What's the cheapest way to get to Lake Louise?
By far the cheapest option is to use the shuttle service provided by the parks service. It's $8 Canadian and includes transport from the Lake Louise Park and Ride up to Lake Louise (or Moraine Lake) and then a free connector between Lake Louise and Moraine Lake as many times as you want to go back and forth once you've taken your initial trip up to the lake. These buses, including the connectors, run every half hour starting at 6:30am and the last return from Lake Louise is 7:30pm. You MUST, though, make a reservation, and reservation for prime times sell out at least 4 to 5 days in advance. You can usually get tickets for non prime hours a day or two ahead. They also release a very limited number of tickets for each shuttle at 8am two days before the travel day. The website for shuttle reservations is not terribly user-friendly. Once you're on the site, click through where it says "Day Use." On a phone you might have to scroll through "Frontcountry Camping," ParksCanada Accommodations," and "Backcountry Camping" to get to "Day Use."
If you're staying in Banff town, the other cheap option is to use Banff town's Roam Transit buses to get to the lake. You must make reservations for these services at least a week in advance as well. Bus 8x goes to Lake Louise and bus 10 goes to Moraine Lake. If you get the Roam Transit Superpass you can use the shuttles between Lake Louise and Moraine Lake for free.
What's the next cheapest option?
If the parks shuttle is all sold out or they're not available at the times you want, there are a number of private shuttles that can take you there. The tourist information center in Lake Louise town can give you a list of all the private operators. The private bus shuttle service that best mimics the parks shuttle is WowBanff. The cost is $34CAD and similar to the parks shuttle, you must select an initial departure time. The buses for Wow run every 45 minutes with the first departure from the park and ride at 8am last departure from Moraine Lake at 5:15pm. For mid-day departures they use a bus with an open top deck so you can catch some rays if you want on the ride. They run on a loop between the park and ride lot, Lake Louise, and Moraine Lake. You take your initial scheduled time to Lake Louise, stay as long as you'd like, and then take any future Wow bus on to Moraine Lake. Again you can stay as long as you like there and then head back to the park and ride on any of the Wow buses making the loop. We noticed that the day prior to travel there were at least a few tickets available for all departures. They were all gone, though, by the day of travel. In the super-high season this might be more limited the day before.
What's the BEST option to travel between town and Lake Louise?
Our suggestion, and the one we ended up choosing, while more expensive, is a bit more personal. Ten Peaks offers 4 different departures on 12 passenger vans throughout the day. A typical tour allows for pick-ups at a variety of locations between Banff and Lake Louise and then 2.5 hours at Lake Louise. The van then picks you up and takes you to Moraine Lake for another 2.5 hours. The extra time compared to other private van operators who typically only do 1 hour at each lake, gives those who want to do short hikes in each of the lake areas the opportunity to get a little further into nature. The reason we went with Ten Peaks, though, was because they also offer the option to extend your stay at either Lake Louise or Lake Moraine for either 4.5 hours or 6.5 hours for an extra fee so that you can do more extensive hikes. We wanted to be able to the the Plain of Six Glaciers hike so we chose the 4.5 hour extension option (see our blog page on what we did in Baff for more info).
Ten Peaks also offers very personalized service. The guides/drivers are super-friendly, and if anything goes haywire, the company will come to the rescue. You never think you need this kind of service until you do. After our 4 hour hike up to the glacier from Lake Louise and 2.5 hours at Moraine Lake we were ready to get home when we got dropped off at our pickup location. Except when Stephen reached into his pocket to get the car key to drive ourselves back to the Airbnb, the key wasn't there. We were panicked. Our Ten Peaks guide, though, let us know he wasn't going to leave us without a solution. He drove us back to Moraine Lake to the most likely location that it might have dropped out. Luckily we found it there, but Ten Peaks was already working a way to get us back to our accommodation 1.5 hours away and thinking about how they could support us getting a new key for the rental car if necessary. To top it all off, as we were driving back in the van to our car, we heard a cell phone go off. One of the other passengers over the day had left their phone in the van. After our guide dropped us off with key in hand, he went to personally deliver the cell phone to the passenger who had lost it. That kind of customer care makes Ten Peaks the best option for shuttling to the lakes.
