Lake Louise Trip Planning
When visiting Lake Louise and the surrounding national parks, planning is essential. Below you will find information and recommendations to help get you started.
Weather Information
See the lakeshore and famous view right now.
There is no official weather forecast for Lake Louise (the Weather Network one is a fiction). Your best choice is Environment Canada’s Yoho National Park forecast – just make it one or two degrees cooler.
Monthly averages for Lake Louise
General Canadian Rockies Trip Planning
The main tourism site for this area.
The Field and Yoho National Park Guide
A beautiful site about Yoho. The main town, Field, is only 20 minutes from Lake Louise.
An interactive guide to the road between Lake Louise and Jasper.
These are the official national park websites, which include trail reports, maps, shuttle information and more:
Buy your national park entry pass ahead of time online at this webpage.
Maps and Guides
These are the best free maps of the area. You can get hard copies of them almost everywhere here, including the one for Banff / Lake Louise.
These commercial visitor guides have reasonably good maps of the national park that outline basic sightseeing. You can get hard copies of them from visitor centres here.
Gemtrek has a series of driving maps, but more importantly, the best topographic hiking maps for this area. They can easily be purchased locally once you arrive, include two specific to Lake Louise:
Accommodation - Lake Louise
Use this interactive Googlemap to see where things are located and to get an overview of the hotels in the area.
Notice that there are some hotels between Banff and Lake Louise: Baker Creek Mountain Resort (10 min from Lake Louise), Storm Mountain Lodge (35 minutes from each town) and Castle Mountain Chalets (20 minutes from each).
This webpage lists all the hotels in Lake Louise itself and at Moraine Lake (20 minutes away), but it is missing our fairly fancy youth hostel.
See our Interpretve Shows!
During the summer, we do evening interpretive shows at the following hotels:
Accommodation - Banff
This site has all possible accommodation in Banff town, including hostels and B&Bs. It is less useful for Lake Louise – see above.
Recommended and Unique
We have friends who own places in Banff.
Josee Richard owns Cottage B&B. She has bed and breakfast rooms and a self-contained suite with kitchen.
Becky and Lee O’Donnell own Banff Boutique Inn.
Accommodation - Yoho, Canmore & Golden
Field and Yoho National Park
Yoho has a range of accommodation from hostels to luxury hotels, including many “home accommodations” that are often small suites with kitchens. The main town, Field, is only 20 minutes from Lake Louise.
Canmore, AB & Golden, BC
These two locations are each about a one hour drive from Lake Louise. When things are full in the national parks, they can provide another place to look. They also provide less expensive options. Each is developing its own tourism offering, which means even more things to see and do.
Availability and booking
You can see current open days and link to a booking form on our availability calendar.