Whilst in Banff we wanted to go out and do a proper hike and after doing some research saw that the hike to Little Beehive had some epic views of Lake Louise. The hike was about 9km and had quite an elevation gain so we took lunch with us.

I had been able to book early morning shuttles to Lake Louise – the starting point of the hike so we set off quite early and arrived at the lake for 10.30am. It was a beautiful sunny morning – unlike the cloud and mist we had a few days earlier so we took lots of pictures of us all lakeside.

We walked along the lake until we reached the path which took us up into the woods and we began our ascent. It was quite hard walking as it was a constant uphill climb so we had lots of little stops and after about 50 minutes we reached Mirror Lake.

^{Working our way to Mirror Lake – the hill behind it is Big Beehive}

We were not overly impressed with Mirror Lake so we carried on and it wasn’t long before we came out of the woods and had beautiful views over the mountains

^{Working our way to Little Beehive}

We soon reached the famous view point and basically had the place to ourselves so did lots of pictures – although it was a sheer drop down from the rock so nobody went to close to the edge!

We followed the trail for a further 5 minutes and reached a rocky mound where we all stopped to have our lunch and were joined by a very friendly chipmunk.

We headed back down but decided to take a different route which would take us past Lake Agnes and the Teahouse.

^{Views as we were heading back down}

There was a huge queue at the teahouse so we didn’t get anything and carried on back down to Lake Louise.

^{Hiking back down to Lake Louise from the teahouse}

We really enjoyed the hike – it took us three and a half hours in total – but by the time we reached the bottom Stu & my legs were shaking! We headed home for a chilled evening in the pool!