Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise Family Activities

In winter your kids and teens can sample a total of 7, 700 acres cut with 240 trails at three ski areas. The Lake Louise facility, a ten-minute drive from the Chateau, rates as one of North America's largest with 4200-skiable acres. Its longest run stretches for five miles and plenty of gut-wrenching steeps, open bowls, and chutes challenge your teens. The ski area also has beginner and intermediate trails. Kidski offers ages 5 to 12 supervised skiing and instruction Shreddies does the same for snowboarders ages 7 to 12. In season, the Chateau operates a complimentary shuttle to Ski Louise, as the hill is affectionately known.

Sunshine Village, between Banff and the Chateau, features additional runs as does Ski Banff@Norquay, the ski mountain nearest to the Fairmont Banff Springs hotel.

In ski season the Chateau hosts a supervised Children's Playroom, open daily for ages three (potty trained and older) for a nominal fee. Don't consider this a daylong children's program. The facility works best as a "relief center," a place for your children to find other kids for a couple of hours of coloring, crafts, board games and movies while you savor a glass of wine by a roaring fire. From Monday through Friday, the playroom is available from 2 p.m. until 10 p.m. and on Saturday and Sunday, from 10:30 a.m. until 10 p.m.

Few ice "rinks" in the world reward you with such majestic scenery as the frozen Lake Louise, crowned in season with a man-made ice castle. For more ice time, tweens and teens can sign-up for a guided walk through ice-covered Johnston Canyon, dazzling with its frozen waterfalls. Johnston Canyon is a 35-minute drive from the Chateau.

Remember too that Canadian winters often bring below freezing temperatures and bitter wind chills. That makes the Chateau in winter best suited to skiing tweens and teens accustomed to frigid temperatures.

Speaking of winter, the Olympic flame will pass through Banff National Park, January 20, 2010. To commemorate the event, the park plans a two-hour evening celebration. If this inspiring event interests your family, book rooms well in advance. Contact the park for more details.

In summer, tweens and teens can ride the gondola up Sulphur Mountain for the sweeping views of ridges and the river.

Year-round kids can swim in the indoor pool, but those 12 and younger must be accompanied by an adult.

Family Friendly Activities
In winter families can also enjoy guided moonlight snowshoe tours and sleigh rides. As scenic as park is in snow, summer, we think, is more glorious. In fact, about 75 percent of the more than 2.5 million annual visitors to Banff National Park come between mid-June and mid-October. The towering peaks, lush forests and verdant valleys plus the rivers, glaciers, hot springs and lakes create miles of varied terrain for summertime hiking, canoeing, rock climbing, horseback riding, fishing and wildlife viewing.

True to its alpine heritage, in spring and summer the Chateau offers a mountaineering program complete with a mountain adventure concierge. This expert matches your hike to your mood. Do you feel like finding a sweeping view or a trail that leads to a secluded, fast-flowing stream? Pick your pleasure after consulting the concierge and pack a picnic lunch from the Chateau's deli.

The naturalist guides lead hikes as well as rock climbing and mountain biking tours. Even though you and your children can do these activities by yourselves, we recommend at least one guided outing. You'll learn more and will go farther than you thought you could, creating that sweet feeling of satisfaction.

Mike, our naturalist guide, gets us through the steep, initial half-mile of our hike on the Lake Agnes trail by keeping up a lively repartee about the park's grizzly bears. We'd be lucky to see one, he tells us, dispensing ser’s molars are flat to grind leaves and that carnivores such as wolves use their jagged, sharp incisors to scrape meat from bone.

On our hike we gather more tidbits about bear safety: don't linger in a patch of buffalo berries, a bear favorite that comes into fruit at the end of July to mid-August and don't run if you see a bear. Instead, put your hands in the air (makes you look bigger), retreat by walking backwards (never turn your back on a bear) and talk in a calm voice (Nice grizzly, nice grizzly). It's unlikely you will spot a bear at all, especially at close range. Banff National Park is vast. Chances are the only bears you'll encounter are the stuffed teddies for sale in the gift shop. In the meantime, enjoy the grizzlies' splendid habitat by day and the pampering of the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise in the evening.

For those families with young kids who don't want to go uphill, enjoy an easy stroll around the dazzling lake.

The resort, we are told, is working on some special family offerings, but the information was not released at press time.

From the Chateau you can take one of Canada's most scenic drives. The Icefields Parkway (highway 93) stretches for 143 miles from Lake Louise to the small town of Jasper. En route look for bighorn sheep, elk, mountain goats, ravens and other birds as you drive through river valleys and pass forests, lakes, snow-capped mountains and distant glaciers. Spectacular views abound in this landscape of peaks reaching 10,000 + feet. Among our favorite sights: turquoise Peyto Lake, the bluest in the Canadian Rockies, a result of how the fine particles of ground rock, called rock flour, scatter the sun’s rays.

A few miles after Parker Ridge, you leave Banff National Park and enter Jasper National Park. Not too far from this border is the Icefield Centre, the starting point for your glacier stroll. A bus with balloon tires that grip the mud and ice, tackles the road with its 32 percent grade for the 15-minute ride to the glacier, billed as "the world's most accessible." After the bus parks on ice estimated to be 1000-feet thick, you get out to walk on a real glacier. Brewster, the park concessionaire, marks the limits of your exploration with a line of blue cones. The glacier, even if crowded with busloads of tourists, looms impressively.

Reserve ahead and bundle up for this outing. On a sunny July day the temperature hovered at 50 degrees F. (In January, it's a blistering -40 degrees F.)
Icefields Parkway remains open to non-commercial vehicles from about April through October (check ahead).