Emerald Lake is the largest body of water in the park and one of the prettiest in the Rockies. You can best enjoy the lake by hiking the 5-kilometre loop called the Emerald Lake Circuit. This path begins in heavy forest punctuated by sunny avalanche chutes.

Near the far shore, the trees dwindle in size and number until you emerge onto a gravelly, lightly vegetated alluvial fan. The material that has built this fan comes from the mountains above the lake, where ancient glaciers dropped their sediment loads.

High above Emerald Lake lies an equally dazzling but less readily visible treasure, one that lay buried for some 515 million years. There is the Burgess Shale, one of the most important fossil sites in the world. Discovered in 1909, the Burgess Shale has yielded tens of thousands of fossils, representing some 170 species from the beginning of the Cambrian period. Perhaps most remarkable, the fossils consist not only of hard body parts such as bones and shells, but also soft body parts such as muscle fibre and tissue. Scientists can tell what some of these creatures had for a last meal half a billion years ago.