Prince of Wales Hotel from Waterton Lake Shore, Alberta, 1952

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Prince of Wales Hotel from Waterton Lake Shore, Alberta, 1952 — Archive & Atlas

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1952

Prince of Wales Hotel from Waterton Lake Shore, Alberta, 1952 — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1952

AA-2026-B17DF4

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Perched on its bluff above Upper Waterton Lake as though it had been placed there by a committee determined to prove that Canada could out-scenic Switzerland, the Prince of Wales Hotel looks exactly as its 1927 builders intended: a Victorian-Swiss chalet scaled up to the point of mild absurdity, visible from every direction for miles. The Canadian Pacific era of grand railway hotels operated on the theory that if you built something magnificent enough in the wilderness, wealthy passengers would invent a reason to go there. By 1952 that theory had been thoroughly vindicated.

From the cobbled lakeshore path, whoever stopped here framed the building across the full width of the lake with the instinct of someone who had just grasped that the whole point of the place was the view from the water, not the view from the hotel. The rolling tawny hills behind it — characteristic of the Alberta foothills meeting the Rockies — strip away any pretense that this is European. It is aggressively, specifically here.

Waterton Lakes National Park in the early 1950s was still the quieter half of the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, a designation both countries were proud of and neither quite knew how to promote. The hotel stood on its promontory doing the promotional work by itself.

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