Lisa Christensen, Glenbow Museum

Magnificent Mount Temple towers its 3544 metre summit over the Lake Louise area and can be seen from many hiking trails in the adjacent valleys, from the banks of the Bow River, along the Trans-Canada Highway, up the Icefields Parkway, and south towards Banff. This impressive peak was named for Sir Richard Temple (1862 - 1902), a British economist who actually did very little travelling in the Rockies. The literal denotation of the word temple does better justice to the peak than does the namesake of Sir Richard, as it is a climber's shrine and a mountain devotee's altar. It was an ideal mountain for a painter as spiritually oriented as Lawren Harris, who saw it as a universal symbol of humankind's humility. It is massive, snow- capped, soaring, and remote, dwarfing everything in its domain. Harris saw such peaks as a touching off point between the earthly world and the divine. He has painted Mount Temple thrusting unfettered through weightless clouds, sheer bands of light that shroud the peak, almost as if it were ascending to the heavens.