Sharon Stephenson has a high time in the Canadian Rockies.
SHARON STEPHENSON IS CAPTIVATED BY THE WORLD’S BEST TRAIN JOURNEY
It’s not every day you’re on bear-watch duty. But when you travel across the girth of Canada on the famous Rocky Mountaineer train, it’s essential you don’t miss the elusive black and grizzly bears.
So the 60 of us in the second-floor Gold Leaf carriage take it in turns to look for the shy animals, each of us hoping we’ll be the one who shouts “bear!”
Sadly, we don’t get the chance on the luxurious two-day journey from Vancouver to Jasper. But it’s a small price to pay when the scenery and the service is this good. Our Western Explorer trip starts in Vancouver, on what has been called the world’s best train journey.
Because it’s early spring, only 200 passengers are on board (at the height of the northern summer, this can rise to 600).
Most are Australian and plenty of them are retired or thinking about it. But there are also honeymooning couples and those, like us, ticking this journey off our bucket lists.
It’s a surprisingly long trip – up to 10 hours a day, but you don’t ride the Rocky Mountaineer to go fast. The whole point is to power down and enjoy the stunning scenery that fills the full-length windows.
There are enormous mountain ranges, hillsides carpeted with lush maple, cedar and fir trees, and valleys gouged by glaciers millions of years ago.
We’re enjoying a threecourse lunch in the formal dining room downstairs when we pass Hells Gate where, in a gorge almost 180m deep, the huge swell of the Fraser River is squeezed into a 38m channel of foaming water.
After a stop in Kamloops for the night – where we’re greeted by horse-riding volunteers – we’re back on board early the next morning for our 418km leg to Jasper. We’ve already seen some spectacular scenery, but Mt Robson has us gasping. At 3953m, it’s the highest peak in the Rockies, so high that it has its own micro-climate.
Thanks to the ever-present drinks cart, not everyone is sober but we all quieten down
when we get to Craigellachie. This is where the “last spike” of the Canadian Pacific was driven in 1885, when rail crews from the east and west met to complete the track. We take a photo of the memorial dedicated to the men who died building this pioneering railroad.
Some trains go onto Banff, but we say our goodbyes at Jasper. Somewhere along the line, we crossed into Alberta and the World Heritage-listed Jasper National Park, the largest of the national parks we loop through. We’re staying at the stunning Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge, which has hosted everyone from the Queen Mother to Marilyn Monroe. After a walk around the lake, we thaw out in front of the lodge’s enormous fireplace and I tell my husband I never want to leave.
Sadly, I have to and the next day we board a bus to Lake Louise, one of Canada’s most photographed locations. Named after Queen Victoria’s daughter, the lake is a glittering carpet of slowly melting ice, shadowed by the Château Lake Louise, a hotel that looks like a castle straight out of Disney.
Our final day in the Rockies is spent on a bus, driving to Banff where, an hour or so out of town, we hear the word we’ve been waiting six days for.
“Bear!” yells someone and there, on the left side of the bus, a young grizzly runs along the scrubby bush. We manage to get a few photos before he’s gone. It may not have been the wilderness experience I was expecting, but I’m incredibly grateful for it.