Rocky Mountain High

Aboard the Rocky Mountaineer train, Sue Dobson travelled in style through some of Canada’s most spectacular scenery.

It's 6.30am on an autumn Tuesday and Vancouver's Rocky Mountaineer station is packed with people checking in for one of the world's most scenic railway journeys. Over two days, the Rocky Mountaineer train retraces the legendary western Canadian routes of the first transcontinental railway, travelling almost 600 miles through spectacular scenery into the Canadian Rockies. It's a journey high on travel's 'must-do' list.

An early morning haze drifts over the fertile Fraser River valley. The start to our journey is frustratingly slow, crawling and stopping for signals and the ultra-long freight trains that take precedence over the privately owned Rocky Mountaineer. “This does cause some pauses in our journey but should not affect our arrival time”, the train manager says soothingly as we sip our Buck’s Fizz.

We're travelling in GoldLeaf Service, in a double-decker, glass-domed coach. Our seats upstairs offer grandstand views of the scenery and the restaurant tables below are set with sparkling white cloths and silver cutlery.

From the impressive breakfast menu I choose the terrine of scrambled eggs wrapped in smoked salmon with rosti-style potatoes and 'a dusting' of caviar. The meals, created in the Goldleaf on-board kitchens, are superb. The emphasis is on local specialities, including wild British Columbian salmon and prime Alberta beef, served with wines from BC's Okanagan Valley.

Just as patience is evaporating and the idea of ever reaching the Rockies seems solely in the realms of the imagination, the train gets going, gathers some speed, and we're in the midst of trees and mountains. The sun has burned through the haze, revealing 10,000ft–high volcanic peaks rising above forest-coated slopes.

Alder, hemlock, cedar, spruce, fir, trembling aspen and dogwood trees surround us. A glacial green river foams white over rocks, its swirls and eddies forming convoluted patterns. Shoals of salmon in sardine numbers are dark shapes in the shallows.

The tracks take us over bridges and through tunnels, through country where for 12,000 years West Coast Native Indians lived. Here the Hudson Bay Company traded furs and provisions and the Gold Rush came and went. The Fraser River pounds through Hell's Gate, the Thompson River squeezes through the Jaws of Death Gorge.

Leaving forests and farmland behind, the landscape turns to rose red, gold and grey rock. Copper is mined in this region that's burned by sun and wind and lit by lightning storms. Yellow sagebrush blooms on pink-sanded slopes bound by wind-dried grasses.

Ospreys nest on telegraph poles in cattle ranching country. In the late afternoon sun, bare brown mountains are reflected in the 25mile-long, sapphire-shaded Kamloops Lake, popping with leaping fish. The train hugs the waters' edge, past Ponderosa pines and drifts of wild sage, and in a moment of pure delight we watch a young black bear bounding across a rocky beach.

The overnight stop is at Kamloops, a low-rise town of motels strung along a river valley. We stay out in the country in a relaxing, ranch-style hotel with good food and lovely views. Next morning, I wake to mist rising from the river and Canada geese flying in formation through the golden morning light.

Back at the station, we find our train diminished in length. Kamloops is a division point for the Rocky Mountaineer's routes, with one half of the train heading north into Alberta for Jasper and our section going east for Banff and Calgary.

Towering mountains

Day two of the journey is spectacular in every way. There are rivers wide and narrow, fast-flowing and gentle, squeezing through gorges and flowing across plains. As the train follows miles of sparkling lakes, crosses canyons and high bridges built above deep gorges, the colour of the water spans teal, turquoise and clear ice blue.

The building of the railways in Canada is one of the great engineering feats of the 19th century. And never are you more aware of that than amid the towering, densely forested mountains.

When the first railway line was built through the Rogers Pass in 1885, it looped back and forth along the sides of mountains, and crossed creeks and ravines on enormous wooden trestles. But heavy snowfalls in the narrow, steep-sided valleys resulted in deathly avalanches and in 1913 construction began on the 5mile-long Connaught Tunnel. Boring through Mount Macdonald, it climbed in a straight line to a summit of 3,800ft, taking three years to complete and costing C$9.2 million, a fortune in those days.

But consider this. In 1886, the 8-mile stretch of ‘big hill’ was constructed, with a dangerous 4.5 per cent grade. Twenty years later, unique Spiral Tunnels were envisaged that took a thousand men 20 months to complete and reduced the grade to 2.2 per cent.

The Lower Spiral tunnels through Mount Ogden, is almost 3,000ft long and turns approximately 230 degrees, emerging 56ft higher than its entrance. At 3,255ft in length and turning about 250 degrees, the Upper Spiral travels through Cathedral Mountain, to emerge 50ft higher than its entrance. Together, the two tunnels form a figure of eight.

Emerging from these miracles of ingenuity and labour, we find ourselves among glacier-capped mountains and striated rock in ice-cream colours. Wapta Lake, the source of the Kicking Horse River, which we’ve crossed seven times along the way, sits 5,200ft above sea level. A couple of miles later and we’ve climbed to the highest point of the journey.

On the boundary between the Yoho National Park in British Columbia and the Banff National Park in Alberta, this spot is also on the Continental Divide that separates the Pacific and Atlantic watersheds – and we move our watches forward by an hour.

As the train heads for our final destination, we spot a circling bald eagle, big-horned sheep and a mountain goat teetering on sheer cliff rock. By Banff station, an elk in the middle of the road has stopped the traffic.

Into the Rockies

Banff's main street is lined with hotels, shops and trees, a Canadian version of a Swiss mountain resort. The base for excursions into the National Park, and a ski centre in winter, its clear air is the kind you yearn to bottle.

We'd travelled on one of the world's most scenic rail journeys, now we were travelling by road through some of the most spectacular scenery you could ever imagine. In this glacier-carved, mountain-encompassed world, at least 25 peaks rise to 9800ft or more.

Wide parkways sweep between dense forests of evergreens growing tall and thin like dark exclamation marks. Deciduous aspens glowing yellow gold smother steep rock faces. There are snow-drizzled mountains as far as the eye can see, and then some.

Two glossy black ravens parade at the viewpoint beneath Crow's Foot glacier, squirrels skitter in the pines above the intensely blue Lake Peyto. We head along the scenic Icefields Parkway to the Columbia Icefield, where a snow-coach on gigantic wheels transports us onto the four-mile long Athabasca glacier that stretches to almost a mile in width. There we stamp around on ice 900ft thick.

At Lake Louise, the sun beats down on water as blue as the cloudless sky, and the scent of pines pervades the cool, clear air.

On the Trans Canada highway, wide bridges topped by grassy paths, and carefully positioned underpasses, provide safe crossing places for the elk and moose, grizzlies and wolves that live in the surrounding forests. High in the sky, towering, treeless ridges are carved into deep crevasses.

In the Rockies we found the true meaning of the word 'awesome'.