Explore the Natural Grandeur of Canada’s Wild West With This Luxury Train Ride
A journey aboard the Rocky Mountaineer explores the natural grandeur of Canada’s wild west.
It’s day two of the rail journey from Vancouver to Banff aboard the Rocky Mountaineer and we’re parked in an alpine forest, stalled by track works ahead. There’s no indication of how long we’ll be stopped but no-one’s in the least bit worried. Sometimes, delays should be savoured.
We’re cloaked entirely in green. Douglas firs are so tightly packed around the train that I can make out every needle through the windows and almost touch the trees from the open vestibule at the end of the carriage. It’s a tad too early for snow but there’s a bosky glow and an invigorating chill to the air.
It’s lunchtime and our carriage hosts, Patrycja Podgòrski and Victor Venutti, have gathered us downstairs in the dining area for a three-course lunch of British Columbian fare: crisp-skinned Lois Lake steelhead trout, ravioli stuffed with Dungeness crab and Fraser Valley berries bathed in Chantilly cream. Paired with cocktails, craft beers and wines from leading vineyards in nearby Okanagan Valley, the cuisine is first-rate but it’s the accidental setting that sears the moment in my memory.
That’s the trick of a ticket on the Rocky Mountaineer. Canada’s acclaimed luxury train brings you face-to-face with often inaccessible, extraordinary landscapes, without the slightest discomfort. And, if you’re lucky, with sightings of bears, deer and eagles. The delays – usually caused by oncoming traffic, especially kilometres-long freight trains – are integral to the trip. They force me to pause and, thanks to the absence of onboard wi-fi, to be 100 per cent present.
A bagpiper serenades our departure under grey autumn skies from the Rocky Mountaineer Station in Vancouver. There are more than 600 passengers – including grandparents and grandchildren, a newlywed octogenarian couple and every age in between – all buzzing at the prospect of spending the next 48 hours rail-cruising through the wilderness. (The train runs its three Canadian and one United States routes between April and October and only during daylight, to maximise the scenery.)
I’ve barely had time to settle into my heated leather seat on the upper deck of a duplex GoldLeaf (basically Business class) carriage, glass-domed for 360-degree panoramas of the passing countryside, before I’m ushered downstairs to breakfast. Minted fruit salad, pastries and a choice of dishes, including eggs Benedict and lemon-honey buttermilk pancakes with stewed Okanagan stone fruit, are served with shifting views of the Fraser River swing bridge, shy seals and the gritty backblocks of Vancouver.
The broad flow of the Fraser continues through rural scenes of cranberry bogs, silos and silage, logs massed against the shore and neat farmhouses with pitched roofs and painted weatherboards. The Fraser Valley is British Columbia’s food bowl and home to esoteric outposts such as the town of Hope, which was immortalised in the Rambo film First Blood and is, perhaps not unrelatedly, the Chainsaw Carving Capital of Canada.
For true “foamers” (Canadian for trainspotters) there’s ample information about our passage, including engineering trivia and local history, from our two erudite hosts who share stories throughout the 957-kilometre ride.
On approach to Kamloops, our first night’s staging post, golden hillsides carpeted in sagebrush are haloed by a dazzling rainbow rising from Kamloops Lake. It lasts for an hour or more, often turns double and causes a sensation on board. Somewhere Over the Rainbow plays through the train’s speakers. “This is amazing!” exclaims Podgòrski. “I’ve never seen so many rainbows in a day!”
We arrive at the riverside city, which is home to about 100,000 people and 300,000 cows, in darkness, stay overnight in the comfortable Delta Hotel and leave next morning before dawn. At 6am under a lightening sky, Venutti has rolled out a red carpet and stands in front of our carriage warmly welcoming his charges back. He’s wearing a bear pin “just to attract them”. (It doesn’t work.)
Venutti’s name tag doesn’t state his first name because “Victor”, when called three times – perhaps by a very thirsty passenger – is the train’s evacuation code. Can’t risk it. Especially given our fellow passengers include a 24-strong gardening group from Dallas who pass the time playing board games and drinking cocktails from 10am (when the liquor laws permit bars to open in British Columbia). “If we could have had them any earlier, we would have,” one player assures me.
There’s an easy rhythm to rail life and a cheerful camaraderie with my carriage mates. Mealtimes – including our forest lunch – are a highlight but so too are the autumnal and increasingly alpine landscapes of glacial lakes and pine forests, and mountain tops disappearing into smudged skies.
We enter Glacier National Park at around 3pm but it’s another three hours of panoramic touring before my first glimpse of the snow-streaked Rockies from the depths of the Columbia River gorge, a world of green, gold and ice-blue that only accentuates the mountains’ grandeur. On cue, Rocky Mountain High starts to play.
After pulling into Banff well after dark, we’re transferred promptly to Sulphur Mountain and the fabulously retro Rimrock Resort Hotel, which is handy to the town’s hot springs and gondola, for celebratory cocktails. But our journey is far from over.
The coming days – guests can choose to stay on in the Rockies for as long as they like – are filled with gentle hikes and guided bus rides between the resort towns of Banff and stunning Lake Louise, where the chateau-style hotel is set beside iridescent turquoise waters with the Victoria Glacier looming behind.
While we’re still swooning from the sight of Louise, our guide, Alex Mowat, drives us to Moraine Lake where the water is an even more intense blue-green but with a metallic sheen and quicksilver nature that shifts with every sunray.
From the great outdoors to the grand indoors of the Fairmont Banff Springs, where Mowat leads an entertaining history tour before a few of us sneak into the Rundle, the hotel’s speakeasy bar (it’s behind the library wall) to drink fishbowl-sized, lilac-tinted G&Ts. The 739-room property, built in the style of a Scottish baronial castle, opened in 1888 as “an island of civilisation in a sea of wilderness”. A fine fit for the Rocky Mountaineer.
“What makes this trip so special is seeing it through your eyes,” Podgorski, an avid foamer herself, tells us as we disembark. And it’s true. Travelling with others, witnessing Canada’s phenomenal scenery together, makes the adventure all the more rewarding.
