Canadian Rail Tour

(Note: Clicking on any image in this travelogue will bring up an enlarged version of the image.)

Tuesday, August 21
Lake Louise to Jasper

Emerald Lake

Up not quite so early (I run every other day) and as frugal a breakfast as could be found in the Fairmount Chateau Lake Louise. Like its cousin at Banff, it was situated far from town and more modestly priced restaurants. Back on the bus headed up the Icefields Parkway (Route 93) to Jasper through Yoho National Park along and some impressive sites. The first such site was Emerald Lake, aptly named for the color of its waters due to glacial sediment. The lake was very pretty, but the water color struck me as perhaps a little garish. I would not find it inviting to swim in. (Even if it weren't as cold as Lake Louise.) I stopped into a souvenir shop there and purchased a very informative book, "The Spiral Tunnels and the Big Hill" by Graeme Pole, with the history of the rail line through the Kicking Horse Pass, and a lot of vintage photos. It was good reading.

The aptly named Icefields Parkway follows the Kicking Horse River north. At one point the entire fast-flowing river, about 30 or 40 feet wide, is funneled down through a gap of only a few feet, and has eroded a waterfall under a rock formation that spans the river. This eponymous Natural Bridge was another popular tourist sight. The National Park Service had constructed walkways and several foot bridges (unnatural bridges?) to give the sightseer some spectacular views of the falls and the rapids above and below them from some great vantage points. Again we ran into the disparity between our level of interest and the published schedule of the tour bus. The driver dispatched some of our fellow passengers to retrieve us from our wanderings when we overstayed the scheduled departure time.

Our next stop along the Icefield Parkway was, appropriately, at the Columbia Icefield Centre for lunch, and a ride onto the Athabasca Glacier itself. The Columbia Icefield Centre is a highly developed tourist attraction. The cafeteria was mobbed. But they had a wonderfully efficient system that moved the crowds expeditiously through the cafeteria. There was also a museum at the facility with displays about glaciers, their formation, movement, advance and retreat. After an hour and a half or so, we embarked onto an "Ice Explorer" for a ride out onto the glacier.

Once more we were filing on and off yet another bus. It was actually more of a cross between a school bus and a monster truck. Look at the size of the wheels when compared to the person about to board. It was a 6-wheel drive vehicle with extremely low gearing. It climbed very steep grades and traversed the ice slowly and sure-footedly to a mostly horizontal area marked out with traffic cones about a half mile up the glacier. We all got out and wandered around, along with the passengers of maybe a half dozen other such vehicles. It was sort of interesting to be wandering around on a surface like hardpacked late-spring snow in mid August. The air temperature was probably around 50°F, and I was reasonably comfortable in a sweater. But once on the ice, the novelty wore off quickly, and I was ready to head back. It was a bit of a letdown, and given my choice, I would have spent more time at the Natural Bridge, and less time here. But it came with the package. We later opted out of such things "in the package" in favor of our own explorations.

We departed the Icefield Center and headed for Jasper, and the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge. Here, unlike the grand edifices of the previous Fairmonts, the layout was more like a condo community with scattered one-story room complex in a faux village layout. The general impression was still luxurious, with a fancy common building with reception, restaurants, and other amenities, and a bunch of golf carts to ferry us around the facility. It had started to rain, but cleared up about the time we arrived, and we were treated to a lovely double-rainbow as we headed to the main building for dinner.

Wednesday, August 22
Jasper to Quesnel

Today we finally get to board the train. The trains are run by Rocky Mountaineer, a private company using the tracks of the CPR. They are one of the few railroads in North America to specialize in passenger service only, and it is all tourism. They have their own fleet of rolling stock, all painted in distinctive blue and gold with a white swoosh a la Nike that runs the length of two cars. They have three levels of service, Red Leaf, Silver Leaf, and Gold Leaf. Having wanted to do this trip for 25 years or so, I sprung for the full monte Gold Leaf service. That included seating in special double-decker observation cars with the top level equipped with a glass roof. The lower level held dining facilities, bathrooms, and an open air observation platform at the rear with standing room for about a dozen people. Each car had 66 seats on top, and these folks took breakfast and lunch in two seatings for each meal. The meals were of gourmet quality, with portions exactly the right size for Jenny and me. (We're both light eaters.) There were several choices on the menu for each meal, and they were all delicious. I don't know if our fancy accommodations overnight were part of the Gold Leaf service or not.

The rolling stock, with the exception of the double-decker observation cars, which were introduced in 1995, was all relatively old, but completely refurbished. Some of the single-level cars dated from the '50's

We convened in the hotel lobby and were checked in and issued little red maple leaf pins with which to bedeck ourselves. We were herded once again onto busses to the train station, where we were ushered over red carpets onto our cars each adorned with small maple leaf Canadian flags. The train consisted of two diesel engines, a generator car (to provide onboard electrical power for the train), and about 8 or 9 coaches, the last of which was the Gold Leaf dome car. We mounted a spiral staircase (there was also a lift for the mobility-impaired) to our seats, and I was delighted to find ourselves assigned in the front row, with unobstructed view forward over the tops of the rest of the cars. Well, almost unobstructed. There was a service area in front of us where the onboard crew would prepare drinks and snacks, and kept supplies for the passengers. The rolling stock was all very spiffy: clean, comfortable (well, they were a little enthusiastic with the air conditioning) and classy.

The train pulled out right on schedule. It was utterly silent, and accelerated so smoothly that the moment of departure was imperceptible. The iconic clickety-clack of the wheels is gone due to the modern welded rail joints. The only noise from the wheels came when we went over a switch, or sometimes a squeal from the wheel flanges on the sharpest of curves. Our speed was modest; maybe 50 - 60 MPH at most. And most of the trip was spent at a leisurely 35 - 45, sometimes slowing to 10 - 15 over the highest bridges and trestles. Not that we were in a hurry, but it is a little disheartening to those who might hope for more widely used rail travel. It was no mystery that our luggage, which traveled separately by truck, would be waiting for us in the hotel room when we arrived.

Our route was to follow the Fraser river all the way along its circuitous journey to the Pacific over 3 days of travel. The first stage was 332 miles northwest, and then looping south to Quesnel. (silent "s"). The landscape was temperate rainforest: pines and spruces with mountains in the background, and the river always on one hand or the other. Some of this paralleled the highway; some stretches, where it diverged from the river's path forged through territory inaccessible by any means other than the railway.

Layers of mist skirted the nearby hills as we departed, which gradually dissipated to scattered clouds with occasional rain. We were lucky that this and the previous day's showers were the only precipitation we encountered on the trip. We passed Moose Lake, the headwaters of the Fraser River, and followed the Fraser over the next 5 days all the way to the Pacific. The words to Stan Rogers' Northwest Passage came unbidden to my lips. Well, most of the words. I had to google them to fill in a few missing ones

Through the night behind the wheel, the mileage clicking west
I think upon Mackenzie, David Thomson and the rest
Who cracked the mountain ramparts, and made a path for me
To race the roaring Fraser to the sea.

Ah, for just one time, I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.
Tracing one warm line through our land so wild and savage,
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.

The river cut an impressive gorge, and offered some impressive views from the right-of-way perched along its banks.

Heading northwest out of Tête Jaune Cache we passed into some high plains country: scattered towns separated by lots of wilderness. Time seemed suspended as we rolled on. We struck amiable companionships with other passengers as we were randomly seated with other couples for meals. More non-Canadians than natives to my perception. There was a sizeable group on tour from Australia. There was one fellow (I've forgotten his name) who had brought a guitar with him. I had left mine at home, figuring it to be too much hassle to schlep it on and off trains, planes, and busses and too little opportunity to play. I proposed to him that we swap a couple of songs if we found the opportunity. And the train manager assisted us by giving us access to the Crew Lounge in the adjoining car. We passed a pleasant hour or so. Later on, he brought the guitar out again in the Observation Car, where we both sang a few songs to the applause of the nearby passengers. I tried to think of train songs. I came up with "City of New Orleans", but never thought of "Railroad Bill" until later. However, with all the forward-facing fixed seats with arms, there really wasn't a comfortable place to play in the passenger car.

I'm not really certain about the captions on the following pictures. The calendar on the camera wasn't set, so I can't be sure of the dates. And when scanning through the 400+ photos we took, one mountain or forest or rail yard starts to look like the next. So I'll make my best guess at where each of these was taken. And if I'm wrong, then rest assured it was just as beautiful or interesting or whatever in its actual location as it would have been if it were where I said it was.

Red Pass Junction is a major rail center with 3 major routes converging in this one little town. There's a sizeable rail yard that we passed through at a crawl, and it was interesting to see all the different kinds of rolling stock lined up on all the parallel tracks. We rolled through a lot of lumber country with sawmills aplenty. It was pretty impressive, and a little upsetting to see acres and acres of stripped tree trunks piled 20 feet high awaiting their pass through the big saws, and similar acres of palettes of of 2 x 4's out the other end, awaiting transport to Home Depots all through North America.

The day was an endless sequence of new sights, many of the unremarkable, yet nonetheless fascinating. The world paraded by at a leisurely pace with a smorgasbord of offerings to delight us: miscellaneous rail equipment, hydroelectric installations, various wildlife (too fleeting or distant for our cameras), vistas of dramatic clouds, fields, forests, mountains, and always the Fraser on one hand or the other, ever growing as we followed it downstream. As dusk approached we rolled into Quesnel (kwih-NELL), crossing the river one more time on a modern bridge about a quarter mile downstream from the older truss bridge it had replaced. The old bridge had been converted into a footbridge between a riverside park and an island in the Fraser. We disembarked and transferred (yet again) to shuttle busses to our hotel. The hotel was only a few hundred yards away, but on the other side of a rail yard that required about a mile and a half ride to reach. This was the only un-fancy accommodation of the trip, a Best Western. It served us just fine. Walking distance to a nice burger joint, and free computers for Internet access. We walked down the riverside park, crossed the footbridge to the island, poked around for a while, had a late dinner, and hit the rack.