Train Kept A-Rollin

How great an idea are national parks? Whether it's in the United States or Canada or anywhere else around the world, what could be more inspiring than a country's government setting aside areas of absolutely outstanding natural beauty within its borders for the use of its population in perpetuity? No development. No farming. No settlement. Just open space preserved that way. Awesome, right?

I certainly think so. I love these places. 

But things don't always start out the way they seem today. 

So, sure, in 2025 it is amazing to be able to visit six Parks Canada National Parks just west of Calgary. I honestly loved every bit of the country and the scenery and the gorgeous natural wonders that we explored in late June and early July of this year. And full disclosure...I want to go back. Both to Banff and Jasper and Yoho and beyond. Way beyond. I'm all in on Canada's National Parks. How the heck have we never explored these places before this year? 

And yes, we already have our next Canada vacation booked. And there is at least one National Park on the itinerary. 

How could you not want to go back and see this sort of view? Glacier National Park.

There was a time not too long ago (let's say 150 years or so...) when it was pretty much about impossible for any sort of regular person on this planet to get to Banff and everywhere else we visited this summer. 

4-1/2 hour flight to Calgary? Forget about it. Calgary as a city? Not yet. Not then. In fact, no Calgary at all. Not then. No city. No town. No village. No hamlet. Nothing.

If you even had the time and money to travel (and let's face it, it hasn't been that long since a large portion of the population on Earth could really do much with their lives than struggle to stay alive), how would you get there? On foot? Are you crazy? In some kind of horse drawn wagon? Probably not. Not in that country. On horseback? I guess. If you can live off the land and manage maintain good relations with the people and wildlife already there. 

What about the railroad? Didn't that exist in the 1870s? The transcontinental railroad in the United States was completed in 1869. Couldn't you ride the rails out to what is now Banff? 

Nope. No you couldn't. No railroad in Canada back then.

But the idea was out there. When British Columbia agreed to join Canada (and not the United States) in 1871, they demanded a railroad. One that would connect Canada's newest residents to the rest of Canada on the eastern side of the continent. So Canada embarked on a national project to connect the two coasts of the country by train. 

It started out great, meaning with mass bribes to government decision makers; generous to insanely generous land grants to the awarded contractor; required approval of additional funds when the project was in a "we either pay what we shouldn't or let the whole thing just end up as nothing" status; and generally seemed like a huge gamble for everyone involved but of course really ended up being gigantically profitable (on like a generational wealth basis) for those same people. All of them. The people getting paid and the people authorizing the funds.

Oh...and it eventually it paved the way for Canadians to visit their nation's first National Parks, complete with luxury hotels at the stops along the line. And of course, those hotels were built and operated by the same folks who secured the insane but insanely rich contracts to build the railroad in the first place. Of course it did. 

Rogers Pass. Glacier National Park.

So putting aside all the grift and bribery and overcharging the Canadian government and corruption, building a railroad across Canada was a monumental achievement that is still evident today. And nowhere was that achievement tougher and more costly on a number of levels than the portion of track spanning the Canadian Rockies. But it happened. 

How tough was it to build through the Rockies? Well, maybe we should start with how easy it was building a railroad across the prairie. Easy if setting up a mobile camp that was supposed to be alcohol free but which rarely was in the middle of nowhere with potentially hostile people and wildlife staffed by lots of imported labor divided racially with plenty of white resentment towards the better organized and more effective but lower paid Chinese workers that is. 

The Canadian Pacific Railroad started their work on the prairie. They did that so that as much land and money could convey to them for making progress as quickly as possible. On a good day, over six miles of track could be laid on the flat open prairie. I know that might not seem like a ton of progress but in the mountains it was significantly more difficult. On some days, 2 meters of progress was made. And that was using heavy quantities of dynamite. 

And that progress in the Rockies could only be made after a path through was found. Today, it looks simple because the job is done. You just drive it. But back in the second half of the nineteenth century, finding the right pass through the mountains that could also work with the required maximum grade for locomotive travel was a giant endeavor. It was so complicated that the CPR had to pay someone to do it for them. That finders fee payment to one A.P. Rogers came with a contractual requirement to name the pass after him in perpetuity. 

This summer, the railroad was very visible to us as we drove through Banff, Yoho and Mount Revelstoke National Parks and in the town of Golden. Heck, we had to wait on more than one occasion for a very long train to pass in front of us in the way to or from dinner in Golden. It was not an unexpected sight to see trains rolling along the tracks as we drove through that gorgeous landscape west of Calgary. All of that track is on solid ground, on fill which I am sure is engineered and compacted to provide the most stable and safe ride.

It wasn't always that way. In the first draft of the railroad through this area of Canada, there were places where the ground was too steep for a train in the late 1800s to climb. So the engineers that built the original railroad used elevated sections of track on wooden trestles (in the 1880s) that were eventually replaced with stone masonry piers (in the early 1900s). Some of these tracks on trestles are piers were really steeper than the rules would allow and so because of the importance attached to an operable coast-to-coast railroad, some corners were allowed to be cut. They could fix it later, right? And what were the odds things would go wrong in these steep sections? Oh...that also happened to be banked so the train could go up them fast to make the grade and not fall off the track. That's all OK, right? 

I'm sure someone felt it was safe enough. The odds of someone dying in a train falling off an elevated track were certainly lower than the risk of death to someone placing dynamite into a drilled hole in rock and then swinging away in a chair on a rope before the dynamite exploded, right? Of course that person was getting paid, not paying. 

Eventually, the elevated tracks got replaced. The deteriorating condition of the original wooden trestles sort of forced the railroad to move to masonry piers. The move away from those piers was likely driven by fears of trains flying off tracks than by the stone piers collapsing but eventually it got done. 

But there is still one place where you can see evidence of how it used to be. It's a trail called Loop Brook Trail in Glacier National Park. And it's super simple and amazing at the same time. 

But first, let me say how incredibly gorgeous this Rogers Pass in Glacier National Park is. I know the Pass was selected for its relative (I guess) ease of passage through the Rockies but it also is just spectacular. There's a picture above. Since we got back from Canada, I've looked through photos again and again that we took in and of those mountains and I'm not sure there's a place of more supreme beauty than Rogers Pass. Yes, there's a road going right through it but I don't even care. We actually stopped on the way back to Golden on the side of the road and took more pictures of this area even though we already had the exact same pics looking the opposite way in the morning. Just stunning.

And after our second pass through Rogers Pass, we got to Loop Brook.

Loop Brook Trail starts maybe 100 feet or so from the parking lot. Want a trail with very little hiking to get there? Loop Brook may be the trail for you. And right at the beginning of the trail are five of the original 1906 stone piers that used to hold the railroad tracks aloft. They are just standing there in the forest next to a furiously bubbling stream, relics of some past age when people did things differently and traveled differently. After more than 100 years, they are standing solidly still tracing the curve of the original railroad route. They are just incredible to see, still there after all this time. 

We have spent time over the past 12 years hiking all over some places we have been to discover ruins hidden in the middle of nowhere. Mayan ruins in Guatemala. Incan cities in Peru. Ancient stone circles in England and tombs in Ireland. The list goes on. And here in Canada in the Rocky Mountains is the same sort of stuff. Only a lot more recent. It reminds me of Frodo and Sam and the rest of the Fellowship of the Ring passing giant statues of bygones kings in the woods on their way to Mordor. That's what this felt like to me. These are modern day remnants engineered to hold train tracks and they are just incredible.

The trail helps you appreciate these relics. It loops around to the top of the western-most pier so you can see them from above. And it does the same on the other end, admittedly after you pass the one pier that has collapsed in the 120 or so years since it was put in place by men whose names are probably not even known to this day.

The collapse, by the way...a combination of erosion from the stream undermining the foundation followed by an avalanche to really knock the thing over. Impressive that four of the five are still standing up as they were intended given those kind of threats. 

Those five stone towers along Loop Brook Trail are not the only masonry railroad piers still standing. As you drive into the parking lot for the Trail, you pass eight others, all proudly present as you drive the road to the trailhead past and between these mighty stone structures. We stopped on the way out to admire, to look at them from every angle we could and to touch them and feel the solidity that is still there. 

This whole experience took less than a half an hour. But the symbolism associated with this stop was immense for me. I know these kinds of things mean more to me than they do to some others because I'm an architect and have actively been engaged for over 30 years in designing and seeing things built that are supposed to last. Seeing stone structures that were built effectively in the middle of nowhere more than a century ago that still feel enormously there to the touch is just fantastic. 

This was also our last real stop in the western Rockies. We visited Takakkaw Falls in Yoho the morning after and did a little impromptu birding at Vermilion Lakes and at a bathroom stop in Banff later in our drive to Calgary, but in our real exploration of Parks Canada's National Parks, this half an hour with these stone giants sticks out as the culmination of our 2025 time in the mountains. I think it's fitting that we stopped and admired part of the railroad from the 1880s that brought so many people to this area for the first time all those decades ago. I couldn't have thought of a better ending. 

For now. If I have my way, we'll be back some day.

The first cross-country journey on the Canadian Pacific Railroad departed Montreal on June 28, 1886 and arrived in Vancouver on July 4 that same year. We arrived in the Canadian Rockies on June 27 of this year (149 years later) and departed on June 3. If we'd only done this trip a year and a day later...

No regrets on the schedule. I loved this trip. Like really loved it. What's up next? I'm thinking South Africa is nice this time of year.

Top Of The World

Through our first four full days in the Canadian Rockies in late June and early July we had visited or traveled through four Parks Canada National Parks. But it wasn't really that straightforward. We'd started out driving in Banff National Park and Yoho National Park but didn't stop in either. When we started our visits for real we visited Yoho first; then Banff; then Kootenay National Park (twice); then Yoho again; then Banff again; then Jasper National Park; and finally Banff a third time. 

Our goal was six Parks in five full days. So after all of that back and forth laid out above, we were down to a single full day remaining and two parks un-visited. Time to double up on Glacier National Park and Mount Revelstoke National Park. Last day, here we go!

So it's not like having two Parks to visit in the last day was an accident or anything. We planned it this way. Indeed, the very reason why we picked Golden, British Columbia as our home in the Rockies this year was so we could spend time in six Parks. And we planned all along to do Glacier and Mount Revelstoke in one single day. To visit the first four Parks, we headed east. To hit the last two, we'd head west.

So far, I've written and published these blog posts in the order we visited the Parks. If I did that with the last two Glacier would be first because we had to drive through that Park to get to Mount Revelstoke. But because we didn't actually do any park stuff in Glacier until the return trip, Revelstoke gets the five spot and Glacier gets saved for last. 

There's another reason Glacier is last but that's for another post.

I have to tell you Revelstoke didn't start out looking so promising. 

Our major planned stop in that Park was a drive to the top of its namesake mountain and the quick walk from the parking lot to the actual top of the mountain so we could see multiple peaks of the Canadian Rockies in all their glory all around us. Revelstoke appeared to us to be one of the only places where summiting the top of a mountain involved very little walking up. And being no mountaineers but finding a view like that too hard to pass on with little effort, we were all in.

The night before we were due to visit Revelstoke we checked the navapp to confirm the driving time and discovered bad news: the road to the summit wasn't open all the way to the top. We knew there would be the risk of snow still affecting access to the mountain top in early July which is why we pushed this park as late in our trip as possible. Finding out it was closed was a bit of a gut punch. But having no other plan, we figured we'd go anyway, make all the other stops we planned and see how far up the mountain we could get.

The view from halfway up Mount Revelstoke.

Our first stop in Mount Revelstoke National Park was at a place called Skunk Cabbage Boardwalk. We needed a stop along the way and I'd never seen a skunk cabbage. That and a reasonable length on the walk at that point seemed like a good break in the drive. 

It didn't work. We saw no skunk cabbages. We saw no boardwalk. We walked in the woods until we got to a sign telling us we could proceed no further. "End of Trail" was the actual message. No explanation other than that. But no cabbages. And no walk. Stop number one closed down  and our directions to the summit of Mount Revelstoke still having us stopping short. Not looking good!

And while we didn't know it at the time we stopped at Skunk Cabbage Boardwalk, our planned stop at Giant Cedars Boardwalk on the way back was also closed. Three planned stops. Three closed stops. I'm telling you...Mount Revelstoke didn't start out looking so promising.

The path to Skunk Cabbage Boardwalk. Only...no skunk cabbages and no boardwalk.

Then we got a break. That information that the road to the summit of Mount Revelstoke was closed? Turned out it was false. The internet is not always right. Shocker, I know. We rolled right through the Park gate and started the long, slow climb up that zig zag road to the top-most parking lot but we were on our way. 

And to be perfectly clear, the top-most parking lot was closed, so we really went to the next top-most parking lot. That meant a little more walking than we planned on this one. And of course, there were multiple, multiple signs about bears. Ugh! Are you kidding me? Why is the summit parking lot not open?

There were no bears. Who are we kidding?

Wildflowers? Is this it?

The signature attraction at the summit of Mount Revelstoke is apparently meadows and meadows of wildflowers. And of course, because I used the word "apparently" in the prior sentence, we did NOT see meadows and meadows of wildflowers. But that does not mean Mount Revelstoke was a disappointment. 

First, while we didn't see really very many wildflowers at all, you could tell they were coming. There were little orange and yellow flowers dotting the sides of the road to the summit. If these are the first ones to emerge and they are going to be followed by many, many more of the same sorts of things, I bet they are spectacular. And yes, I know I'm projecting the whole thing here and there might never be more than we found by the side of the road. 

We have a whole list of "next time" things to see in the Canadian Rockies. The wildflowers on Mount Revelstoke might have to be added to that list. Although if we are staying in Jasper "next time", it's going to be tough to get all the way to Mount Revelstoke. 

Second, the summit was incredible. Yes, it took more walking than we planned and I'm convinced we took about the most indirect route we could take that took us through what looked like remote back country (and therefore possibly filled with bears...I know, I'm fixated a bit here) but was really a stone's throw from the nearest paved road. At the very top of the mountain, there's an old historic fire lookout and it really is worth the very non-stressful (totally serious) final climb. You may have to scramble over some snow to get there but it really is an awesome view. There are mountains in that Rocky Mountain range all around you and it is a super clear 360 degree view. There is nothing else in the way of that view on the top of the mountain.

Third, there's a Native American art trail near the top of the mountain called First Footsteps. Any time we get to explore art created by the descendants of the original inhabitants of this continent of ours we feel privileged. And seeing sculpture and other works of art against the natural background of the Canadian Rockies is just an amazing setting. I mean we are on top of a mountain for crying out loud.

The real joy here was the summit. Of all the mountain views we'd been gazing and gawking at all week, the ones we got from the top of Mount Revelstoke were by far the most expansive and distant. We really got a sense of how far this range that we'd been exploring for the better part of a week covered. And we knew we couldn't see far enough to see all of what we'd driven through and past and in for the four days prior to our mountain topping. 

But ain't it always the small things that put experiences over the top just a little bit.

In 2011, some Parks Canada employees at Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland decided to drop 18 pairs of red Adirondack chairs somewhere in the Park for people to discover. They picked some iconic, but also some obscure, places to locate these seats. Some could be stumbled upon easily; others would take a little more work or would be more out of the way.

It became sort of a thing. Today, there are more than 400 red Adirondack chairs scattered about all over the wilds of Canada. We had maybe 10 or 12 approximate locations on our itinerary where we could find a pair or two (or 10 or 12, I guess). Yet after four plus days spending at least 60% of our waking hours in Parks Canada National Parks, not a single red chair was discovered. Until Mount Revelstoke.

Yep, on our walk to the summit, just as we reached the upper (closed) parking area, we looked to our right and there was our first pair of red chairs. Pointed towards one of those gorgeous views at the top of the mountain. We climbed up to the old fire watch and then on the way back down the mountain, spent five minutes or so looking out over the Rockies from a red chair each.

And after we drove, struck out at Cabbage Skunk Boardwalk, summited and sat, we had some lunch. Packed lunch, of course!

We first started packing lunch on National Park trips in 2020 during COVID. We sort of had to. Between closed restaurants and not wanting to get sick, we started hitting the grocery store in whatever town we were staying at, got up 15 or so minutes earlier than usual every day and made a sandwich and threw some chips and maybe a couple of other things in a lunch bag. We love it. It allows us to stop wherever we want when we are hungry and pick somewhere gorgeous to just sit and recharge with some food. 

Our choice at Mount Revelstoke was the spot below, right next to a clear mountain lake that I feel pretty confident in saying is all snow melt run off. It was peaceful and calm and sunny and the Parks Canada folks had managed to place a picnic table right next to it so we could sit and eat. We packed lunch on fours days on this vacation. This spot was my favorite. And that along with four of five other things made Revelstoke memorable.

Mount Revelstoke didn't go exactly to plan. I still wonder about those wildflowers. But it was pretty amazing all the same. While we were eating, we talked to a woman who was clearly admiring how brave we were for eating right out in the open near a lake with no escape route in bear country. She told us she was deathly afraid of bears. Yep! On some level, I guess we all are. By that time we'd seen enough of western Canada to take a pretty good educated guess that we weren't going to be seeing any bears during our lunch stop. We ended up being right.

Lunch view. Table for two lakeside, please.