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.