Churchill

Every night at 10 o'clock in Churchill, Manitoba, a siren rings out across the downtown area. Time to think about calling it a night before darkness envelops the town. Before it gets dangerous. Before what pretty much every visitor in Churchill both comes to see and is acutely aware of as a threat when they walk around town, even in broad daylight.

Polar bears. The largest land predator alive on Earth today. Vicious and merciless hunters. These are no grizzlies or black bears. Get into a fight with a polar bear and you won't win. You'll be food. And the chance to see some polar bears in the wild is exactly why we went to Churchill earlier this month. There's really nowhere else in North America where you stand a chance of seeing these animals in the wild like Churchill. So we headed north.

We thought we'd skip the walking around town thing. Even in broad daylight. Well, mostly anyway. We made one trip to the Arctic Trading Company. We figured it was just on the block next to our hotel. What could possibly go wrong?

We've wanted to visit Churchill for years but it's complicated. We never could seem to fit it in. And I don't just mean into our schedule. I also mean into our budget. It's expensive to head all the way up to the Hudson Bay in northern Manitoba for a few days. And considering sightings of wild polar bears are in no way guaranteed, plopping down a ton of money per day for just the opportunity to get a glimpse of one of these gorgeous creatures is a tough thing to reckon with. I mean, it's also not like you go out looking for bears every day. Most organized tours have one day only really searching for white bears.

But last year, we figured enough was enough. We decided we'd look seriously at a trip to Churchill. We searched websites. We gathered recommendations where we could. We thought about what our priorities and budget would be. We weighed the risks of doing it ourselves vs. going with a tour operator. And after all that we took the plunge and booked a tour. 

Frontiers North. Canada's Big Five Safari. August 2 through August 10, 2026. Eight nights, but just three in Churchill. And of those three nights and the best part of four whole days, just one day would be in a spot where the bears frequently hang out in a Churchill summer. This had better pay off.

Polar bear trip, Churchill, Manitoba.

Maybe a few words about these bears and how to find them in the wild as a 21st century tourist is in order. 

Type "where to find polar bears in the wild" into an internet search engine and you'll likely get some useful tourism information. Like they only live in five countries in the world: the United States (northern Alaska); Russia; Greenland; Norway; and Canada. And it seems to me that the two most accessible places to find one in the wide open Arctic (or close to it) are Svalbard north of Norway (like way north actually) and Churchill, Canada. 

You also might find out based on your internet search that polar bears are the largest bear in the world. If you have ever seen a black bear in the wild, you likely saw a creature that tops out at about 500 pounds and six feet tall when standing. And yes, I recognize that the likelihood of finding a standing black bear right next to a tape measure is pretty slim. Grizzlies are a bit bigger: try 600 pounds and eight feet tall maximum.

Polar bears can weigh up to 1,200 pounds and can stand just a bit taller than the tallest grizzly. Polar bears are big. There are also just about 30,000 left in the wild. And that may be a high estimate. There are that many grizzlies in Alaska alone and there are almost 1,000,000 black bears in North America. Polar bears are rare in addition to big.

Bear skulls. From right: polar, grizzly, black. Parks Canada Visitor Centre, Churchill.

From a tourism perspective, the yearly polar bear life cycle is not exactly intuitive. I'd say most people probably assume the best time to visit Churchill for polar bear spotting is in the winter when it's snowy and icy and super cold. You know...white bears against a white landscape. But that's just not true.

From late November to May or so, you won't find many polar bears in and around Churchill or anywhere else on solid land in northern Canada. That's because during those months they are out on the frozen ice of the Hudson Bay (Churchill is on the shore of the Hudson Bay) or wherever else they happen to roam looking for seals to eat. Seals don't live on land during the winter. They live in the sea or on the ice and when they are in the water they breath through breathing holes that may or may not have a hungry polar bear waiting for a seal face to pop up for a breath.

Bear season in Churchill is in the fall, before the Bay freezes solid. Polar bears start gathering near the ice perimeter hoping that the frozen water can support their weight long enough for them to roam for months looking for some yummy seals. All told, there are about 900 or so polar bears around the western edge of the Hudson Bay in any given season. That doesn't mean all those bears are in Churchill, but it's a concentrated number close to human settlement like no other place on Earth.

We chose to visit in the summer, a time when there are fewer polar bears around the edges of the water but there are enough out there that seeing multiple polar bears in a single excursion is eminently possible. Polar bears don't hibernate. They have to be somewhere roaming around on land in the warmer months and one of those places is Churchill. We'd done enough research to know or hope or a little bit of both that we'd see a polar bear or two. Time to take a chance.

Polar Bear Holding Facility, Churchill. Capacity 28 polar bears. 30 day stay for wandering into town.

On day six of our nine day tour with Frontiers North, we hopped on a sixty or so seat prop plane at Winnipeg Airport, rode it to about 21,000 feet above sea level and headed north to Churchill. Two or so hours later, we landed. Time to see whether booking this tour was smart or if maybe our money could have been spent better elsewhere.

There are only two ways to get to Churchill, by the way: plane or train. There are no roads that lead from the rest of Canada or lower Manitoba or wherever else you might be in the Great White North to Churchill. Fly or train. Those are the options. Flying over a landscape of unevenly shaped pools of water scattered over what was becoming more and more like tundra as we flew north really emphasized the impossibility of constructing roads across Canada's wilderness. And that's not even considering repairing frost damage. 

Want to get to Churchill? Fly or train. Although I guess you could take a boat in the summer.

We were greeted at the airport by a polar bear safety sign. Never go beyond a polar bear alert warning sign. Never walk at night after 10:00. Always travel in groups and make noise. Always stay close to a vehicle or other refuge. Always remember bears can be in town any time of day. 

Welcome to Churchill.

We received our first in-person polar bear safety briefing at the site of a 1979 plane crash about 15 minutes after leaving the airport. The downed plane, now dubbed Miss Piggy, is still there completely intact out on the rocks of the tundra. We received our words of caution while we gazed at the plane's hull right after our driver walked around a little towards the plane clapping his hands to scare away any lurking polar bears.

What stuck with me from our briefing was if you see a polar bear and you are outside the bus, yell "BUS!" as loudly as possible and run for the bus as fast as you possibly can. There may have been some other stuff like don't walk beyond the signs or something like that but yell and run as fast as possible hit home.

Bears are dangerous. Point taken. Got that. It wouldn't be the last time we were warned. One of my favorite safety signs later in our time in Churchill said do not turn and run and do not play dead. Run like hell. Got it.

15 minutes after we arrived at Miss Piggy and before we even got back on the bus, we saw our first wild polar bear. Fortunately, it was at a good distance swimming at the edge of the Bay so nobody had to yell "BUS!" or run anywhere. 

Are you kidding me? 30 minutes into our time in Churchill with a good amount of anxiety about whether we would even see a single bear and we got our first sighting. This was going to be good.

Polar bear number one. In the Hudson Bay.

The next two days, we didn't see a single bear. 

OK, so truth be told, we weren't really looking for bears. I mean, we were, but not like in an organized group tour way. Sure we looked left and right every time we stepped outside the hotel and we remained super vigilant on our very brief walks around town (like to the Arctic Trading Company). And wherever we went on the tour bus, we looked left and right into the rocks and around the fireweed. But days two and three in Churchill...no bear sightings. Not a one.

Although, funnily (or maybe not so funnily) enough when we were headed back from the Arctic Trading Company, we heard some firecracker noises. Car backfiring? Gunshots? Nope and nope. Apparently, it was the bear patrol trying to get a polar bear in town back out to the tundra. The one time we walk by ourselves anywhere that's further than 25 feet away and we are on foot when a polar bear is in town in place with a full time population of less than 1,000 people (meaning very small). No more walks outside by ourselves. We'll wait for the tour bus to take us.

On day four, the same day we were set to leave town, we went looking for bears in a serious way in a serious ride.

Our Tundra Buggy. Churchill Wildlife Management Area.

Just east of Churchill, there is a Parks Canada property called Wapusk National Park. It sits along the western edge of the southern portion of Hudson Bay and houses the largest concentration of polar bear dens in the world. Wrapping Wapusk to the west and south is a tundra area called the Churchill Wildlife Management Area. The Wildlife Management Area was the final stop on our agenda in Churchill. If we saw bears here, we'd leave town happy. If we came up empty, there was no second chance. We'd be back in Winnipeg before the clock struck midnight and we'd likely never come back. Sure, we'd seen a bear. At a great distance swimming. That wasn't what we hoped for.

Our transport for the six hours we'd spend in the Wildlife Management Area was a Tundra Buggy, a boxy, all-white vehicle on jacked up tires with a back deck for polar bear watching. Picture a vehicle just a bit less aerodynamic than a school but with a deck attached to the back of the vehicle. Or you can just look at the picture above.

Indeed, a school bus was the inspiration for the Tundra Buggy. The first models were literally school busses with a fenced platform welded to the back of the bus which was accessible through the back exit door that we rarely ever used to use when we were kids. The current Tundra Buggies I'm sure are a lot more efficient and effective than those early vehicles, although the school bus feel still permeates the inside of the 2020s Buggies, right down to the windows which are unlatched on both sides and slid down to get fresh air. Or a clear view of polar bears for the Buggy occupants.

Polar bear number two. Churchill Wildlife Management Area.

It took us about 45 minutes to see our first polar bear. Not in the water swimming with his (or her) head barely above the surface of the Bay but on solid ground. Lying down in the distance, so far away that our camera struggled with the distance to get us a good picture. But this was it. This is what we came to see. Surely this would not be the only bear we'd find on our last day. A small thrill? Yep that about sums it up. Feeling vindicated but the bear didn't even stand up for crying out loud. We moved on in hopes of more.

We got it. But we'd have to wait about an hour and a half. And this one was running. Away from us. Fast. Possibly spooked by the giant rectangular white box with a bunch of excited humans inside. These bears can move and those strong back legs can power these big bodies across the landscape pretty rapidly. Once it had run a while, it turned, stood in profile and looked out and back towards our big white box long enough for me to take the picture below.

Two and a half hours. Two very distant white bears. That's about half our time gone.

Polar bear number three. Churchill Wildlife Management Area. 

The next sightings would be thrilling.

We'd end up with six polar bear sightings in our time in Churchill: one at that first safety briefing just by Miss Piggy and five more in the Wildlife Management Area. We haven't spent a lot of time in our lives looking for bears but we've done a few days here and there. Five in one day equals our best day ever in Sequoia National Park in California and six in one trip equals our best trip ever in Alaska. While that may not seem like a ton of bears on a vacation or even a day, we'll take it. If (and here's the catch) those are quality bear sightings.

Our afternoon bear sightings on our last day in Churchill definitely were of a higher quality. And they were polar bears which are rarer and take way more work than grizzlies or black bears. Polar bears are better. This was our best bear day ever.

One of the great things about the sequence of bear sightings we got on that last day is the bears we found were progressively closer to us which meant that each one gave us more to look at. You can see the difference in bear size between the two photographs above which stretched the zoom on our camera. Bear number two is definitely closer than bear number one.

Bear number six (the closest bear) is below. Now we are talking!

A few thoughts about bear number six. 

First, the view was terrific. This was a bear sighting we could take in without the use of the zoom lens on the camera, although we did that anyway. This was the best appreciation we would have of the size of a typical polar bear. This is a thick, muscled animal that you do not want to tangle with. I love the face as he's looking right over to our big white box on wheels.

Second, while we didn't intend to chase him away with our noise and extra large vehicle, we surely did in the end. We fully meant to just watch and take it all in and then leave the bear for someone else to discover (although I'm not sure there was anyone else out that day) but that didn't happen. The bear striding from his original spot again emphasized just how massive these bears are.

And third, the fact that this bear turned and yawned got us a great look at his signature long neck and massive jaws. This bear's mouth is gigantic. I guess it has to be because that's how he's going to capture seals when they surface at breathing time. The jaw has to be big enough to grab a full grown seal and pull it out of the water. 

Polar bears are generally solitary creatures. There's no hanging out as a family unit sipping a bottle or two of Coke at Christmas. The only time they really hang out with fellow polar bears is during mating season (which is NOT August) and if a mother is raising a cub or cubs. And that last one is why bear number six was our second best bear sighting.

Say hi to our mom and cub. Mom is on the right. The cub, which admittedly is not that much smaller than mom herself, is on the left. Mom is likely five plus years old. Her cub is likely about eight months old. The size similarity is more noticeable in the pictures below. Our guides for the day guessed that the cub is male, which explains the relatively similar bulk.

We spent about 10 minutes watching bear number six. We got about twice that long with our bear family duo, including a walk from where we first noticed them to a spot nearby to get a snack (likely of berries) before disappearing into the tundra greenery. And I really do mean disappearing. Once they had walked a bit into the fireweed and other stunted growths on top of the ground, you really couldn't see them at all. This is a big part of why they are so dangerous. Despite their size and their completely white fur, somehow they are about invisible even when there is no snow.

Cub leaves and mom follows.

Based on our wildlife watching experiences over the last 10 or so years, we've always been most satisfied with our looks at mammals or other creatures when there is some social interaction. One bear doesn't do that for us. And while we didn't get an extensive look at these two bears engaged with one another, the little bumps and nudges that they engaged in made a difference. It made it look like these two were in it together for each other and it was not just an every bear for him or herself situation like the others we saw. I like to think there was genuine affection and love exchanged between these two. Maybe I'm anthropomorphizing a bit much there. It was a privilege to follow these two for a bit more than a quarter of an hour.

One thing that I found remarkable about all five bears we found in the Wildlife Management Area was that they all knew we were there. They all looked straight at us for a while with the exception of our second bear that day (identified in this post as bear number three) who just took off running. Maybe it's stupid to note that an animal that uses its senses to survive in one of the harshest environments on Earth can notice a large vehicle that looks nothing like anything else for miles around. But it wasn't just the odd glance. The humans were to be watched and tracked and if we got too threatening, the bear was gone. Size matters. Big creatures don't like things bigger than them.

Before we arrived in Churchill, we'd seen pictures of polar bears walking right up to Tundra Buggies, putting their paws as high on the vehicle as possible and looking up at the humans looking down at them. I am sure that would have been incredible to see and hear and smell. That's not what we got. We'll have to be satisfied with what we found in 2026. And you know what? We didn't find nothing and we are satisfied. We got what we came for.

Single species wildlife watching trips are difficult. If you don't get that one thing you came to see, you are bound to be disappointed. We've never based a whole trip around one type of animal. We've had days where we were looking for one and only one bird or animal, but not a whole vacation. And to be frank, this wasn't a polar bear or bust trip; we actually did have other things we wanted to see that we felt pretty darned secure that we would see. But if we hadn't seen a polar bear in Churchill, this would have been a bust. There's no question about that. We left town knowing that wasn't the case and that felt good, even if we didn't get to smell polar bear breath because they were so tantalizingly close.

Polar bears are now added to our life list. They are proudly on that list with elephants and lions and kiwis and wolves and humpback whales and toucans and hippos and painted dogs and shoebills (definitely a one species day there) and a lot of other things.

Lots of big white butts and lots of looks over at the big white vehicle.

I don't know when the next time is that we will see an iconic animal in the wild for the first time. We certainly don't have the trip already scheduled or even penciled in right now. But when we get there, no matter what species of mammal, bird, reptile or whatever else it is we are looking for, that first sighting will be magical and thrilling, just like seeing our first polar bear was right after being scared to death by our "run as fast as you can" safety briefing.

This trip for us covered everywhere from Winnipeg to Churchill and back to Winnipeg with a couple of spots in between. The undisputed highlight of the trip was Churchill and the undisputed highlight of our time in Churchill was our time in the the Wildlife Management Area close to but really very far away from a number of large white bears. 

My favorite picture of the day is the one at the end of this post. It's the little head touch from the mom with the closed eyes on the back of her fast growing offspring. These two will stick with me.

The cover picture of this post is a soapstone sculpture called Circumpolar Mother and Cub by Abraham Anghik Ruben, an Inuvialuk Canadian sculptor. We found this work alongside a number of other similar sculptures by the same artist in the Winnipeg Art Gallery in downtown Winnipeg on the first full day of our trip. Maybe this was really the first polar bear we saw on this trip. Or maybe it was just a good luck omen. Anyway, it seemed appropriate to add to this post.

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 bygone 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.

Poutine

Word association time: Canadian food.

You said poutine, right? 

I know you said poutine. No way do you think anything else when you hear "Canadian food". The most recent season of Top Chef (best show on television, by the way) was staged in Canada and when the chef contestants were asked what they thought when they heard "Canadian food", they all (to a person) said poutine. 

Poutine is it. Poutine = Canadian food. And I know it's a bit insulting to Canada but it just it what it is.

Before we headed up north to Canada in late June, I did some snooping on menus in the two towns we were staying on this trip (Golden, BC and Calgary) and it seemed to me that there was a lot of poutine on the menus of a lot of restaurants that we might entertain going to. You can even upgrade your side of fries or salad or whatever comes with your meal to poutine at most places. I was looking at Canada as poutine wonderland. Plain and simple, I was pretty darned stoked for this experience.

Maybe some words about poutine are in order? In case the cover picture (which of course is a dish of poutine) of this post doesn't speak for itself.

Poutine is not a complicated dish in any way. It's French fried potatoes topped with gravy and cheese curds. Sure...I get it, these days you can get it with all sorts of other toppings but if you boil it down to its essence, it's fries with gravy and cheese curds.

The dish was invented in Quebec in the late 1950s. Of course, like most food origin stories (the Philly cheesesteak and the French dip sandwich come to mind here), there is a healthy amount of debate about the one true originator of the dish. So sure, Le Roy Jucep in Drummondville, QC has a copyright registration certificate for the dish issued by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office but that might just mean the owner of the place got to the Office first. 

It appears that the earliest appearance of poutine on a menu may have been at Le Lutin Qui Rit in Warwick, QC but that place apparently didn't add gravy until a few years after they put in on the menu. So is it really poutine, then? There's a third restaurant in the mix but suffice it to say for the purposes of this blog post poutine is a dish from Quebec. No real debate there. If I ever make it to Quebec, maybe I'll do a more exhaustive examination than just lazily checking Wikipedia.

I have had amazing poutine before our trip this summer. I had some incredible poutine with pastrami in some restaurant that I can no longer remember the name of in Toronto and I had some awesome straight up poutine (maybe with some chives added) at The Vanguard in Milwaukee a few years later. But a whole week in Canada to explore poutine? Surely this would add to my appreciation of this Canadian dish immensely.

Lebanese poutine? Topped with chicken shawarma. At Beirut Street Food, Calgary.

Now, I can concede that one issue I might have run into here is that British Columbia and Calgary are really nowhere near Quebec and that the quality and authenticity of poutine might diminish as you get from from its point of origin. Now, granted...Toronto and Milwaukee aren't really that close to Quebec either but they are a whole lot closer than Calgary, not to mention points west.

On the fourth day of our trip, I was four dishes of poutine into my 2025 poutine quest and I was not particularly impressed. I'd eaten poutine in everything from a Lebanese restaurant to a dedicated poutinerie. I'd eaten it topped with chicken shawarma and hot peppers intentionally and with green onions accidentally despite mostly trying to stick to pure simple poutine. I'd had poutine served twice in aluminum foil dishes that are way too big (and are also the small size). And I'd had poutine with lightly battered French fries and with gravy that looks congealed but was actually pretty tasty (see picture below). 

As an aside, why do people lightly batter fries? Why? Just leave them alone. They are fine as just fried potatoes. 

The part that was just not impressing me on my poutine food tour on day four was the gravy. And it's really a pretty simple issue: why is it always so salty? All those variations of poutine noted a couple of paragraphs before this one...really, really salty gravy. And that honestly sort of ruined every dish. I'd say maybe in a pinch, if I was really, really in need of some poutine and didn't mind the heavy-ish amount of salt in the gravy, I'd cave and order some poutine from The Wolf's Den in Golden (cover picture). But the rest? Not particularly interested.

The Wolf's Den is the place with the battered fries, if that tells you anything about my opinion of the other three dishes I'd eaten to that point.

It was at this point that I took a poutine break. It wasn't intentional. We just ended up at some places to eat where I wanted something that didn't go particularly well with poutine or one place may have just been a bit too fancy. And by the time I really realized it, I found myself down to my last full day in Canada and I still hadn't had some poutine that I would consider as good. This was not going well.

Our last full day in Canada was spent at the Calgary Stampede, a rodeo / agricultural fair / amusement park / celebration of heritage / biggest thing all year in Calgary that is way better than all those things put together. Maybe they would have a poutine stall? Other than breakfast at the hotel and lunch in an airport lounge, this would be my last poutine shot of this trip. And yes, they did have a form of poutine on the breakfast menu but that dish was conspicuously absent from the reduced-but-totally-free menu for Hyatt Globalists. And there's no way I'm spending money on breakfast when there are other free options that are likely just as good.

So sure enough, when it got to about lunch time at the Stampede, we looked for the word poutine on a food stall in the food area. And sure enough, right there next to a burger place that also sold poutine was a place called La Poutinerie. This had to be it. This was the place I was getting my last poutine of the trip. I guess it was encouraging that it sounded French. Maybe.

One order of "poutine" please. No hot dog poutine or Greek poutine or maple bacon poutine or shepherd's pie poutine. Just straight up poutine. Fries. Gravy. Curds.

La Poutinerie's poutine. Calgary Stampede.

You know what? This worked. This was what I needed. It was hot. The fries were correctly cooked and not battered in any way. The cheese curds were melty enough around the edges, even on top of the dish. And the gravy was beefy and not overly salty. There! How difficult was that? I mean, just look at the color and consistency of that gravy in the picture above. The best poutine I had in a week in Canada (admittedly far, far from Quebec) was from a stall at the Calgary Stampede. 

If I'm going to gripe at all, I could have used some more cheese curds. The guys working in the La Poutinerie stall were just placing them on top of the dish so by the time I got to the bottom half it was just fries and gravy. Maybe that's my fault for not mixing them in if that's the way I wanted it.

This is for sure one of the least scientific and casual food quests I have ever been on but I'm satisfied. Thank you, Calgary stampede. Next year we are heading to Winnipeg and other parts Manitoba for a week. I'm not going to be as fanatical about the poutine next year but you know I'm having it somewhere.

This is my "this is some good poutine" face.