Rocky Mountain High

The overnight stop at the small town of Kamloops was brilliantly organised, bearing in mind approximately 500 people from the Rocky Mountaineer had to be accommodated with the minimum of trouble. Before disembarking you are given an envelope stating your hotel, coach and room number. You can walk straight to your room and the luggage will have been delivered! This morning we walked out of the room leaving the luggage to be collected and taken to our stop in Jasper. Every detail has been carefully thought out. Kamloops was originally an indigenous settlement for thousands of years. In the mid 1800s, a group of some 150 men who came to be known as the Overlanders set out from Winnipeg in Manitoba to find an overland route across the mountains to join the gold rush. One wife refused to let her husband go alone. Mrs Schubert and their three children joined the group and over the next few months endured untold hardships to reach the promised land. For the final month they existed on rosehips and potatoes and when Mrs Schubert reached Kamloops she informed her husband that they were going no further! The next day she gave birth to a baby daughter they named Rose, after the berries that had kept them alive. The Schuberts were the first white family to settle in Kamloops, the name originating from a First Nation word “Tk’emlups” meaning “meeting of the waters”.
Life as we know it resumed at 8am this morning, when the Rocky Mountaineer set off on the second leg of our journey. The train left promptly in brilliant sunshine and we made our way out of Kamloops to the northeast still following the Thompson River. The river is a different beast today, now still as a millpond, so calm as to be a mirror lake reflecting the trees along the waters edge. The valley floor is again wide and fertile and isolated farms and settlements are nestled in beautiful surroundings. We slow for a freight train to pass, breakfast is served and the champagne appears. It’s pretty idyllic. Gradually the train starts to climb, the landscape closes in, changes and the forest reappears.
Lunch is served and not long afterwards out of nowhere we come across the Pyramid Falls. I will post you a video. It is so beautiful. The Rockies are looming ever closer. The mixed temperate forest is slowly changing to predominantly pine and firs with wild creeks tumbling their way through. You can almost feel the atmosphere changing, mind you, it could be something to do with the margarita that has yet again appeared at my elbow!!
The train picks up speed as it travels through the Rocky Mountain Trench created by tectonic plate movement hundreds of thousands of years ago. The trench runs north to south from the Yukon to Montana splitting the mountain groups in two leaving the Rocky Mountains the higher. Mount Robson is the highest peak in Canada at 12,972 ft and we had a fabulous unimpeded view of it today against a clear blue sky, which is apparently unusual. We were lucky and it was such an impressive sight.
As Jasper becomes ever closer the higher the mountains loom above us. Moose Lake appears on our right, perfectly tranquil and turquoise in colour. This is in fact the headwaters of the Fraser River that we followed for so long. The train continues to climb towards the Yellowhead Pass, which is one of the lowest of the Rocky Mountain passes, hence making it the obvious spot to construct the original transcontinental railway. The Yellowhead Pass also marks the boundary between British Columbia and Alberta and is the drainage continental divide. Eastern rivers flow to the Atlantic Ocean via Hudson Bay and the West to the Pacific Ocean. Yellowhead Lake rolls into view framed by Mt Fitzwilliam and we are coming to the end of our journey. The whole carriage had been looking for wildlife the entire trip, with little luck; the odd bald eagle, the back end of a mountain sheep and possibly half an ear of a maybe moose! We were within 10 minutes of our destination when the cry went up ‘Moose’ and sure enough there he was standing
in some swampy ground by the track. We’d hardly recovered from this when ‘Elk’ was the cry and on the other side of the track stood a young elk and would you believe round the next bend was a juvenile black bear who beat a hasty retreat when he heard the train. We were amazed, but just to top it all, in a short distance, a large black bear got up from some undergrowth by the track at our approach and slowly ambled across the adjoining road.
Well, who’d have thought it?! It completed a fabulous train journey, which we have thoroughly enjoyed. The scenery is sublime. You are off the beaten track and this is country that you cannot drive. The attention to detail and organisation by the Rocky Mountaineer is first class. I have come to conclusion that government departments could learn a great deal from them!Read more