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The garrulous blond Australian standing across the train's aisle suddenly threw her arms above her head and declared -- with rather more drama than seemed appropriate at 10 o'clock in the morning -- that she was "quite desperate for a beer."
We had boarded the Rocky Mountaineer in the town of Banff just an hour before, and already I had observed that most everyone on the Vancouver-bound sightseeing train was on some sort of quest. Evidently, Sinead Harris of Perth was looking for a lager.
"They'll probably roll out the drinks cart after lunch," I quietly volunteered. "It's luxury service and all, but" -- tapping my watch -- "it's still a bit early."
She looked at me as if I'd spoken in Klingon. And then burst out laughing: "Oh no! It's the animal I'm after. A beer -- I can't go home without seeing a grizzly beer."
Our accents may have been out of sync, but our ambitions were apparently in lock-step. Both of us had broken the first rule of enlightened travel, and arrived in Canada's first and most famous public playground -- Banff National Park -- full of expectations.
We had come to the heart of Alberta's Rocky Mountains hungry for iconic landscapes and landmarks, and who could blame us? Since childhood, we had been wooed by a "moose, mountains and Mounties" marketing campaign that stretched back more than 100 years to the time when trains were new to Western Canada, Alberta was not yet a province, and mass tourism was just a gleam in the government's eye. With a summer of provincial centennial celebrations just around the corner, I decided to mark the occasion by taking a day-long train journey from Banff to Kamloops, B.C., on the very route that helped to establish Alberta as a prime tourist destination.
It was, ironically, an American who was largely responsible for creating and promoting what might today be called the Canadian brand. In 1881, the federal government, anxious to unify the country and shut out U.S. expansionism, hired 38-year-old William Van Horne, the former general superintendent of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, to push a railway through to the West Coast.
As students of Canadian history know, it was a formidable task, fraught with scandal and financial instability, and when the last spike was pounded into the ground at Craigellachie in B.C.'s Interior on Nov. 7, 1885, Van Horne was already looking to tourism to offset the enormous debt load and operating costs of the railway. "If we can't export the scenery," he famously declared, "we'll import the tourists."
To that end, he set about building a series of deluxe company-run hotels to accommodate the travelling classes of Europe and North America, who were keen to make the transcontinental train journey to take the waters at the newly protected Banff Hot Springs. The Banff Springs Hotel became the Canadian Pacific Railway's signature property, a fairy-tale stone castle that opened in 1888 and is now a National Heritage Site. Today, it is not only the face of the Fairmont hotel chain, but is also an internationally recognized landmark.
It seemed the obvious place to begin my journey, so I checked into a corner room and immediately pulled a chair to the picture window to admire the rush and roar of Bow Falls below. I spent the next few days exploring the nearby trails that link the hotel to key historical landmarks, including the Whyte Museum of the Rockies and the Cave and Basin Hot Springs, Canada's first protected natural site.
In the lobby of the hotel itself, I discovered a shop that sells reproduction memorabilia from the golden age of Canadian rail travel in the decades bracketing Alberta's birth as a province in 1905. My favourite item, a poster from the early 1920s, showed a young flapper kitted out in high-fashion hiking duds, lounging against the broad, red-serged chest of a square-jawed Mountie, his leather-clad hand pointing westward toward distant snowcapped peaks. If Mother Nature ever wrote a romance novel, then surely here was the cover art.
