To the rockies!

I didn't do much in Winnipeg, as I had been feeling sick most of the week previous. So I mostly stayed in bed, didn't do much exploring. 

We left early Monday morning, heading west. I don’t think I fully appreciated before just how vast the prairies are, and how big the sky is. It was cloudy Monday and Tuesday, but Wednesday was mostly clear, and that morning I saw one of the most spectacular sunrises I’ve seen, it just lit up half the sky. Pictures just don't do it justice.

It actually feels like I’m going to new places now. Southern Ontario I had all been to before, Winnipeg was pretty much in Ontario, and last time I was this far we knew we were going right back to Montreal, so the adventure wasn’t there. But this week our destination is revelstoke, in the rockies. It was cool starting Thursday morning out of Medicine Hat, finally going further west than we had ever gone, and each minute was brand new territory.

Thursday afternoon I could finally see the mountains in the distance! They were still a very long ways off though. I could also see downtown Calgary, even though we were still like 30 miles away. That certainly something that doesn’t happen in Ontario. We actually ended up going right through downtown Calgary, among all the tall skyscrapers.

It got dark shortly after that, and we couldn’t see anything. Which was really frustrating, cause I knew we were getting closer to the rockies. I was looking at the mileposts, and could see that we were passing through Banff, Lake Louise, through Kicking Horse pass and the spiral tunnels, with the supervisors saying how nice the view was from there overlooking Field. But I could barely see the trees on either side of the train.

Spend Thursday night in Field, and woke up Friday morning, knowing that we were in the rockies, surrounded by mountains, but still hadn’t seen them close up. Eventually the day started to brighten, and I could finally see the silhouettes of the mountains. We started moving, and we passed beside these huge giants, the tops reaching through the clouds. It was snowy most of the day and pretty cloudy, so I couldn’t make out much. But we passed alongside blue/green rivers tumbling over rocks and snow-covered logs. And the trees are huge!! They towered over the train, easily 5 stories tall, and when I looked down we were on a hill and the trunks went down another 3 or 4 stories. I have to climb one of them.

We passed through a bunch of smaller tunnels, and then the Macdonald tunnel, 14.7km long. Traveling at 30mph, it took us 20 min to go through it. It was a weird feeling, knowing there was a whole mountain on top of you.

I also realized that I am one of the very select few who have travelled that line and seen that scenery. VIA travels along CN lines, so the only people who travel along the CP lines through the mountains are the conductors, maintenance crews, and us. And a lot of the places are so remote that they are only accessible by train. And no one else really seems to care about the spectacular scenery going by, they are just used to it. One of the supervisors, who is from the prairies, says that you can’t see anything at all, since the mountain is right there in front of your face. I’m just thankful that I get to see it, and by train too, which is so much better than by car.

We got to revelstoke, where we parked for the weekend. There’s a ski hill here that apparently has the largest vertical in North America, so I’m doing that on Saturday. I’ve always wanted to go skiing in the rockies, it’s on my bucket list of life. So I’ll be checking that one off over the weekend!