29-31 July: Canada also has a Glacier National Park (not to be confused with the American park in Montana), in B.C. west of the continental divide. The Rocky Mountain parks in Canada were all created about when the transcontinental railway began bringing tourists in 1886. To help finance building the transcontinental railway, the Canadian Pacific Railway built luxurious hotels to bring tourists to see the grand scenery of the Rocky Mountains. One of these was Glacier House, built in the style of some of the great hotels in the Swiss Alps. They also hired Swiss mountaineers to build hiking trails and guide tourists on alpine climbing excursions, advertising the area as North America’s version of the Alps. CPR’s transcontinental railway, completed in 1885, crossed the Selkirk mountain range at Rogers Pass, with a grade not much less steep than the route through Kickinghorse Pass to the east. About 1910, a 10-mile-long tunnel was completed to bypass the steep Rogers Pass route. The Glacier House hotel went out of business in the 1920s and was dismantled. Now the former hotel site is the nucleus of a great set of hiking trails (many of them dating back to the Glacier House’s glory days in the 1880s and 1890s). Glacier National Park is truly spectacular, and our three days of hiking there led us into some unforgettable mountain scenery.
