Eight days in the Canadian Rockies: the lakes really are that colour

Nothing ambitious today. Get into town, get outside, and go to bed at a local hour.

The Calgary Tower is the one thing worth doing on a short stop, because on a clear afternoon you can see the entire front range standing up on the western horizon about a hundred kilometres away, which puts the rest of the trip in context. There is a glass floor.

Then walk down to Prince's Island in the Bow River and have dinner. Pick the car up in the morning.

It is ninety minutes from Calgary to Banff on the Trans-Canada, and the transition is abrupt: prairie, foothills, and then the front range comes up out of the ground all at once at Canmore. Pay at the park gate and carry on.

Start at the Cave and Basin, which is where the whole thing began. In 1883 three railway workers found hot sulphur springs coming out of a cave on the side of Sulphur Mountain, and the resulting argument about who owned them was settled by the government reserving the land, which made this the first national park in Canada and the third in the world. The cave, the spring and the Victorian bathhouse are all still there and the smell is exactly what you would expect.

Then Bow Falls, a broad drop on the river ten minutes from the town centre, and the enormous baronial hotel above it. The Banff Springs was built by the railway in the 1880s to give people a reason to buy tickets, rebuilt in stone after a fire, and is worth walking into even at a distance from your budget.

Eat in town. Banff Avenue is touristy and there are good kitchens on the side streets off it.

The alarm goes early today and it is worth it. Moraine Lake sits in the Valley of the Ten Peaks and the view from the rockpile at its end was on the back of the twenty dollar note for years. The road is closed to private cars, so you are on a shuttle or a taxi, and the first ones run before dawn. Go then. By nine the light is flat and the rockpile is shoulder to shoulder.

Lake Louise is fifteen minutes away and is the famous one: a milky green sheet of water with a glacier at the far end and a very large hotel at the near one. Walk the flat shore path to the far end, which takes forty minutes and loses ninety per cent of the crowd, or carry on up to the tea house if you have the legs and the day.

In the afternoon cross the divide into British Columbia and Yoho, which is the same mountains with a fraction of the traffic. Emerald Lake is a twenty minute detour off the highway, has a wooden bridge and a canoe dock and is quieter than anything in Banff, and there is a five minute stop on the way in where the Kicking Horse River has cut straight through a wall of rock.

Back over the pass for dinner, roughly an hour.

A gentler day, all of it within twenty minutes of Banff.

The gondola goes up Sulphur Mountain in eight minutes to a ridge at about two thousand five hundred metres, where a boardwalk runs along the crest to an old weather observation station. You get the Bow Valley in both directions and six ranges of mountains. If you would rather earn it, the trail up the same mountain is a steady eleven kilometres and the gondola will bring you down.

In the afternoon drive the Lake Minnewanka loop, which is a short scenic circuit northeast of town past the largest lake in the park, with a decent chance of bighorn sheep on the road and elk in the meadows. There is a boat cruise on the lake if you want one.

Finish in the Upper Hot Springs, which come out of the same mountain the gondola goes up, sit at about forty degrees, and are at their best on a cold evening with snow on the peaks in front of you. Bring a towel or hire one at the door.

Today is the drive. The Parkway runs two hundred and thirty kilometres from Lake Louise to Jasper between two ranges, past something like a hundred glaciers, and it takes four hours without stopping and eight if you do it properly. Fill the tank before you leave, because there is one fuel stop on the whole road and it is expensive and seasonal. There is no mobile signal for most of it.

The centrepiece is the Columbia Icefield at the halfway point, a two hundred square kilometre sheet of ice on the continental divide that is the largest in the Rockies and feeds rivers running to three different oceans. The Athabasca Glacier flows off it and comes down almost to the road, and you can walk to the toe of it in twenty minutes from the car park. Do not walk out onto the ice without a guide, whatever you see other people doing: the crevasses are real and people have died in them.

North of the icefield, Sunwapta Falls drops into a gorge a short walk from the road, and closer to Jasper the Athabasca Falls is the one to stop for: not tall, but the entire river forced through a slot in the quartzite with a series of walkways cut into the rock beside it.

Get into Jasper for dinner. It is a small town and the kitchens close early.

One road, three stops, all morning and afternoon. The Maligne valley runs southeast out of Jasper and holds the best day in the park.

Maligne Canyon comes first, ten minutes from town: a limestone slot cut fifty metres deep and in places barely a couple of metres wide, crossed by six footbridges. Go as far as the fourth bridge and turn round, which takes about an hour, and do it early before the coaches.

Medicine Lake is halfway up the valley and is a geological oddity rather than a lake. It fills every summer from the glacial melt and then drains away entirely through sinkholes in its bed into one of the largest underground river systems in North America, resurfacing in the canyon you were standing in that morning. By autumn it is a mudflat.

At the top of the road is Maligne Lake, twenty-two kilometres long and the largest in the Rockies, with boat trips running down to a small island that has been photographed so many times it is on the tourist board's letterhead. The boat is expensive and it is the only way to see the far end. There is a good flat walk along the near shore if you would rather not.

Back in town, eat at the brewery.

The Jasper Tramway goes up Whistlers Mountain and is the longest and highest cable car in Canada. From the upper station a rough trail climbs another two hundred metres to the true summit in about an hour, and on a clear day you can see Mount Robson, the tallest thing in these mountains, a hundred kilometres away. Go first thing, because the cloud builds by midday and there is a queue by ten.

In the afternoon drive out to Mount Edith Cavell, up a narrow switchback road that opens late in the season. The walk from the car park is short, paved and steep, and it brings you to a moraine looking straight at Angel Glacier hanging in a hollow on the north face, with a small lake full of ice at the bottom. Sections of this area have been affected by rockfall and the fire, so check the road and trail status at the visitor centre before driving up.

Come back into the valley for the evening. Pyramid Lake is ten minutes from town, has a small island reached by a wooden footbridge, and is where locals go to watch the light come off the mountain.

Breakfast in town, then a long drive whichever way you go. Calgary is about five hours back down the Parkway and the highway, and Edmonton is four hours east on a much duller road with an airport at the end of it.

If you are returning south, leave early and give yourself time for the stops you drove past on the way up. The Parkway looks completely different in the other direction and the morning light on the west side of the valley is better.

Take a walk along Connaught Drive before you go. The town is rebuilding and the shops and cafes along it are the ones carrying it.