Ten days from Seattle to Banff: the Pacific Northwest does not stop at the border

Start at the market, because it is nine minutes downhill from most downtown hotels and because it is at its best before noon. Pike Place has been trading on the same site since 1907, and unlike almost every American market of its age it never became a food court: there are still farmers with tables, still fishmongers who throw things, and a lower level of secondhand bookshops and oddities that most visitors never find.

Eat in the market rather than near it. Then walk two blocks up to the Seattle Art Museum, whose Northwest Coast collection is the right introduction to a trip that ends in the Rockies, and finish along the waterfront in the sculpture park as the light goes.

If you arrived on an overnight flight, this is the day to cut short. Nothing here needs a ticket booked in advance.

The Seattle Center is what is left of the 1962 World's Fair, and the Space Needle is the reason the fair is remembered. Go up early: the observation deck has floor to ceiling glass on both levels and a rotating glass floor underneath, and the queue after eleven turns a twenty minute visit into an hour and a half. On a clear day Mount Rainier stands about ninety kilometres away to the south and looks a great deal closer.

Next door, the Museum of Pop Culture occupies a Frank Gehry building that people either love or describe as a crushed guitar. Inside it is better than the outside suggests, with the Hendrix and Nirvana material justifying the ticket on its own and a science fiction wing that is more serious than it sounds.

Finish on the hill. Kerry Park is a small terrace fifteen minutes uphill from the Seattle Center and it is where every photograph of this city is taken from, with the Needle in the middle distance and the mountain behind it. Sunset, if the sky is doing anything at all.

Seattle's oldest quarter burned down in 1889 and was rebuilt in three years in one architectural style, which is why Pioneer Square looks like a film set. It also explains the streets: the city raised them by a full storey after the fire, leaving the original shopfronts underground.

The gold rush museum is small, free and better than either of those facts suggests. Seattle made its real money in 1897 and 1898 not by finding gold but by selling shovels, boots and passage north to the tens of thousands who went looking for it, and the museum is honest about how much of that outfitting was a swindle.

Then the Smith Tower, whose brass and copper lifts are still worked by an attendant, and the observatory on the 35th floor wraps around all four sides. Finish in the International District, where Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Vietnamese communities settled alongside one another rather than in separate quarters, which is unusual in the United States and has given the neighbourhood the best cheap lunch in the city.

The morning train leaves King Street Station and runs up Puget Sound with the water on your left almost continuously to Bellingham, then inland through farmland to the border. Bring a passport you can hand over without unpacking. Canadian officers meet the train on arrival at Pacific Central and the whole formality takes half an hour.

You will be in downtown Vancouver by early afternoon with the bags dropped and nothing booked, which is the correct way to spend a first afternoon. Walk to Canada Place, built as the Canadian pavilion for Expo 86 and shaped like a ship under sail, and take the promenade around the outside for the first proper look at the North Shore mountains. They are what you are going to spend day six in.

Gastown is ten minutes east. Two blocks of cobbles and cast iron survive from the 1880s, most of it now selling either coffee or First Nations prints. Be aware that the Downtown Eastside begins immediately beyond it and that Vancouver's street homelessness is concentrated there and is confronting.

Stanley Park is 400 hectares of mostly second-growth rainforest at the tip of the downtown peninsula, and the way to see it is the seawall: a flat paved path right around the outside, nine kilometres, sea on one side and cedar on the other. Rent a bike near the Georgia Street entrance and the loop takes ninety minutes with stops. Walking, give it three hours and turn back at the far side of the park if the weather goes.

In the afternoon, cross False Creek to Granville Island. It was an industrial sandbar full of sheet metal works until the 1970s, when the federal government turned it into something nobody expected to work: a market, a theatre, boatyards and an art school under a motorway bridge, with the industry left visible rather than tidied away.

The little ferries across False Creek from the West End take five minutes, cost a few dollars and are more fun than the bus.

The mountains you have been looking at for two days are twenty minutes away. Capilano Suspension Bridge is the commercial version of the North Shore and it is unapologetic about it: a 137 metre span 70 metres above the river, plus platforms in the tree canopy and a walkway bolted to the cliff. It is crowded, it is not cheap, and it is still a good hour. A free shuttle runs from Canada Place.

Grouse Mountain is five minutes further up the same road. The Skyride cable car climbs to 1,100 metres in eight minutes, and what is at the top is a small mountain resort with lumberjack shows, two orphaned grizzly bears in a large enclosure and a view back over the whole city and the delta. The alternative is the Grouse Grind, 2.9 kilometres of staircase up the face, which locals treat as a fitness test and which takes most people ninety minutes. You cannot walk down it.

Come back down and stop at Lonsdale Quay before crossing the water. The market is small, the food court is genuinely good, and the SeaBus from the pier outside takes twelve minutes back to Waterfront with the skyline coming towards you.

The flight from Vancouver to Calgary takes ninety minutes and crosses the entire Coast Range, the Interior and the Rockies. Ask for a window on the right side going east and you will see most of the terrain this trip is about, including the icefields, in about twenty minutes of it.

Then 140 kilometres west on the Trans-Canada, which is dull for the first hour across the prairie and then abruptly is not, because the mountains arrive as a wall rather than as foothills. Buy the park pass at the gate or have it on the windscreen already.

Arrive, leave the car and walk. Bow Falls is fifteen minutes from the middle of town along the river, wide rather than tall, with the Banff Springs Hotel standing over it looking like a Scottish castle that took a wrong turn. Surprise Corner, on the way back up, is where you photograph the hotel from. Eat on Banff Avenue and go to bed early: tomorrow starts before the shuttles fill.

The two most photographed lakes in Canada are 15 kilometres apart at the end of the same valley road, and neither of them can be reached by private car in the way it once could. Moraine Lake is closed to private vehicles entirely; Lake Louise has a car park that costs over thirty dollars and fills before sunrise. Reserve a Parks Canada shuttle seat weeks in advance, or take one of the commercial coaches, or use the connector bus that runs between the two.

Do Moraine first if the booking allows. The colour is glacial rock flour suspended in the meltwater and it is at its most absurd in the morning: the ten minute climb up the rockpile at the outlet gives you the view that was on the back of the twenty dollar note. Then Lake Louise, which is bigger, greener and has a very large hotel on the end of it, and where the walk along the north shore towards the glacier loses the crowd within a kilometre.

The gondola on the ski hill opposite is the other half of the day and it faces the right way: from the top you look back across the valley at Lake Louise, Victoria Glacier and the whole Bow Range. Grizzlies feed on that slope through the summer and the lift staff will tell you where they are.

Johnston Canyon is 25 kilometres west on the old parallel road up the valley, which has a speed limit low enough that you actually see the elk. The walk goes up the creek on steel catwalks bolted into the limestone, over the water most of the way. Lower falls at a kilometre, upper falls at 2.7, and the crowd falls away sharply above the first one. Go early: the car park is full by nine in July.

In the afternoon, the Banff Gondola takes eight minutes to the ridge of Sulphur Mountain at just over 2,200 metres, where a boardwalk runs along the crest to an old weather station on the next summit. This is the view that puts the whole trip in order, with the Bow Valley running away in both directions and the peaks going on until they stop being distinguishable.

Then the hot springs, which are on the same road a couple of hundred metres below the gondola station, and which are the reason any of this exists. Sitting in 40 degree sulphur water at 1,585 metres, outdoors, watching the mountain go dark, is the correct end to a day in Banff and costs about the price of a cinema ticket.

Give the last morning to the place the whole park came from. In 1883 three railway workers found hot sulphur water coming out of a hole in the side of Sulphur Mountain, tried to claim it, and were overruled by a government that set the springs aside instead. That decision, in 1885, is the beginning of Canada's national parks, and there has been a bathhouse over the spring since 1887.

The site is small and takes an hour: a tunnel into the cave, the original basin outside, and two short boardwalk trails, one of which goes over a marsh that holds a species of snail found nowhere else on earth. Nobody swims here any more, which is the point.

Then breakfast on Banff Avenue and the drive back. Allow two hours to Calgary airport and add half an hour in winter, because the highway between Banff and Canmore closes for weather more often than the forecast suggests.