The Canadian Rockies, I read, form part of the Canadian Cordillera, extending from the plains of Alberta in the east to the trench of British Columbia in the west, and comprise the most northerly section of a sublime mountain range the runs as far south as the border regions of Idaho and Montana in the United States. But don’t mistake the Canadian Rockies for the American Rockies: whereas the southern range is all stubborn gneiss and granite, the northern segments are supple, glaciated limestone and shale. And, okay, theAmerican Rockies can boast a higher elevation than their Canadian counterparts; but that is a cartographic nicety. The Canadian Rockies actually rise further from base to summit (the valleys are at a lower altitude), their jagged, sharp-pointed peaks divided from each other by wide, u-shaped, ice-fashioned valleys in contrast to the v-shaped, river-carved valleys of the American Rockies.

There’s the geography and the geology; I, however, was after the scenery.

Our trip began with a flight to Calgary. After an overnight stay, my husband, David, and I picked up our hire car and headed on Highway 1 towards Banff. As we drove, the mountains began to cast their shadows, wildly folded cliffs of rock that vaulted into the blue sky. Our first stop was the small town of Kananaskis. The rangers’ visitors centre was a rich and helpful source of information. But what struck me most about Kananaskis was its modest harmony with the soaring, unpopulated wilderness that surrounds it: there were few people and even less commercialisation. Next came a trip further west to Banff itself, the largest community in the Banff National Park and sat at the foot of looming Mount Cascade, for lunch. Though where Banff ends and where the park begins may not always be certain. Locals on their way to work, it is said, are as likely to come across a deer or elk as they are the neighbour’s dog or cat.

Refreshed, it was then on to Lake Louise, its silky turquoise waters shimmering like an alpine gemstone, clasped by the steepling white mountains. We stayed at the hotel Chateau Lake Louise, which almost dips its toes into the water, and the view from our room was as breathtaking as it’s possible to imagine. The town, a last outpost before the three-hour journey to Jasper in the north, is dotted with some delightful restaurants. But what most impressed was the scale of the landscape – every vista leads your gaze skywards – its scope magnified humblingly by the miniature measurement of the human habitation.

After two nights in Lake Louise, we started our drive to Jasper, a route that would take us through the Columbia Icefield. The roads appeared almost deserted. Passing foamy waterfalls, green-blue lakes and fluttering alpine meadows along the way, the distant, framing horizons crowned with peaks, every corner seemed to yield a photographer’s dream. On our arrival at the Icefields we boarded one of the tour buses. The bus itself, as if inspired by the vastness of the glacial plain, was enormous, its wheels almost six feet in diameter. One of the largest accumulations of ice and snow south of the Arctic Circle, the Columbia Icefield covers an area of 325 square kilometres; but the truly jawdropping statistic is that, even given the effects of climate change, its slow-grinding sheets of ice sometimes reach an astonishing depth of 360 metres. At one point on our bus journey, we stopped so that we could step out onto the Athabasca glacier, a tongue of frozen water that spans 6 kilometres in length and a kilometre in width. Such is the immense expanse not only of space but of time here too, the snows that formed its ice were laid down some 400 years ago.

From there, we embarked on a drive along the finger of the Rockies up to Jasper, a town decorated with an enchanting array of lovely little shops. The Jasper National Park is where you come if you want to see the wildlife of the Canadian Rockies as much as its geological grandeur. The Park protects a sliver of the wonderful diversity of flora and fauna that once blanketed the west of the country. Elk, deer, moose, caribou, bears, coyotes, wolves, beavers, lynx, pine martens, cougars, snowshoe hares and wolverines still flourish here, the extraordinarily varied geographies and climates sustaining a whole range of of habitats. During our stay in Jasper we were taught how to behave if we encountered some of the larger examples of the local wildlife: bears can be a problem, and the recommended way handling a meeting is to raise your arms in the air and to shout “Go back, bears”. We saw two but not at such close quarters that we were required to put our newly learned bear-dispersing skills into practice.

After a two-day stop in Jasper, we caught the Via Rail Canadian train bound for Vancouver. For the 530- mile trip we were provided with (very comfortable) sleeping bunks to which we could retire when we at last exhausted the awesome array of views that filled the window of the observation car. With the hot on-board showers, the splendid food, the opportunity to strike up conversations with fellow passengers – Canadians are the friendliest of people – and the proximity of such scenery made me glad we were travelling by train and not plane.

Arriving in Vancouver the next morning, we joined our Alaskan cruise ship, disembarking at the port of Juneau. Our plan was for a couple or so of excursions. The first took us back to sea to watch as a pod of killer whales, their dorsal fins cresting the surface in silent formation, on a hunt. The second saw us at the Mendenhall Glacier, half a mile wide with ice in parts 800 feet deep, and catching up with some more bears. The third – we went by boat since there are so few roads in Alaska – ushered us by water from the natural wilderness to what was once the centre of some pretty wild human activity.

Skagway made its name as a Klondike gold rush settlement, and you feel you can still hear the sound of pickaxes echoing in the nearby canyons, and the tunes of barroom pianos and the hubbub of boisterous boomtown crowds filling its streets. History felt even closer, perilously so, when we took the woodentracked railway through the White Horse Pass, the superstructure of struts and beams supporting the lines hewn from the pine forests. Our onward journey to the marvellous Glacier Bay National Park, with its dark fjords, tidewater glaciers, freshwater rivers and streams, and gleaming snow-topped mountains, brought a moment of reflection. As recently as 1794, when explorer Captain George Vancouver first charted the adjacent waters of Icy Strait, he noted that the bay was a mere five-mile indent in a colossal glacier thousands of feet thick, filling a 100-mile long fjord and stretching as far inland as the St Elias mountain range. But the ice has been in concentrated retreat, melting away in the face of rising temperatures. As we cruised past the ice shelf, we were startled by a low, silence-consuming roar: seconds later, the glacier calved a monumental slab of ice, which thundered into the bay. We spotted a family of black bears on the banks of the bay, and the captain stopped the boat for half an hour so that we could watch them browse and snuffle and play.

Cruising back to Vancouver, we called in at Granville Island, perched on the city’s peninsula, which was once a decaying industrial area but has been rejuvenated. Arts shops, crafts studios, farmers’ markets and fabulous seafood restaurants now jostle for your attention along the quayside. Our final destination, before flying home, was Vancouver’s world-famous Stanley Park, an oasis of green in the city’s downtown area. Hugging the coastline, the park, abundant in gardens, pools, lagoons and stretches of mighty Douglas firs,Western Red cedars and Sitka spruces, their height outreaching even the spreadwinged totem poles that stand sentinel beside them, was a fitting conclusion to our trip.

For in western Canada, even the city parks seem to carry reminders of the sheer size of the Rockies. On our journey to Vancouver we had passed another train. It lasted an age to rumble past us, hauling its freight of 250 coaches behind it. Yet even this monument to humankind’s own capacity for the colossal was dwarfed by the landscape through which it travelled. The Rockies feel eternal. I know that my memories of them will last a lifetime.

The team at Tickets Anywhere can tailor and plan a Canadian Rockies holiday of a lifetime – or the holiday of a lifetime anywhere else – specifically to suit your wishes, making sure that it includes the sights you want to see and the places you want to visit.