JOURNEY THROUGH CANADA

Go west across the Rocky Mountains from Calgary to Vancouver, winding through jaw-dropping scenery and encountering magnificent wildlife

- IAN BELCHER

Linking two sophisticated cities - Calgary and Vancouver - this 600-mile journey completely justifies that overused word 'spectacular'. Have your camera ready to capture the other-worldly landscapes, ancient First Nations sites, towering snow-slathered mountains and no-filter-required emerald lakes.

There's also wildlife in abundance - everything from bears to orcas zingingly good Chardonnay and the shimmering Pacific Ocean for a finishing line. If there's a drawback, it's scenic fatigue the danger that your senses get blunted by the national parks' relentlessly epic vistas on a grander scale than anything in Europe. A pretty nice problem to have.

The 10-day route chases the setting sun out of Calgary towards the west, but starts with a 90-minute drive to the east into South Alberta's Badlands, where the grassy plains plummet into a maze of steep, multihued mesas (flat-topped hills) and winding canyons - home to the largest deposit of dinosaur bones on earth. Drumheller's Royal Tyrrell Museum displays some of the most complete dinosaur skeletons ever found.

Further south, at Writing-on-Stone Park, you enter an alien world sculpted by ice, water and wind, with vast forests of sandstone hoodoos (rock spires) and vertiginous cliffs - a canvas for the greatest collection of rock art on North America's Great Plains. Thousands of carvings and paintings, made mainly by the Blackfoot Nation over 3,000 years ago, depict warriors, bison, tipis and spirits.