Our pictures can’t capture the majesty of what my husband and I saw on our recent trip to the Canadian Rockies. As our Caravan tour guide suggested, we rated the scenery as wow, wow-wow, and wow-wow-wow. Most of what we saw fit the triple-wow category.

Our journey began in Calgary, which was a direct, not quite five-hour flight from the Raleigh-Durham Airport. Calgary is in the Alberta Province of Canada, above Montana.

Canadian train trips are a popular way to view the Rockies, but we chose to join a bus tour with a company (Caravan) we’ve used over the years for other trips.

The railroad is a big deal in Canada, though, since the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the late 1800s is what opened up the western part of the country for settlement, and today, tourism. A walking tour we took in Calgary began near the historic Canadian Pacific Railway Station in Calgary, built in 1910.

Calgary, the gateway to the Rockies, is a combination of old and new. The city boasts skyscrapers but has an annual festival called the Stampede, which features chuckwagon races and all kinds of rodeo events. The Stampede celebrates Alberta’s western cowboy heritage.

I’d never thought of Canada in terms of having a ranching, frontier, cowboy kind of history much like that of the United States. I learned otherwise. We were taken to the Bar U Ranch National Historic site, where a cowgirl filled us in on some history of the Canadian West.

On our way to the Canadian Rockies from Calgary, we rode through the prairies. The pretty yellow crop is canola.

Once we reached the Canadian Rockies, we entered Waterton Lakes National Park, which joined Glacier Park in Montana in 1932 to become the world’s first International Peace Park. As you can see from the sign, Canada has two official languages: English and French.

The wow factor increased as we cruised on Waterton Lake. Looking at the snow-capped mountains that abutted the lake, I was reminded of the Norwegian fjords.

Though the trip was billed as a tour of the Canadian Rockies, we did into Montana one day to visit Glacier National Park. It was fun to explore the park in a restored 1930’s touring coach called the “Red Jammer.” And again, the scenery was spectacular.

Back in Canada, we spent four nights in beautiful downtown Banff, surrounded by the grandeur of Banff National Park.

A gondola ride in Banff took us to the summit of Sulphur Mountain with steps leading to an even higher elevation. Of course we had to go the extra mile, literally. After our hike was one of the few times I was hot in the blissfully cool weather of Canada.

Jasper National Park, Canada’s largest at 4,200 square miles, was also on our agenda. Here we had a wow, wow, wow experience riding across the Columbia Icefield’s Athabasca Glacier on something called an Ice Explorer. We got out and tentatively walked around the glacier. Thankfully, no broken bones to report.

Old folks tubing, billed as a float trip on the Bow River, was another adventure. Can you identify my husband and me in this group huddled together?

The mountains and the glaciers were stunning, but the lakes of the Canadian Rockies were also spectacular. Glaciers feed Moraine Lake and Lake Louise, resulting in sparkling, turquoise-colored water.

Unfortunately, we didn’t stay in the thirteen-hundred-dollars-a-night hotel there at Lake Louise. Maybe next time….ha, ha.

Visiting the Canadian Rockies is not a hard trip from eastern North Carolina, just a roughly five-hour direct flight from Raleigh to Calgary. It’s a great vacation to take in the hot, humid days of a Southern summer when the temps in this part of Canada feel like early spring.

And once there, you’re rewarded with some of the most spectacular mountains, lakes, and glaciers to be seen in North America. Absolutely wow-wow-wow.