Window view on Via Train from Edmonton to Jasper National Park, Canada

Traveler’s content is settling over me like a well- placed comforter. The train rocks me, the scenery is flocked forests and red barns with roofs of thick white snow and tribes of bare-branched birches collecting ice crystals like ornaments. So many shades of white. The Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, I need a more versatile vocabulary for the blue-whites, green-whites, and brown-whites so soothing to the eyes viewed from the pleasures of a moving train.

Train Travel to the Canadian Rockies

A bit of traveler’s dilemna. My body wants sleep. My cabin is one big cradle and the bed is so nicely pulled down. My eyes want to feast on window fare—a tall steepled church monolithically rising from the white just passed before I could get my camera on. My mind says use the time for writing stories, for overdue emails, for writing thank yous… no, it argues, don’t forfeit tracks of uplifting “now”– meditate on the cold world beautifully framed by the window, a moving canvas of a realm harsh to others and benign to the pampered traveler.

From Edmonton to Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada

I have started writing about yesterday for this column, but the light is so cheerfully bright outside. I expect the cone-shaped firs to start twirling in dance like Christmassy tops. Blue sky over the clean whites, clusters of horses, curved parallel lines- ski tracks to somewhere I can’t see.

Culture and Nature

We left Edmonton many kilometers of tracks back, heading through Alberta, Canada from the bright lights of a dynamic creative urban center to the raw wilderness and muses of the Canadian Rockies. Ahead,  Jasper National Park with its Dark Sky Preserve, as well as the comforts of the renowned Fairmont “JPL”- Jasper Park Lodge.

My highlights in Edmonton –staying at the historic Fairmont MacDonald, the “Chateau on the River”;   a regenerating NVE Institute spa treatment by the innovative founders;  the private tour at the Art Gallery of Alberta, the building itself a work of art;  Chef David at the museum’s Zinc Restaurant with his creative “open concept” cuisine, Madison’s Grill with its inviting hospitality– are all physically behind me now, but they are packed in my internal luggage. Now just isn’t the time to unpack them.

I am nestled in one of Via Rail’s most spacious sleeper cars with a private bathroom, having enjoyed good service and food in the dining car.  And now the soul food of nature is out my window.

Canadian Rockies in Alberta

The Rockies thrust up assertions of tenacious glory.  The scrimshaw of geology etches jutting timetables to the sky. And the train keeps rolling forward.

-Lisa TE Sonne for Luxury Travel Mavens

Photography by (c) Lisa TE Sonne

Reflections of the Rockies, Via Train rolling through Alberta, by Lisa TE Sonne