As you fill eye, mind, heart, and imagination with these mountain forms and mountain masses, you feel overwhelmed with their grandeur. The six hundred miles from Calgary to Vancouver form beyond comparison the most striking and wonderful railway ride that can be enjoyed in going round the world—rushing torrents, silvery cascades falling thousands of feet down steep mountain sides; mighty rivers hurrying to the sea; slumbering lakes reflecting snowy summits; deep and dark gorges torn by raving waterfalls; beetling precipices; forests of stately pines in quiet valleys; mountain sides ploughed and scarred by avalanches; leagues of slumbering glaciers slowly grinding their way down the rocky slopes; four vast ranges to be crossed—the Rockies, the Selkirks, the Gold and the Coast ranges, each with peculiar features of grandeur and beauty, of loveliness and terror.

The road follows the Fraser River along its wild canon for several hours. Nowhere else is such a sight or such a series of sights to be witnessed—the mighty river rushing with headlong haste, and bearing on its seething bosom all the wreckage borne by the swollen torrents from the impending cliffs overhead; the train winding its way into tunnels, out of tunnels, along the face of the solid rock, over bridges that span nameless cataracts. Even in midsummer the Fraser is full-flooded, angry, furious; and it seems a wonderful achievement of human science to wrest from its banks a safe highway for the "iron horse."