Glaciers, Grizzlies & the Last Frontier

You touch down in Calgary and collect the keys to your hire car. Within 45 minutes the skyline fades in the rear-view mirror and the Rockies begin to fill the windscreen. The scale of it is immediate and almost shocking — serrated peaks, pine-dark valleys and a sky that seems larger than anywhere else on earth. Tonight you stay on the edge of the mountains, readying yourself for what lies ahead.

Banff National Park is a place that renders superlatives inadequate. Lake Louise, with its famous turquoise water and glacier backdrop, is the iconic image — but it's Moraine Lake, tucked into the Valley of Ten Peaks, that tends to stop people mid-breath. You spend two days here: one for the lakes, one for the gondola ride above the treeline and an evening watching the wildlife come out along the Bow Valley Parkway.

The Icefields Parkway has been called the most beautiful road in the world. For 230 kilometres between Banff and Jasper, you drive through a landscape of hanging glaciers, impossibly blue lakes and waterfalls that seem to pour directly from the sky. Halfway along, you stop for the Ice Explorer — a specially designed vehicle that drives directly onto the Athabasca Glacier, followed by a walk across the Glacier Skywalk, suspended above a canyon with views down to the valley floor.

Jasper is larger, quieter and wilder than Banff. Your base is Pyramid Lake Resort, where the still water reflects the mountains in almost perfect symmetry. Days here are for wandering: Maligne Canyon for ice-sculpted limestone, Maligne Lake for a boat trip to Spirit Island, and the valley roads for spotting moose, caribou and, if you're fortunate, wolves crossing the meadows at dusk.

You fly from Vancouver to Anchorage and the journey shifts entirely. Alaska is wilder, bigger and more elemental than anywhere in the lower 48. A train carries you north to Denali National Park — a six-million-acre wilderness dominated by North America's highest peak. Just one road penetrates the park, and the rule is simple: no private vehicles. You travel by park bus, scanning the tundra for grizzly bears, Dall sheep, caribou and wolves.

A bus south from Anchorage delivers you to Seward, a small fishing town at the head of Resurrection Bay. From here you board the boat for the Kenai Fjords Glacier and Wildlife Cruise — one of the great wildlife encounters on earth. Humpback whales breach alongside the boat. Orcas surface and dive. Puffins crowd the sea stacks. And tidewater glaciers calve house-sized chunks of ice into the ocean with a sound like a cannon shot.