In the early evening we arrived in Jasper, and looking at my map I realised that we had only so far managed to travel around five hundred miles from Vancouver - yes, I know that sounds a lot but out here it really isn't, especially when you consider that the entire journey across the country to Toronto is a distance of two thousand seven hundred. I have a long way to go on the train yet, and that's even before I change to another route and head South into the United States. I had been told that Jasper was one of the most expensive areas anyone could wish to live in this part of the world, and it was certainly clear why as we slowly approached the station. Jasper Station is a purely minimalist affair, standing by the side of a single main road a couple of hundred yards long surrounded on all sides by snow capped mountains. Rows of log cabins could be seen heading a little way up the nearest mountainside on narrow backstreets, but other than that the town seemed very small and inviting - the sort of place where everybody knows everybody else. Jasper doesn't seem to feel any need to spread itself out or build upward just because it's considered a popular destination, but it is one of those places where the local council likes to exaggerate a bit in order to make it sound a lot larger than it is.

Going back to Wikipedia for a moment, I read that Jasper claims to cover an area of over nine hundred square kilometres - which does seem a slightly odd claim when you consider that only four thousand people live in this area and that this equates to only four people per square kilometre. Most of the houses, of course, are perched up in the mountains miles away from anywhere else and there's no reason at all for them not to consider themselves part of the town of Jasper, but when you get off the train at the station and find yourself in the middle of a town with just a handful of small shops and nothing but mountains and log cabins heading off at well spaced intervals up the mountainside, you hardly feel as though you're in a town at all - let alone a large one covering nine hundred square kilometres.

I would imagine that people coming to Jasper settle into a small bed and breakfast and spend their days off skiing somewhere or exploring any of the large number of local natural attractions. The town is at the centre of Jasper National Park, which is the largest in the Canadian Rockies and covers an area of over ten thousand square kilometres - so not a place to be explored in a single day. This is where you will find much of the wildlife for which Canada is famous - Jasper National Park, besides being covered in a fair number of spectacular waterfalls, glaciers and mountains stretching skyward in every direction you turn, is also home to elk, moose, both grizzly and black bears, mountain goats, gray wolves, mountain lions and any other critters you would expect to find wandering the mountains. Compared to large parts of the rest of the world, the Canadian Rockies is not a place which gets accused much of running low on wildlife - there is certainly plenty of wide open space out there for the wildlife to roam freely and never see a human being for as long as it lives. Of course, the tourist shops are full of books about how to fend off a bear attack and, intriguingly, how to know if you're annoying one - personally I'd like to think that, put in the situation of finding myself face to face with a bear in the middle of nowhere, I would have enough common sense to know whether or not I was annoying it. As a general rule, I think that standing perfectly still and not staring at any sort of predator is likely to upset it less than poking it with a stick, for example.

In Jasper, we were all required to leave the train for half an hour while it was cleaned, and I don't think any of us needed to be asked twice. A number of us had already started sulking about all the delightful little stations we had been pulling into for five minutes at a time, where we had been able to look through the window or peer down from the observation bubble at tiny streets of log cabins with children playing in the snow outside and wonder exactly who we had to sleep with to be allowed to get off and look around for a while. As soon as it was announced over the intercom that we would all be required to get off the train in Jasper whether we liked it or not, I think everybody literally jumped up from their seats and were queuing up at the door to be the first off before the train had even finished pulling into the station. Of course, there was always the thought at the back of our minds, while we looked around, that we had to be back on the train at a certain time - after all, when the train comes to town only three times a week, you really really don't want to miss it, especially when all of your worldly possessions are on board. I took the opportunity to run across the road to the local store for a film or two to replace the one I had just exhausted taking far too many snaps of moose and mountains from my seat in the observation car.

The town seemed straight out of a holiday brochure for the Austrian Alps. Every direction I turned, the mountains towered over me. The houses all seemed to have been constructed according to plans stolen from towns in the Alps - if you were blindfolded and airlifted in, you would swear blind that you were in a famous ski resort in Europe. I felt sure that James bond would almost certainly stop off here for no apparent reason, just to chat up some women and show off his skiing skills on the way to a secret lair somewhere in the mountains. Overlooking the town, and impossible to miss, is Pyramid Mountain - named, rather obviously, because of its distinctive shape. At nearly ten thousand feet, Pyramid Mountain is a popular destination for climbers and hikers and is actually considered to be a relatively easy climb as long as visitors don't mind scrambling over rocks and ripping themselves to shreds on recognised climbing routes to the top. Myself, I was quite content to stand in Jasper high street, look up and it and enjoy the view - I've never felt any particular need to kill myself climbing to the top of a high peak simply so that I could say that I've done so. Although that doesn't, I hasten to add, mean that I wouldn't like to go out to the Himalayas and tramp all over them, visiting villages up where the air is thin and hiking the mountain trails - that is something I'd love to do. It's just the sticking large nails into vertical slopes and hauling myself up to a ledge where I can erect a tent and go to sleep in the hope that I don't roll over in the night and plummet thousands of feet to my death that I have a problem with.

In the local store, I managed to find the film I needed for my camera after spending an inordinate amount of time hunting. This was a real local store, and stocked everything from baby food to television sets to skis to postage stamps - you would certainly have had a hard time finding something they didn't have or couldn't get for you, which is probably just as well as I get the impression that the nearest big city must be days away by car, and that's always assuming the roads are open of course. Out here, there is never any guarantee that there won't have been an avalanche or snowstorm in the night which has blocked off any hope of getting in or out - and here's something which will give you an idea of just how remote Jasper is: nobody in the shop knew what I was talking about when I asked for film for my APS camera - nobody had heard of APS, apparently, even though this was at the height of interest in the format and shops seemed to be selling the cameras by the bucketload - but I was able to find exactly what I was looking for by asking for film for a Kodak Advantix camera. They'd heard of Kodak, but were under the impression that Advantix was the name of the film rather than the name of Kodak's brand of APS cameras. Kodak have obviously won the hearts of Jasper, Alberta.

A number of my fellow travellers from the train had decided to stay in Jasper for a few days and were planning to catch a later train onward, and I began to wish that I was staying with them, if only so that I could go out to Pyramid Lake at the base of Pyramid Mountain and actually see the view that everybody was pointing at on the postcards in the local shop. Talking of travelling companions, two of the people who left us in Jasper were girls from Dorset, Nikki and Jo, who turned out to be doing virtually the same trip as me and were eager to compare plans and make sure we were all going to the most interesting places in the few weeks we had left before returning home.

Naturally, though, they only decided to appear in the observation car a couple of hours before we arrived in Jasper, and by the time we had got to know each other and discovered that we were doing virtually identical trips, they were leaving the train. Isn't that always the way? Still, perhaps it was for the best - I just know that, had I had much longer to chat to them about their trip, they would've told me about hundreds of places along my route which I absolutely should have visited.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.