The year was 1883. The Canadian Pacific Railway was stretching a path across the young country, helping people settle the wide open spaces of the West. Three employees with the railway stumbled upon a series of hot springs high up in the Rocky Mountains. Their timing was outstanding. This was an era when natural spas around the world were attracting wealthy globetrotters, with railroads providing the needed transportation. The three ‘discoverers' predicted personal riches and saw big dollar signs. So did the Canadian government. Within two years, the prime minister proposed a fairly new concept – the creation of a…

We shot past the US-Canadian border so quickly that we had to turn back afterwards to take a photo. We were anticipating the same kind of grilling we received when we entered the US, but Canadians are simply a much more laid-back bunch. We drove north through the wide-open Alberta prairies to Calgary, the biggest city in the province (pop: 1.2 million). Until about 1950, the area was mostly about agriculture. But that all changed when large oil reserves were found further north near Edmonton. Calgary was then caught up in a major and lengthy oil boom, followed by a…

We arrived in Glacier National Park, a place that had been recommended by a number of people both before and during our travels. We came prepared to see some glaciers and do some hiking. To understand this park, I had to go back to basics. What is a glacier? It is ice, densely compacted together, that is constantly moving under its own weight. Imagine if snow began to accumulate on the top of a hill at a rate faster than it can melt. Over time this would form a dense body of ice. Over some more time, this body would…

Montana is a big state, larger than the whole of Japan. Like Wyoming, it’s a state with wide open spaces and not that many people in them. Heading north from Yellowstone, we passed ranch after ranch after ranch. We misjudged the distance between two towns – the state is just that big – and rolled into a town called Ennis on prayers and petrol fumes. In celebration of our luck, we smashed a diner-style meal at Ennis Cafe including a turkey sandwich with mash & gravy and fried chicken strips. We had three main stops planned on our route northward…

The main thing about Yellowstone National Park, and something that I didn’t fully process until we were right in the middle, is that it is actually a giant active supervolcano. A supervolcano is exactly what it sounds like – a huge monster volcano, or more scientifically, one that at some point has blasted more than a thousand cubic kilometres of stuff into the air in one eruption. That’s a level eight on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, an index that goes up to eight. From what I can gather, “liquid hot magma” in the earth’s innards rises up into the crust…

We left Custer State Park and South Dakota behind, forging our way westward through Wyoming, a wondrous place where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains. We went through three distinct regions before arriving in the town of Greybull. It started with miles and miles and miles of high elevation tree-less prairies, with the horizon broken only by nodding donkey pumpjacks. Amongst all 50 states, Wyoming has the 10th largest landmass and the smallest population – about 600,000 people. There are more people living in Alaska than in Wyoming! We passed the Powder River Basin area, a region that produces…

We entered the Black Hills – a huge stretch of western South Dakota home to dark granite mountains blanketed with spruce and pine trees. The place has mystical appeal and the Sioux travelled here for generations to speak with the Great Spirit and await visions. The purpose of our visit was twofold – Custer State Park and Mount Rushmore. Custer State Park is a large wildlife reserve named after Colonel Custer of “Custer’s Last Stand”-fame. The key reason for the visit was to find the illusive American bison. While they are commonly known as buffalo in US and Canada, American…

We drove through Nebraska, passing small farming towns like Oakdale (pop: 322), Neligh (pop: 1,651), and Valentine (“The Heart City”; pop: 2,803), past John Deere dealerships displaying their best agri-equipment on big lawns. Corn and soy bean fields, giant irrigation equipment, and grain elevators gave way to tree-less grasslands with scattered herds of cattle. We pivoted north into South Dakota, and into our first major Indian reservation called Rosebud. Three interesting sights – a tribal casino (of course), energy-generating wind turbines, and that most small holdings seemed to have stockpiled a number of rusted and broken-down cars alongside their main…