Holiday on Horseback: Horseback Riding and Trail Rides in Banff, Alberta from Warner Guiding and Outfitting

Source: Qantas The Australian Way December 2009

Rachel Ward saddles up for a trail ride in the Rocky Mountain wilderness – where the wolf whistles are the real thing.

A 6.30am departure from toasty sleeping bags into a brisk alpine dawn to try to catch either sight or sound of elusive wolves separates the intrepid adventurer from the lazy sod (that includes certain husbands). They would wake to regret it.

Ten from a group of 14 fall in line behind Melanie Percy, naturalist and wolf-call imitator extraordinaire. Condensed air blows from mouths and only the crunch of boots and the chaffing of waterproof gear disturbs the silence of still-slumbering slopes deep within Canada’s Banff National Park. A steady 40-minute climb up Flints Peak produces a lot of huffing and puffing, and the Cascade River valley, in all her evergreen mountain splendour, below. The first snowfall of the season dusts the hard, grey granite peaks encircling the vista. Racing clouds threaten more snow and a lone osprey wheels in hope of breakfast. This is Jack London (Call Of The Wild) territory, moments before unearthly temperatures and impenetrable snowfalls will annex it, preventing human penetration until winter is over.

Warner Guiding & Outfitting runs trail-riding tours through this wilderness during the temperate months with enticements of time spent in wolf and bear habitats, although seeing or hearing them is, sometimes, another matter.

This is vast country. Banff, just one of several Canadian Rockies National Parks, covers 6641sq km. There are more than 120 black and grizzly bears, numerous elk and moose, mountain goats and big-horn sheep, and three packs of wolves. However, if they don’t want to be seen by the most fearsome and nosey species of the animal kingdom – us – then they are under no obligation. The Cascade wolf pack is out there somewhere (the tour group preceding this one witnessed two of them larking about in the pasture only minutes from the campsite), but generally they maintain their mystique by rare appearances.

Melanie Percy cups her hands around her mouth and howls. The sound is almost shocking in its authenticity, as if she harbours some werewolf incarnation under her all-Canadian, blue-eyed blonde extremity. As the low, haunting note floats down the valley, group members take a wary step back and hold their breath waiting for a response.

Eight, nine, 10 and back it comes – but trebled, quadrupled. The wolves’ howls overlap, over and over again, like wind crying through a desolate tunnel. Hairs rise on the backs of necks; the group all grin with mutual, inane delight. Percy, who has spent years tracking and researching wolves in the area, fills in the picture. Wolves love to howl. The full moon is a fallacy; give them any excuse and they’re off, tails thumping the ground with enthusiasm. There are five in the pack; the yapping chorus is from this year’s pups.

Warner Guiding & Outfitting’s Holiday On Horseback offers (among other things) three- to six-day rides over a 100km route encircling the Vermillion Ranges. Three semipermanent campsites are spread a day’s ride apart. The longer trips take day forays into adjacent valleys returning to the same camp at night. All the camps have a similar set-up: A-frame canvas tents for two, mattress the thickness of half your thumb, a tin bowl for washing, and meals cooked by cowgirls wearing bronco buckles with varying degrees of culinary experience. There’s a timeless, authentic quality to it all. If it’s a pioneer experience you’re after, that’s what you’ll get. Every detail seems to spell some old-time Western magic. Surely John Wayne has shaved his bristles in front of the cracked mirror nailed to the washstand. Surely Alan Ladd has kicked his heels onto the old steel-barrel fire to dry his boots. Surely Doris Day’s hemline has brushed the packed earthen floor inside the large communal kitchen tent where meals are served and cowgirl-cooks untie their pinnies and pick up fiddles to serenade tired trail riders.

Of course, it’s the riding we’re all here for. Not adrenaline junkie kind of riding; anyone looking for breakneck gallops across open plains should look elsewhere. The terrain here – deep gorges, high ridges and hard flint paths – is tough on horses and, although not for wimps, is a riding holiday that conforms more to a sort of “slow movement” ethos where steadiness and togetherness is more the order of the day than the usual manic speed of life in the 21st century.

It takes only a few hours in the saddle – following the burnished, round rear of the horse in front, the meandering paths embroidered with clumps of mauve daisies (asters, for the botanists), drawing in the sweet smell of the spruce pine, listening to the burbling of the Cascade River below and tinkle of bells from the necks of the pack mules – to be delivered of all trace of a life that went before. That, taken with a kaleidoscope of spellbinding views and lunch of hamburgers cooked on a small charcoal brazier followed by sweet cups of coffee, is about as life-enhancing and rejuvenating as it gets.

This holiday is not exclusive to those who have a wealth of experience in the saddle. The horses are handpicked to suit every level of horsemanship. The good-natured nags will do this round trip more than 16 times in a season. Western saddles make this sport a doddle even for grandmothers and children; one woman on the tour had ridden only a total of five hours beforehand. And at the end of a five-hour day in the saddle, there’s a cowboy in a black stetson to meet you at the corral, and un-tack and feed your faithful steed.

The rivers, either the Cascade or Forty Mile Creek, which you follow on the return, are a significant part of the experience. They are broad and mostly shallow, ice-cold water tumbling over smooth boulders and as clear as you will ever find. The trail criss-crosses the river all day and the romance of crossing it on horseback never pales; a combination of the playful pawing that goes on whenever horses encounter water and the purely aesthetic quality of a line of horses crossing a running stream. It’s a sight shared by Indians, cowboys, pioneers and trackers, ad infinitum, and somehow restores faith in the timeless order of things. The massive, untrammeled, grey mountains rising out of great green sheaves of alpine forestry for miles and miles doesn’t diminish a comforting sense that all is not entirely lost to greed and development in this ailing planet of ours.

AF Tschiffely, the Swiss-born adventurer who, in 1925, undertook perhaps the most ambitious trail ride of all time (Buenos Aires to Washington DC), later wrote of the value of “seeing it from the saddle, for the smell and creaking of leather and the company of a horse give it an atmosphere people can today only find in novels.”

Undoubtedly, it is exactly this sentiment that draws together those whose idea of bliss is picking the way along Sawback Ridge, a 40-mile (64km) pass with perilous drops on either side, but views across to towering Mount Brewster and turquoise glacier-fed lakes. Or straining through binoculars at the sighting of a grizzly on the far hill before lunch around a fire at Rainbow Lake, where the conversation rarely strays from accounts of other adventures taken by this disparate mob of wilderness junkies. Perhaps sleeping in five layers of clothing on pillows of bright green moss banks blanketing forests straight out of Middle Earth, chipping the ice off the top of water bottles when the night temperatures dip below freezing, swimming in the icy temperatures of the rivers after a day in the saddle, or learning to tie a diamond hitch knot. Eating porridge cooled and sweetened with tinned milk, meeting others from across the globe who share your passions (six nationalities on this tour alone), and falling in awe with your tour guide (Cindy Obrigewitsch), a five-foot-five (1.65m) bundle of strength with a broad smile and can-do attitude.

For all this hardy adventure, on return, there is nothing like the luxury of a massage, a glass of cabernet and the crisp white sheets at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel. Don’t count on sleeping well, though. After four nights of roughing it, a cowgirl can’t take too much heat and comfort.

For more information and pictures on this article, http://travelinsider.qantas.com.au/canadian_rockies_rachel_ward.htm.