Reading through The Canadian Rockies; Early travels and explorations, by Esther Fraser was an amazing adventure, and even though these were the reminiscences and experiences of those who braved the unknowns of an hitherto-unexplored and vast territory of mountain ranges and valleys dating from the 18th to the 19th Centuries, it made me feel personally nostalgic.

These were people who had a professional and both an amateur-explorers' interest in what lay ahead of them, as they blazed new passages to the interior of the Canadian Rockies, never quite knowing what they would find ahead of them, but driven on by impetuous curiosity and an inner need to discover, mapping the terrain as they proceeded.

We think of Canada's First Nations as having been in possession of full knowledge of all these places, the forests thick with giants of their species, the immense valleys of ice fields, the mountain passes, and the grand, imposing, forbidding and beautiful mountains themselves, but the Indians were practical in nature, driven to fend for themselves, not to explore where there was no game to be had at relative ease in quantities sufficient for their needs.

And then, beyond the explorers, the map-makers, botanists and people who dedicated their lives to be the first to ascend those peaks and to name them, there were the hordes of people driven by hope and poverty to go West to take part in the Gold Rush. Many did not survive, from those who were swept away by torrents of swift-rushing rivers we now know as the Thompson and Fraser, and those too who were swept off mountain tops in their weary, storm-bound descents.

When at last they saw the Rockies, "lofty snow-clad peaks, standing out in bold relief against the blue sky beyond and glistening in the sunlight the company was enraptured at the sight of them; for whatever dangers or difficulties might possibly be in store for us among them, all were heartily tired of the endless succession of hills and streams and swamps ... and were willing to face almost any danger that would be likely to terminate or vary our toils."

We flew out to Vancouver twenty years ago to meet up with our younger son in Vancouver, and to travel with him on one of many adventures we shared with him when we were younger. And those adventures, in those years, generally took place in British Columbia. When we experienced our first, memorable alpine ascent fully loaded with backpacks, to set up camp on the slope of a mountain side, below a glacial lake of startling blue, at a short distance a steadily dripping glacier.

Most of the people in this group of Overlanders made the fifty-mile trip west to Cache Creek; hardly any continued north to the Cariboo. Like those who had followed the Fraser, they turned away from the "El Dorado of our hopes". A few journeyed from Quesnel, a few from Cache Creek to the gold fields to see for themselves, but the majority accepted the evidence presented by weary and dejected men returning from the Cariboo: for every one who found gold, nine "merely stayed and starved".

We too, made the long trip from Vancouver to the Cariboo. We stopped at Cache Creek, and made our way to the Bowron Lakes for a week's adventure of canoeing and portaging the string of lakes and rivers that together made up the Bowron Lake circuit, an arduous but breathtaking adventure of our own. We saw others rescued from situations they couldn't manage to endure, but ourselves, like many others, successfully completing the circuit.

We stayed over briefly in Prince George, went on to Harrison Hot Springs, then to Chilliwack, to wander in wonder at the cathedral-like presence of forest giants beyond Lake Chilliwack in the old growth forest there, and stood in awe in the Fraser River Canyon, that deep and immense cleft on the Earth's crust amidst the mountains, with rail tracks and tunnels running right through those mountains.

Our labours through unending days of cold and rain were amply rewarded by the quality of the experience, together doing everything required to make this adventure of ours a shared memory we would treasure. There is no comparison to what we experienced and what those early doughty adventurers and Outlanders experienced; we had the advantage of modern conveniences and the knowledge that this was a temporary break in our lives.

Theirs was a gamble, to take themselves away from the weary squalor of their lives in a harsh land to the hopes of a new start elsewhere, in territory unknown to them, but which was reputed to hold the answer to the hopes of so many. Those who remained despite their disappointments, helped to populate the West.