America’s own spectacular luxury train journey now covers almost 1000km

I rubberneck at couples edgily queueing outside a Mormon temple in Salt Lake City’s south-eastern suburbs. They return the rubberneck, curious at the handsome passenger train click-clacking past them for the first time; no doubt hitched by the time I finish this good-by-US-standards coffee.

Minutes before, the Canyon Spirit pulls away from a Sopranos-like industrial area in Utah’s state capital, bound for Denver, Colorado, after a steward acknowledges the land’s traditional owners, the Ute and Goshute first nations (this was a trial run, the train now departs from Salt Lake City’s Amtrak station).

For luxury trainspotters, the carriage livery may look familiar. Canyon Spirit is a rebrand of America’s Rocky Mountaineer, which since 2021 has travelled the two-day route between Denver and Moab, Utah. Armstrong Collective, operator of the Canadian Rocky Mountaineer routes, has added a day to the itinerary, launching this three-day Rockies to the Red Rocks route between Salt Lake City and Colorado’s capital, covering a little under 1000 kilometres. The train is renamed in tribute to the landscapes it traverses, strategically delineating it from its Canadian siblings.

Heading south-west along Provo Valley, I spread a quenelle of honey-butter – a nod to this, the Beehive State – onto a profoundly sugared Utah-style scone. The panorama windows, which curve part-way into the ceiling, showcase a diorama of Utah’s urban curiosities. The tech-hub of Silicon Slopes. The ultra-conservative communities of Happy Valley. All, however, kowtow to the Wasatch Range’s sublime tectonic drama, Park City and ski resorts aplenty up there somewhere.

Pelicans skim the shallow, carp-filled waters of mirage-inducing Utah Lake before soaring over bone-dry banks. Immense as it is, this is a mere puddle compared with the Great Salt Lake to the north. The train follows the historic Denver and Rio Grande lines, zigzagging up and away from Salt Lake City via Gilluly Loops, steep 180-degree hairpins, cresting Soldier Summit at 2279 metres.

Past Price Canyon’s fairy-cave kingdom of honeycombed sedimentary rock walls, Utah’s high desert yawns open, blushing flamboyant red. Our hosts animate the forbidding landscape with tales of yore – from the “ghost” hot springs resort which once claimed to cure the “common use of profanity” to a coalmine where Butch Cassidy’s staged an audacious gold heist.

I recline, click up my footrest, order a negroni, then sprawl out in the forward-facing premium-economy-like seat in “Premier Upgrade experience”, essentially first class, with a carriage-specific lounge car. Low tunnels in Colorado limit the Canyon Spirit to a single deck, so meals are served on the white-table-clothed fold-down tray, as opposed to the double-decker Canadian Rocky Mountaineer’s GoldLeaf Service, with sightseeing up top and dining below.

“The [Canadian trains] have a full commercial kitchen set-up that could service a 60-seat restaurant,” says Kaelhub Cudmore, Armstrong Collective’s culinary specialist.

“The Spirit cooks are confined to a reasonably small galley, so some food has to be packaged and reheated. I demand that our chefs rise to the challenge. It’s wild what comes out of each galley’s two ovens.”

Over three days, I eat mostly culinary victories with just a couple of could-do-betters (including lacklustre scrambled eggs). My first three-course lunch features a stunning seared beef tenderloin with celebration potatoes (AKA “Mormon funeral potatoes”) paired with a Colterris cabernet sauvignon from Palisade, Colorado, one of the en-route “partners that help people interact with what they see out the windows”.

The tequila for the barbecue-rib sauce hails from a master distiller in Moab (grandma’s recipe). Afternoon tacos are garnished with pickled desert cacti. Bakery-fresh strawberry champagne cakes will be loaded in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.

Inter-carriage, open-sided vestibules are prime, bugs-in-the-teeth nooks to witness the quirks of desert communities and the MAGA-flag-flying trailer parks on their peripheries. Towns such as Helper (named for the extra locomotives needed to climb the grade) and Green River, which paints an anomalous fertile flourish in the Utah sand, a boom-and-bust settlement famous for its melons.

The vast, flat desert is ultimately unassailable, yanking attention towards irresistible leading lines. The domineering ridges of the Book Cliffs range, metaphorical shelves of giant’s tomes. Vintage telegraph poles leaning into the vanishing point. Dust devils dancing atop the earth’s desiccated crust, protecting a delicate biome of mosses and lichen underneath.

We leave the train near Jackass Joe’s UFO Jerky convenience store, boarding a coach for stopover one: Moab, a town founded at a geographical low point where pioneers and outlaws could cross the Colorado River. The eclectic, eccentric settlement attracts a gypsy mix of climbing bros, four-wheel-drivers and freedom-lovers. Aside from a phalanx of outdoor stores, Tex-Mex restaurants and T-shirt shops, Moab is home base for one of America’s quintessential day-trips: Arches National Park. This trippy desertscape backdropped so many 20th century cinematic blockbusters that authorities limited visitor numbers so it didn’t become a desert Disneyland.

The extravaganza begins with imposing Navajo sandstone cliffs at the national park entrance, where rock climbers scale ludicrous lines, before the landscapes flattens into a sweeping parched realm roamed by prairie dogs and rattlesnakes. Massive masterpieces of poetic erosion sentry every horizon: arches, massifs, rock towers and giant physics-mocking ‘balanced’ rocks. It’s an equally unfathomable and eerily familiar place, starring Organ Rock (Thelma & Louise) and Delicate Arch (a three-hour hike from the road), star of Indiana Jones and Utah licence plates. At ground level, educated eyes can’t look past the phenomenal density of dinosaur footprints/fossils and First Nations artefacts like arrow heads.

A flaming desert sunrise signals it’s time to reboard. We dawdle along a former potash mining subdivision track before hitting 100km/h again on the main line. The Book Cliffs seize the horizon again while the “painted” shale desert below is a pretty pandemonium of earthy tones. Occasionally, a pronghorn antelope, reportedly the fastest land animal in the US, gallops in the distance.

The Rocky Mountains unsubtly mark their territory around Cisco, Utah, population two, where Thelma and Louise blew up the truck. We squeeze into Ruby Canyon, where trackside electric fences sit ready to warn of up-track rockslides. Passing through Grand Junction, the largest Colorado town “this side of the Continental Divide”, the Canyon Spirit’s classics and yacht-rock-heavy soundtrack lands on a rich seam of John Denver.

We overnight in archetypal mountain town Glenwood Springs, down-valley from glam ski town Aspen. Armstrong Collective chief executive Tristan Armstrong, whose father founded Rocky Mountaineer in the 1990s “with rented tuxedos and government handouts”, says that the Canyon Spirit is no sleeper train, too focused on daylight sightseeing and small-town stopovers like this.

With pre-distributed room keys, train-to-trackside-hotel transition is low-friction. My suitcase beats me to my room in retrospectively fresh Hotel Maxwell. Stopover life is indeed breezy. I dine across the street at what some say is the best restaurant in town, The Pullman (splendid risotto), then stroll down to the enormous hot-spring pool to soak in the waning summer twilight.

The scent of baking cinnamon brioche bouquets the morning’s journey into Glenwood Canyon, via forest-fire-decimated Grizzly Creek and No Name, a blink-and-miss-it “unincorporated” town. Today, the last day, we’ll flash through dozens of tunnels, including the 10-kilometre, Continental-Divide-conquering Moffat Tunnel.

Close to the Paul Newman-founded Roundup River Ranch, where a single brown horse slurps from the river, host Olivia implores us to keep our eyes peeled for Eddie and Edith, huge eagles with a double-bed-sized nest atop a dead ponderosa pine. The Colorado River, ever fringed by Douglas firs, blue spruce and cottonwoods, changes moods and swaps sides whimsically. The double-deck I-70 highway, an engineering wunderkind that winds all the way to Denver, hints that the end is nigh.

I retire to the lounge car, a tasteful den of Golden Age sophistication, to taste Colorado bourbons and sundry with mixologist Leigh Berry. She talks about her drink selection like old buddies. The “burn-free” Leopold Silvertree vodka, which graces the dirty martini. The Odell Lagerado, poured from a cartoon-train can. Each is made with Colorado River water; enough reason to preserve the mighty waterway, she says. Leigh wants to add some “great” whiskies from more-regulated Utah to the menu soon.

I graze on my final meal of bison and wild mushroom lasagna, as the Spirit passes Winter Park ski resort, in full summer repose. We thread granite canyon after granite canyon, before the Great Plains flicker between the trees, Denver’s skyline silhouetted in the atmosphere below. Three days feels too short and there’s already talk of expanding the route, possibly to Las Vegas. “It will grow, eventually,” says Tristan Armstrong, “but Salt Lake City to Denver is the focus right now.”

The Canyon Spirit’s Premier Upgrade might not quite have the accoutrements of its top-tier Rocky Mountaineer contemporary, but it certainly offers unostentatious, refined and relaxed luxury with attentive, personality-filled service. It is, perhaps, the most wonderful way to stare, snap, sip and snack your way through the landscapes of these two extraordinary American states.

THE DETAILS

TRAIN
The three-day Rockies to the Red Rocks journey costs from $4176 a person, with onboard meals and drinks and stopover accommodation included. Trains run from April-November. See canyonspirit.com

STAY
For before-and-after accommodation, the Grand America Hotel, Salt Lake City (grandamerica.com) costs from $429 a night and Hotel Indigo Denver Downtown (ihg.com) from $170.

FLY
United Airlines flies from Australian east coast cities to San Francisco and Los Angeles with multiple direct connections to Denver and Salt Lake City. See united.com

The writer was a guest of Canyon Spirit.