Trail riding in the Canadian Rockies

With its mountains, alpine forests and "emerald" glacial lakes, Canada's Banff National Park is glorious riding country – and you won’t find better guides to it than those at Banff Trail Riders, said Zoey Goto in National Geographic Traveller.

This corner of the Rocky Mountains has been attracting tourists since the late 19th century, and the national park – Canada's oldest, established in 1885 – has always drawn female adventurers. But even though early pioneers included the naturalist Mary Schäffer Warren and the mountaineer Georgia Engelhard, when Banff Trail Riders was founded in 1962, guiding was still a man's job. Today, however, 80% of the staff are women – reflecting, perhaps, the growing enthusiasm for the "cowgirl" lifestyle in the wider world.

The family-owned company is based on the outskirts of Banff, a resort town 110 miles west of Calgary, in southwestern Alberta. On one of its three-day treks, guests spend two nights at Sundance Lodge, a "rustic" ten-room log cabin that lies deep in the national park, a full day's ride from base. Built in 1991, the lodge sits next to Ten-Mile Cabin, a rest shelter dating back to 1923. It's a "modern take" on the early pioneer homesteads that once dotted this region, with stags' heads mounted on the walls; from its wraparound porch, marmots can often be seen on the lawn, standing up and sniffing the air "like fat meerkats". On the trail, you might also see bears (guides are well trained to handle such encounters, should they occur).

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Mules accompany riding parties, and are loaded with supplies that include steaks to be "washed down with metallic mugs of cowboy coffee" during wonderful campfire lunches. The riding gets "rough-and-tumble" at times, along cliff-edge paths or through "boulder-strewn streams", but the horses and mules are as nimble as "ballroom dancers". And the views at almost every turn are epic in scale, from sweeping wildflower meadows to "jagged" peaks rising well above 3,000 metres.

The three-day trip costs from £945 (horseback.com).