About the Trans Canada Trail - The National Trail Which Is Not One Trail

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

A Single National Pathway Across Canada

 

For the past several months we have been telling people who ask that we are walking across Canada on the Trans Canada Trail. It is a wonderfully simple way to describe an undertaking that, increasingly, does not seem very simple at all. The words create an obvious image: somewhere out there is a trail stretching across the country, and if we keep following it long enough we will eventually reach the other side of the nation and the Pacific Ocean. Before beginning at Cape Spear, I suspect some version of that image existed in our minds as well. We knew from maps and planning that the route would change, that there would be roads and pathways and sections better suited to cyclists than hikers, but there is a difference between understanding those things on a screen and experiencing them day after day on the trail. By the time we reached New Brunswick, the Trans Canada Trail had already been so many different things that calling it simply a “trail” was beginning to seem both wonderfully inadequate and frustratingly misleading.

 

Even during our training for it – we paddled the Salish Sea Marine Trail in British Columbia. We skied Dundas Valley in Ontario. We cycled Norfolk County on the Sunrise Trail.  And of course we hiked the Niagara Parkway Trail from Fort Erie to Niagara-on-the-Lake.

 

Each experience was unique.  Yet even then, perhaps naively, we had the sense that the Trans Canada Trail was a single trail.

 

Even later, when we took our first steps at Cape Spear, we had been on Newfoundland's East Coast Trail, where narrow footpaths followed the edges of rugged Atlantic cliffs. There were steep ascents and descents, rocky coastlines, exposed headlands and stretches where the landscape itself determined how quickly we could move. Within days, that experience had changed completely. Across St. John's we followed the Grand Concourse through neighbourhoods, parks and urban green spaces alongside walkers, runners and cyclists. Farther west, after Holyrood, the route transformed again into the T'Railway, the old railway bed that carried us for hundreds of kilometres across the island through Boreal forest, wetlands, cottage country and remote interior landscapes. The same national trail that had begun as a rugged coastal footpath had become a broad gravel corridor once travelled by trains and now shared by hikers, Quads and snowmobiles.

 

Even reaching the next province of Nova Scotia required leaving the ground altogether. At Port aux Basques we boarded the Marine Atlantic ferry and crossed the Cabot Strait to Cape Breton. There, almost immediately, our idea of the trail was challenged again. The Trans Canada Trail around Bras d'Or Lake included a water route rather than a terrestrial pathway, and because we were travelling on foot rather than carrying a canoe or kayak, our own journey had to adapt. When the land route resumed at Whycocomagh, it carried us through forested hills and rough tracks before eventually becoming rail trails, community pathways, and road connectors as we travelled across Nova Scotia. Some sections were beautifully developed recreational corridors. Others were ordinary roads that happened to form the link between two pieces of trail. In Musquodoboit Harbour we also began to understand how much of what we were walking existed because local volunteers had spent years planning, negotiating, fundraising and building it. This new sense of the TCT shifted it from being a national line on our map to being better understood as a network of hundreds of local trails joined together.

 

Prince Edward Island seemed almost to simplify everything. The Confederation Trail gave us a remarkably continuous former railway corridor across much of the province, carefully maintained and clearly marked, passing through forests, farmland and communities. For a while it was possible to settle back into the comfortable idea that the Trans Canada Trail was once again a trail in the conventional sense - a visible and consistent path beneath our feet that we simply followed from one place to another. Yet even our arrival on PEI depended upon a ferry from Nova Scotia, another reminder that moving across a country composed of islands, rivers, lakes and enormous distances would never be as simple as drawing an uninterrupted footpath from one coast to another.

 

The Trans Canada Trail in New Brunswick

 

New Brunswick has complicated the picture even further. Since crossing the Confederation Bridge by shuttle bus, we have walked rail trails and back roads, followed marshes and wetlands, crossed quieter communities and larger cities, as well as having tackled the Dobson Trail and the rugged Fundy Footpath. The Fundy section in particular felt worlds removed from the gentle rail trails we had followed only days earlier. There were steep climbs and descents, coastal forests, river valleys and demanding terrain where distance had very little relationship to the amount of effort required.

 

Yet somehow all of these places - cliffside footpaths, abandoned railway corridors, urban promenades, roads and wilderness trails - belonged to the same route.

 

Now, here near Grand Bay-Westfield, the trail beneath our feet has once again disappeared altogether.  In a manner of speaking, that is.  Because while the Trans Canada Trail does continue from here, it exists only as a water route with no adjacent or alternative hiking / cycling path. For paddlers, this makes perfect sense. Canada is a country shaped by waterways, and travelling along rivers and lakes is far older than travelling along many of the roads or railways we have followed. A national recreational route that includes paddling is therefore not an oddity so much as a reflection of the country itself.

 

 With that said, for two people attempting to make their way across Canada on foot, however, standing where a terrestrial trail becomes a water route creates an interesting problem. We cannot simply put one foot in front of the other and continue. We do not have a canoe or kayak strapped to our backpacks, and walking beside the designated route is not always possible. As a result, from here we have to make a decision about how our own journey reconnects with the trail farther ahead.

 

Perhaps that is when it finally became obvious that the Trans Canada Trail is not really a single trail at all.  It is a network of pathways interlinked.  It is a series of trails connected to one another.  However, this is not the same as being a fully off-road and fully hikable or cycleable route.  That distinction sounds small, but after several thousand kilometres it is beginning to change the way we understand the Trans Canada Trail itself. A conventional long-distance trail often has a relatively consistent identity. It might be rugged or gentle, mountainous or flat, wilderness or urban, but there is usually some continuity in how the route is experienced, built, and waymarked. The TCT seems to work differently. Its continuity does not come from the surface beneath our feet. It comes from the idea of connection.

 

A footpath along the Atlantic cliffs can connect to a municipal pathway through St. John's, which can connect to an abandoned railway running across Newfoundland. A ferry can carry the journey across the Cabot Strait before a waterway, forest trail, roadway and community-built rail trail continue it through Nova Scotia. Another ferry can bridge the Northumberland Strait before the Confederation Trail carries us across Prince Edward Island. In New Brunswick, a marsh trail can become a road, which can eventually become the Dobson Trail, the Fundy Footpath, and eventually a paddling route. Seen in this way, the experience on the TCT can change completely from one day to the next while somehow remaining part of the same journey.

 

The farther we walk, the more we are also discovering that these connections did not simply appear on a national map because someone decided Canada should have a trail. Each section has its own history. Some exist because railway lines were abandoned and communities saw an opportunity to create recreational corridors. Others were built and maintained by hiking clubs, municipalities, cycling organizations, snowmobile or ATV associations, conservation groups and volunteers. Roads become part of the route where no recreational pathway currently connects two communities. Ferries and waterways bridge geographical barriers that cannot simply be walked around. What appears on a map as one continuous line is, on the ground, the accumulated work of thousands of different decisions made in thousands of different places.

 

Perhaps that is why the trail can feel so different from one province, town or even kilometre to the next. Each section reflects something of the place through which it travels and the people who built, maintain and use it. The rugged East Coast Trail could hardly be more different from PEI's Confederation Trail, yet both reveal something about their respective landscapes and those who have built them. An urban waterfront pathway serves a different community than a remote wilderness footpath, while a rail trail shared by cyclists and ATVs functions differently again. None of them has to become the other in order to belong to the same national network.

 

For walkers, that variety can be exhilarating and frustrating in almost equal measure. There are days when we find ourselves on an extraordinary purpose-built trail and wonder why every kilometre cannot be like this. There are other days spent on roads when the word “trail” seems rather optimistic.  Similarly, sometimes signage on the TCT is excellent; sometimes navigation requires maps, apps, or lead us to ask residents questions – as well as relying on a fair amount of guessing. Occasionally, as here, our chosen mode of travel simply does not match the route at all.

 

As a result, the temptation is to judge each section according to what we think (idealistically) a trail should be, but perhaps after several months of walking we are beginning to realize that this misses something fundamental about the TCT. Its extraordinary quality may be precisely that it refuses to be only one thing. Canada itself is not one landscape. It is coastline, forest, wetland, farmland, mountain, prairie, river, lake, village and city. Perhaps a pathway attempting to connect a country this large should not feel uniform.  Maybe it cannot ever realistically be uniform and entirely off-road.  Perhaps it should change beneath us. Perhaps it should sometimes be a rugged footpath, sometimes an old railway, sometimes pavement, sometimes gravel, sometimes a ferry, and sometimes a line continuing across the surface of a river where two hikers can go no farther without changing how they travel.  Maybe that is how the Trans Canada Trail keeps users curious, engaged and attentive to the region around them.

 

For us, that means the route on the map and the route we can actually walk will not always be identical. Here in New Brunswick, we will have to leave the designated water route and find our way back to the terrestrial Trans Canada Trail farther north. It feels strange after so long of carefully following a line to reach a place where that line continues but we cannot. Yet perhaps learning how to negotiate these gaps, transitions and changes is simply part of crossing Canada on a trail that was never really intended to be only a hiking trail.

 

When we began at Cape Spear, we imagined walking the Trans Canada Trail across the country.

Several provinces later, we are beginning to understand that there may be no single thing called the Trans Canada Trail beneath our feet. Instead, there are thousands of trails, roads, waterways, bridges, ferries and community pathways. There are local volunteers and regional organizations, different users, different landscapes and different ideas about what a trail can be. Somehow they have been connected into one enormous line across the country.

 

Today that line disappears into the water in front of us.  For the first time, perhaps we are beginning to see what it actually represents.

 

See you on the trail.