When the Trail You Planned No Longer Exists

“The map is not the territory.”

Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity

 

Kettle Valley Rail Trail and the Trans Canada Trail

 

For more than four years, maps have given this journey a reassuring kind of permanence. Routes change, signs disappear, logos change, road connections prove unpleasant, and occasionally a trail on the screen bears only a passing resemblance to what we find beneath our feet, but there is usually still an assumption that something exists ahead for us to follow. A line on the Trans Canada Trail Map suggests continuity. It connects one community with another, crosses rivers, passes through valleys and carries us west. We may have to work out how to follow it, but somewhere behind the symbols and coordinates there is supposed to be a route. It was announced in 2019 - the year we began - to be completed, which was later revised as connected. Yet the sentiment remains - continuity from coast to coast to coast.

 

Princeton has made that assumption considerably harder to maintain.

 

We knew before arriving that there was a serious problem ahead. For weeks, trail builders, hikers and cyclists had warned us that the Kettle Valley Rail Trail between Princeton and Hope had been badly damaged by the catastrophic flooding of 2021. Washouts, landslides and missing trestles were repeatedly mentioned, and the roughly 156-kilometre section ahead was described locally as closed. Mel Vogel (@betweentwosunsets), travelling only several days ahead of us, had shared her own experiences and cautioned that the route was broken badly enough that anyone trying to continue would spend much of the time searching for alternatives along roads and highways. We believed the warnings (especially Mel’s), but until today they still existed mostly as information and online suggestions about somewhere we had not yet reached.

 

Then we arrived in Princeton, and the realities of the situation were directly in front of us, and we began having to ask questions about what comes next.  Several people in the local café knew the trail ahead well. One was involved in trail work, while others had travelled sections of the KVR themselves. Their descriptions were remarkably consistent. The rail trail was broken by a lost bridge on the edge of town and blocked not far outside town. Beyond that, riverbanks had been undermined by landslides and washouts which had not just damaged sections between Princeton and Brookmere but destroyed them.  The suggested alternatives would place us beside the Coquihalla Highway (one of BC’s most dangerous highways) in conditions that locals considered increasingly dangerous with winter approaching. Two large rain systems were also forecast, raising the possibility that already unstable slopes and damaged river corridors could deteriorate further.

 

What struck me during those conversations was how strange it felt to hear people describe a trail as though it had ceased to exist.  Perhaps this is because, for me, trails tend to become surprisingly solid things in the imagination. We think of them as routes established through the landscape, especially when they carry names, maps, kilometre markers and histories. The Kettle Valley Rail Trail itself reinforces that feeling of permanence. For days we have been following a transportation corridor engineered more than a century ago, crossing trestles, passing through tunnels and walking grades carved into mountainsides. The railway may have disappeared, but the route remained. It had become a trail, which in turn became part of the Trans Canada Trail. There is something comforting in that continuity, as though once a path has been established strongly enough across the land it will remain available for whoever comes next.

 

Broken Section on the TCT

 

This afternoon we walked west out of Princeton to see what remained.  It did not take long – at the edge of town, we came to the bridge was not damaged – it was gone.  Soon after, a trail worker drove us out to show us where the floods had undermined the riverbanks and literally washed away the trail.  Standing there, the situation became much easier to understand. This was not simply a trail temporarily closed by a gate or awaiting routine maintenance. The trail was gone. 

 

The map still showed a line, but it absolutely no longer exists.

 

Perhaps trails feel permanent because maps are permanent in ways landscapes are not. Once a route is drawn, the line remains clean and continuous until someone updates it. Rivers are less cooperative. They rise, migrate, erode banks and carry away soil. Slopes fail. Fire removes vegetation that once held water and earth in place. Storms damage bridges and roads. Tunnels collapse. The infrastructure we build across a landscape may last for decades or generations, but it remains dependent on conditions we do not fully control.  Walking makes that dependence unusually visible in a way that a news update or social media post does not.

 

From a distance, it is easy to think of a trail as something laid over the land, almost separate from it. On the ground, the relationship is much more intimate. A rail trail exists because the grade beneath it remains stable. A bridge exists because both banks can still hold it. A path along a river exists because the water has not risen up and washed it away.  Even the most carefully engineered route is, in some sense, an agreement with the landscape that can be altered without consulting us.  A precarious realization in an age of extreme weather, wildfires, and climate change. 

 

For years we have encountered the unexpected along the Trans Canada Trail - unfinished sections, road connectors, temporary reroutes and places where the route remains more aspiration than pathway. Those experiences taught us that the national trail is, in reality, not really a single continuous footpath. This feels different. Here, something had existed until recently. Railway infrastructure had crossed these valleys. Trail users had followed the old grade. Bridges and trestles had connected one side of the landscape with another. Then floodwaters, erosion and unstable ground changed what existed.  The difference between an unfinished trail and one that has been undermined is surprisingly shocking.

 

With that said, the people living in this region understand that far more than we do. The damaged trail is only a small part of what the floods changed. In recent years, southern British Columbia has had extreme temperatures, droughts, and wildfires.  People have had to evacuate; they have lost their homes, and businesses have struggled to reopen.  In the affected communities, there is basic infrastructure that requires attention more than a trail does.  Seen from this perspective, our disappointment about a missing section of the KVR feels very small.  A washed-out trail may be frustrating for us, but for the communities beside it the same extreme situations have changed their homes, livelihoods and lives.  That context makes the broken trestle look different too. It is not merely evidence that our route has been interrupted. It is evidence of what has happened here and in communities around the world. Perhaps that is another reason not to treat trails as though they exist independently from the places they cross. They are part of those places, subject to the same storms, fires, floods and changes as everything around them. When a community is damaged, its trails are damaged too. When a river changes course, the pathway beside it may have to change as well.  Just as when glaciers melt, those who live on coastlines will have to adapt to the changes which arise.

 

Finding a Way Forward

 

With that said - this afternoon we turned back toward Princeton with no clear route to Hope.  That is frustrating. We are close enough to the Pacific now that every detour feels larger than it probably is, and we had looked forward to following the Kettle Valley Railway west through this final stretch before reaching the Fraser Valley. Instead we now have to decide how to move around something that, for the moment at least, cannot responsibly be crossed.

 

But I think the more interesting realization is not simply that our plan has failed. Plans fail all the time on a journey this long, and by now we have become reasonably accustomed to changing them. What feels different here is the reminder that the trail itself is not fixed. For thousands of kilometres we have walked old railway beds, pathways built by volunteers, roads laid across difficult terrain, bridges spanning rivers and routes that generations of people have worked to create and maintain. Because they existed before we arrived, it is easy to experience them as permanent features of the landscape. Today has been a reminder that “before we arrived” is not the same thing as “forever.”

 

A trail is always being held in place by something: by stable earth beneath it, bridges across rivers, drainage that carries water away, vegetation that keeps slopes together, maintenance that clears what falls and repairs what breaks, and communities willing and able to invest the time and resources necessary to keep a route open. None of those conditions is permanent. A flood can remove a bridge in hours. A river can undermine a bank that supported a trail for decades. Fire can change how water moves across a hillside, while storms, erosion and time continue working on every structure we place in their way. What looks like a simple line across a map is therefore sustained by an enormous number of relationships and circumstances that the line itself cannot show.

 

Perhaps that is what maps necessarily leave out. They are extremely good at telling us where a trail is supposed to go, but much less capable of showing how temporary some of the conditions supporting that route may be. The line between Princeton and Hope remains beautifully continuous on a screen even when the bridge at the edge of town is gone, and sections of the rail grade have disappeared into the river. The map is not wrong so much as incomplete. It records an intention, a history and perhaps a future route, while the landscape beneath it continues to change.

 

Onwards and Forwards to the Pacific Ocean

 

In the next day or so we will begin figuring out how to continue toward Hope. That may require hard decisions, trekking once more on roads, and will definitely involve detours we would never have considered when planning this journey from home. Eventually, one way or another, we will find a route forward because our journey can adapt to what the landscape now requires. The Kettle Valley Rail Trail does not have that luxury quite so easily. Restoring it will require time, engineering, money, labour and decisions by communities already dealing with consequences far more important than whether hikers and cyclists can follow an old railway grade.

 

Perhaps that is the final distinction Princeton has made clear. We arrived worrying about how the disappearance of the trail would affect our journey, but the more time we spend here, the more that seems like the smaller story. Our route can change. We can turn around, follow another road, alter the plan and continue toward the Pacific. The landscape, however, has changed in ways that cannot simply be walked around, and the people who live here will continue dealing with those changes long after we have moved on.

 

We will find a way forward.  In time, hopefully, the trail will too.

 

See you on the trail.