Why We Hike Long Distances : Reconnecting and Finding Peace

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, 

to front only the essential facts of life.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

 

What Four Years of Walking Across Canada Taught Us About Attention, Uncertainty, Kindness and What We Really Need

For more than four years, whenever people discovered that we were walking across Canada, one of the first questions they asked was why.

 

It is a reasonable question. Walking more than 14,000 kilometres from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific is not an especially practical way to travel. It takes longer, costs more than people sometimes imagine, involves considerable discomfort, and requires an extraordinary amount of planning simply to accomplish what an airplane could do in a few hours. There were days when we walked through freezing rain, days when the temperature climbed into the high thirties, days spent on busy highways and gravel concessions, days when trails disappeared beneath flooding or vegetation, and days when we wondered whether continuing was sensible at all. We carried our lives on our backs, slept in a small tent, washed clothes in sinks, filtered water from streams and arranged much of our existence around the next grocery store, campground, post office or place where we could charge our electronics.

 

Why would anyone voluntarily choose to live this way?

 

The easy answer is that we love hiking. We love birds and wildlife, exploring new places and being outdoors. Those things are all true, but after four years on the Trans Canada Trail they no longer seem like complete answers.

 

Perhaps there never was one answer.

 

At a Crossroads

 

Years before we arrived at Clover Point in Victoria, walking had entered our lives at a time when both of us were reconsidering what a successful life was supposed to look like.  We had done many of the things we had been encouraged to do. We went to university. We worked hard. Had professional careers. There were academic degrees, research projects, teaching positions, titles and the various markers that society uses to suggest that a person is progressing in the proper direction. Yet somewhere amid all of that progress, something had gone wrong.

 

For Sean, years in the academic world had culminated in an increasingly unhealthy situation that eventually convinced him to withdraw from graduate research. Even leaving did not immediately end the hostility.  For my part, I had spent years studying nature, birds and conservation only to discover that much of my working life was increasingly spent indoors, sitting at a desk and looking at a computer. I had entered environmental science because I cared deeply about the natural world, yet somehow the path intended to bring me closer to it had placed several panes of glass between us.

 

Around the same time, watching a younger member of our family become increasingly absorbed in video games and the online world forced us to look more closely at our own lives. It was easy to worry about young people disappearing into screens, but we were doing our own adult version of much the same thing. Work happened on computers. Communication happened on computers. News arrived through screens. Entertainment arrived through screens. Increasingly, even friendship and community were measured through digital platforms. As such, without quite realizing when it had happened, the noise had moved from the background into the foreground. 

 

Of course what we earned mattered. What our employers thought mattered. Titles mattered. Productivity mattered. Other people's opinions mattered. We had acquired many of the things that were supposed to indicate a successful adult life while becoming less certain that they had anything to do with living one.

 

Walking initially offered no grand philosophy in response. It simply gave us somewhere else to be than behind a desk or behind a screen.

 

In relatively quick succession we walked Ontario's Bruce Trail, crossed Spain on the Camino Francés, followed the Via Podiensis through France, walked across Portugal on the Camino Português and returned to Newfoundland's East Coast Trail. None of these journeys solved our lives. We did not return from any of them transformed into people immune to anxiety, uncertainty or bad decisions.

 

What changed was simpler.  For a while, on the trail, the peripheral fell away – often at the same rate that the digital world became more distant. More than that, the essentials of life became the predominant feature of our days. There was somewhere to walk. We needed food and water. We needed to pay attention to the weather, find somewhere to sleep and take care of our bodies well enough to continue the next morning. We noticed birds again. We talked to strangers. We spent hours outside without needing to justify the usefulness of those hours. The measure of a successful day could be twenty kilometres travelled, a difficult hill climbed, a conversation over coffee, or simply reaching shelter before the rain.

 

Put another way - walking gave us back a scale of life we understood.

 

Taking the Long Way Across Canada

 

Then, in 2018, an improbable question arose - What if we walked across Canada?

 

The Trans Canada Trail (at the time renamed as the Great Trail) offered something unlike the other long-distance paths we had followed. Rather than spending a month or two crossing one region, we could continue for years. We could walk through our own country slowly enough to experience the landscapes between the places most people fly over or drive through. We could learn something about Canada that could not be understood through maps, headlines or tourism campaigns.

 

More importantly, perhaps the journey could become useful beyond ourselves. 

 

#Hike4Birds grew from that possibility. We wanted to share Canada's landscapes, wildlife, communities and trails. We wanted to encourage people to reconnect with nature through birds and citizen science. We wanted young people in particular to understand that the natural world was not something that existed only in distant national parks, remote wilderness or TV documentaries. It existed outside their schools, along neighbourhood trails, in city parks, wetlands, farm fields and backyards.

 

Birds seemed an ideal invitation because they were everywhere and required very little to begin noticing. You did not need to travel across Canada. You did not need expensive equipment or specialized knowledge. You could look out a window, walk around the block or visit a nearby park and begin asking questions about what was there and noticing what was around you.

 

So on June 1, 2019, we stood at Cape Spear in Newfoundland and began walking west. At the time, we thought we understood what the project was and why we were doing it.  Four years later, standing beside another ocean, the answer we realized has become considerably more complicated.

 

The scale of the trail itself gradually changed the undertaking. What looked like a continuous line across a map became 556 individual days on the trail and thousands of small experiences that could never have been anticipated from home.

 

What began beside the Atlantic with puffins, whales, icebergs and the trails of Newfoundland eventually carried us through the communities and coastlines of Nova Scotia, across Prince Edward Island, along the Bay of Fundy and north through New Brunswick. Quebec took three separate seasons to complete. Ontario seemed almost endless. Manitoba carried us from boreal forest onto the prairie. Saskatchewan repeatedly overturned our expectations of what the prairies looked like. Alberta led from farmland and parkland toward the Rockies. Finally, British Columbia carried us over mountain passes, through working forests and mining valleys, along old railway grades, beside the Fraser River and eventually to the Pacific.

 

Somewhere in all of that distance Canada stopped being an abstraction. Places that had once existed for us mostly as names became connected to people, conversations, weather, birds, meals and moments of kindness. The country became harder to summarize precisely because we had begun to know more of it.

 

What Walking Strips Away

 

Walking at its base level repeatedly strips our lives back to essentials. On a long trail, food, water, shelter and warmth stop being abstractions. Water has weight because you have to carry it, but you also need it. Distance has meaning because you have to cross it one step at a time. A grocery store that closes at six in the afternoon kilometres before you arrive can determine the shape of the following day. A picnic shelter in a thunderstorm can seem like a luxury, while clean socks, fresh fruit, a hot shower or a cup of coffee on a cold morning can become genuine sources of gratitude.

 

The longer we travelled and hiked, the more apparent it became how much of normal life at home is built around things that seem urgent but are not actually essential.

 

At the same time, the people we met complicated (in a good way) any attempt to romanticize self-sufficiency. Again and again strangers offered water on hot roads, fruit from gardens, meals, directions, places to camp, encouragement or simply conversation. We may have carried our own packs and walked every kilometre ourselves, but the journey was never truly unsupported. No one crosses a country alone. Even the route itself existed because thousands of people had built and maintained it, and our ability to continue was repeatedly made easier by people who chose, often for no reason beyond kindness, to help two strangers walking through their community.

 

This also changed how we understood the country. From a distance, it is remarkably easy to reduce regions and people to categories. News reports, political maps, social media and stereotypes encourage us to imagine that we already know what somewhere is like or what the people who live there believe. Walking tends to interfere with that certainty through experience and connection. Communities become associated with individuals rather than labels, and supposedly simple divisions become difficult to maintain after enough conversations across kitchen tables, in cafés, beside trails and along roads. People who would never describe themselves as environmentalists cared deeply about the forests, lakes, farmland or wildlife around them. Individuals whose political views differed radically still worried about their children, wanted safe communities and valued places where they could live meaningful lives.

We encountered generosity in regions others had warned us about and difficult experiences in places we had expected to love. The farther we travelled, the less comfortable we became with simple descriptions. Seen from far away, almost anything can be made to look straightforward. Walking brings you close enough to discover that very little actually is.

 

The Difficulty Is Part of It

 

The difficulty of long-distance walking contributed to the same lesson. We were never especially interested in hiking the trail as a heroic test of suffering or presenting it as such.  And unsurprisingly, four years of hiking did not convince us that discomfort is inherently noble. We became tired, frustrated and occasionally miserable. We made mistakes. We carried too much, walked too far, underestimated weather, overestimated ourselves and sometimes persisted longer than wisdom, common sense and health suggested we should.

 

There were flooded trails, injuries, mosquitoes, blackflies, wildfire smoke, extreme heat, cold rain, mud and countless kilometres of road and highway walking that neither of us has any desire to repeat. Some days were spectacular. Some were merely ordinary. Others simply sucked. Yet there was something valuable in having to deal with the world as it was rather than as we wanted it to be. To have to navigate a situation rather than simply change a channel and ignore it.  A mountain did not care how determined we were. A thunderstorm was unimpressed by our schedule. Darkness arrived whether or not we had reached camp. And fifty kilometres remains fifty kilometres regardless of how motivated you might feel.  The trail repeatedly reminded us that perseverance mattered, but so did judgment. Continuing could sometimes be courageous and at other times simply stubborn.   Learning the difference became more important than proving that we could endure anything.

 

Perhaps this was also why being in nature increasingly felt peaceful. The natural world never seemed particularly interested in evaluating us. A mountain did not care what degrees we held, how much money we made, whether anyone knew our names or whether strangers approved of what we were doing. Birds did not ask whether we were accomplished enough to watch them. The landscapes we crossed were vastly older and larger than our ambitions, frustrations or egos, and there was considerable relief in being reminded of that fact. On the trail we were once again simply organisms within a larger system, concerned with weather, food, water, shelter and the movement of the seasons. Feeling small did not diminish us. Strangely, it could be reassuring. If the world did not revolve around us, perhaps we did not have to carry quite so much of it. We only had to be able to take the next step.

 

When the Noise Followed Us

 

Unfortunately, there has been a contradiction at the heart of the #Hike4Birds from the beginning. We created a project encouraging people to step away from digital landscapes while committing ourselves to documenting the journey online. The irony was obvious to us even before we left.

 

On our earlier walks, we could take photographs and notes, disappear into the experience and write about it later and post it at a leisurely pace. The Trans Canada Trail was different because we wanted people to travel with us while the journey was happening.  As a result, we spent our days walking and our evenings writing blogs, processing photographs, answering messages and searching for enough connectivity to publish an entry a day with 60-80 pictures.  In many ways this worked exactly as we had hoped. Families followed the journey. Teachers shared it with students. Birders contacted us. Naturalists joined us for walks. People told us they had discovered local trails, begun watching birds or visited places because of something we had shared. We gave over 100 presentations to classrooms and nature groups across the country.   In this way, the digital world that we were often suspicious of had also created connections that would have been impossible otherwise, and it allowed two people walking along a trail to invite tens of thousands of others into the experience.

 

Over time, however, that relationship became more complicated. The more widely we shared the journey, the more aware we became that people did not simply want us to describe what we experienced. Sometimes they wanted us to describe a place as they believed it should be. A town ought to be charming regardless of what happened while we were there. A trail ought to be wonderful because local residents were proud of it, even when portions had disappeared beneath a field, ended on a highway or become nearly impossible to follow owing to an installed electrical fence across it. Criticizing conditions could be interpreted as attacking a community, while describing uncomfortable encounters could trigger angry messages from people hundreds of kilometres away who had not been present. In response, we learned to censor ourselves.

 

Some of that was appropriate; not every frustration deserves to become public, and certain situations involving other people are better left private. Sometimes silence was necessary for our safety. Yet by the end of our third year we had begun to recognize that something more significant was happening. We had set out partly because we were tired of allowing institutions, expectations and outside judgments to define our lives, only to discover that we had gradually invited a new set of outside expectations onto the trail with us. The digital world we had gone outside to escape had quietly found its way back into our backpacks.  As a result, we were no longer always hiking our own hike and were sometimes trekking beneath the weight of expectations.

 

Not long after, we had our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram social media channels closed down by someone who complained about our presentation of the Trans Canada Trail.  When it happened, we were initially devastated, but over time we came to see what a true gift and blessing that was to be set free once more. 

 

What Were We Trying to Prove?

 

That realization raised an uncomfortable question: who, exactly, were we hiking for? The original goals of #Hike4Birds still mattered enormously to us. We wanted to share Canada, encourage people to explore, support bird conservation, promote Citizen Science and promote the notion that nature should be accessible and welcoming to everyone. Yet four years is a long time to carry any project, and projects accumulate obligations. There were kilometres to complete, blogs to publish, photographs to process, presentations to deliver, messages to answer and expectations - some explicitly placed upon us and others probably created in our own minds - to satisfy. At times the machinery built around sharing the hike threatened to overwhelm the simple act of hiking. Something that had begun partly as a way of clearing away the peripheral had accumulated a new periphery of its own.

 

Perhaps this is not unique to walking. We begin something because it has meaning for us. Other people become interested, and their interest can encourage and sustain us. Yet eventually there is a danger that we begin measuring the value of what we love through their reaction to it. The Trans Canada Trail repeatedly gave us an antidote to that tendency because enormous portions of it were walked without anyone watching. There was no applause at the end of another Manitoba concession road, no audience when we packed a wet tent in Newfoundland, rationed water beneath a prairie sun, climbed another hill in British Columbia or limped through the final kilometres of an exhausting day. Much of the journey consisted simply of the two of us getting up and trying again. By the time we reached the Pacific, that willingness to try had begun to seem more meaningful than many of the statistics attached to the undertaking. 

 

It was not about being exceptional – it was in the trying alone that there was meaning.

 

The Importance of Trying

 

As we had continued to walk and talk with students and nature groups, we also became increasingly uncomfortable with the way achievement is discussed.  Things seem to now be framed as epic successes or misbegotten failures with no in between.  And even those successes - when someone has reached a summit, completed a degree, built a business, written a book or walked across a country – the journey, their skill and all that transpired are framed as inevitable. The uncertainty that existed at the beginning disappears from the story. The mistakes made and lessons learned en route are ignored and passed over.

 

At Cape Spear, however, we had no idea whether we could hike 14,000 km and reach Victoria. We did not know whether our bodies, finances, relationship, equipment or determination would survive the distance. We did not know whether anyone would care about #Hike4Birds, whether the Trans Canada Trail could actually be walked continuously, or whether we would eventually decide that the whole idea had been ridiculous. There was no guarantee waiting for us at the beginning. There was only the possibility of trying.

 

Perhaps one of the things we had come to value most was precisely that willingness to begin without certainty. We need people who dream, take sensible risks, attempt things for which they do not feel entirely qualified and continue even when their first attempts are imperfect. In the world today it seems people have become remarkably skilled at explaining why other people's efforts will fail. Perhaps we could devote more energy to encouraging people who are frightened and try anyway.

 

None of this meant that we had discovered a formula for life, or that walking across Canada gave us any special authority to tell others how they should live. If anything, the experience had made us more suspicious of formulas. We had met too many people living under too many different circumstances and excelling more than others thought they could to believe there was one correct path. Nor did we emerge from those kilometres transformed into wiser, calmer or more virtuous versions of ourselves. We remained capable of becoming angry, discouraged, impatient and doubtful. We still argue at times. We still worry. We still sometimes care too much about things we knew should not matter. Perhaps “transformation” was never the right idea. The changes were more subtle along the way. We had become somewhat more conscious of what we valued, somewhat more skeptical of easy judgments, somewhat more comfortable admitting uncertainty and perhaps more willing to recognize that the life we wanted did not necessarily have to fit neatly into anyone else's expectations.

 

Arriving at the Pacific

 

All of these thoughts were somewhere with us as Victoria approached, although at the time a few weeks ago they were much less orderly than they appear in retrospect. After spending years imagining the Pacific as an almost impossibly distant destination, we reacted strangely when it finally came within reach. Rather than rushing toward Clover Point, we slowed down. Less than twenty kilometres from the terminus, we found reasons to go birding, explore and make the final approach last a little longer. The night before our final walk was largely sleepless. Random places and people surfaced in our memories without chronology: coastlines, campsites, conversations, mistakes, acts of kindness, birds, arguments, meals, storms and moments that had seemed insignificant when they happened but somehow remained with us years later. For so long our lives had been organized around continuing west that the prospect of no longer needing to do so felt almost impossible to comprehend.

 

The final kilometres through Victoria passed largely in a blur. People had come to walk with us, including members of the local naturalist community, and eventually the route brought us beside the Salish Sea to Clover Point. We dipped our hands into the Pacific, managed to get our shoes soaked by a wave while trying to repeat the moment for a photograph, stood beside the small Trans Canada Trail marker and did interviews surrounded by people who had come to celebrate. 

After more than 14,000 kilometres, the Atlantic-to-Pacific portion of the journey was finished. Yet one of the clearest memories from those moments is not the marker itself. Amid everything happening around us, I became distracted by a small group of Dunlin moving along the rocks and a Black Turnstone nearby. Then we noticed the sign telling us that we were standing within the Victoria Harbour Migratory Bird Sanctuary. After four years of walking for birds, we had somehow arrived exactly where we should have: not beneath a monumental finish arch or at some grand ceremonial destination, but beside an ocean watching shorebirds.

 

Why We Hike

Perhaps that was appropriate because reaching the Pacific did not provide a single revelation explaining why we had walked there and trekked across Canada with still more to go. Instead, the many reasons seemed to have become inseparable. We walked because we loved being outside and because moving slowly gave us time to notice what faster travel passed by. We walked because birds connected us with landscapes and seasons, and because paying attention to them gave us a reason to remain curious. We walked because carrying our lives on our backs reminded us how little we actually needed, while depending repeatedly on strangers reminded us how little any of us accomplish entirely alone. We walked because difficulty tested us, but also because we had learned that persistence without judgment could become stubbornness. We walked because encountering communities on foot complicated our assumptions about people and places. We walked because there were times when the noise of the world became overwhelming and we needed enough space to hear our own thoughts again. Most of all, perhaps we continued because walking made us feel engaged with our lives rather than as though we were merely observing them pass through screens as we waited for the next update.

 

Four years on the Trans Canada Trail has not turned us into different people, but it has altered our perspective. The world seemed larger and considerably less certain than it had been when we left, but also more interesting because of that uncertainty. We had seen enough generosity to resist the idea that people were inherently as divided and hostile as the online world often makes them appear, enough environmental damage to know that nature could not simply be taken for granted, and enough resilience in landscapes and communities to understand why protecting what remained mattered. We had learned that some of the things we once regarded as necessities were conveniences, while many things we casually overlooked - clean water, food, shelter, health, friendship and kindness - were the foundations upon which everything else in our lives and our society depends. None of these ideas were particularly original. Perhaps the value lay in having been forced to learn them through experience and live them repeatedly rather than merely agreeing with them.

 

Standing at the edge of the Pacific, there was also no sense that we had reached the end of walking. The Trans Canada Trail still extended north from Alberta toward the Arctic Ocean, and we fully intend to return to Fort Saskatchewan and begin following it toward Tuktoyaktuk next year.  Despite our plans and preparations, the journey to the Arctic Ocean will have its own landscapes, challenges and reasons for being, and natural wonders – and we do not yet know what it will ask of us.

 

For this moment, however, none of any of it needed to be decided. For years there had always been somewhere farther west to reach, another trail to follow, another blog to write, another photograph to edit and another day's kilometres to prepare for. At Clover Point there was suddenly nothing more that we needed to accomplish that afternoon. We could stand beside the people who had walked the final steps with us, watch shorebirds feeding among the rocks and let the Pacific move in and out against the coast.

 

Perhaps this is ultimately why we hike. Not because every trail changes us, not because suffering automatically makes us better people, and certainly not because reaching a distant point on a map provides answers unavailable anywhere else. We hike because walking occasionally clears enough space for us to recognize what was already there: the people beside us, the landscapes we inhabit, the things we genuinely need, the questions worth carrying and the small moments we too easily overlook while rushing toward something else.

 

After more than 14,000 kilometres, I freely admit - there was no grand revelation waiting beside the Pacific.  There were simply Dunlin on the rocks, people we cared about standing nearby, cold salt water at our feet and another enormous horizon in front of us.

 

For now, that is more than enough.

 

See you on the trail!