Reaching the Pacific: Questions and Reflections on Walking Across Canada

Questions and Answers about the Trans Canada Trail

 
After 556 days on the trail and approximately 14,000 kilometres of walking, we finally reached Victoria, British Columbia, completing our journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific along the Trans Canada Trail.

 
When we set out from Cape Spear, Newfoundland, on June 1, 2019, we had imagined that crossing Canada on foot would take considerably less time than it eventually did. We anticipated difficult terrain, unpredictable weather, long distances between communities, and the inevitable challenges of spending months living out of our backpacks. What we could not have anticipated was how much the world, our plans, and our understanding of the country would change along the way.
 
Throughout our journey, we each kept daily journals documenting the communities, landscapes, trails, wildlife, and experiences we encountered. Through our #Hike4Birds daily blogs, we also sought to encourage people to reconnect with nature through birdwatching, photography, and citizen science. Those accounts became an extensive record of walking across Canada, but they could never fully address every question that arose from the experience.
 
Some questions were practical. How long does it actually take to walk across Canada? How much does such a journey cost? Was the Trans Canada Trail difficult to follow? Did we ever feel unsafe? Others concerned the experience of spending years walking through familiar and unfamiliar landscapes. Did we ever become bored? Did we eventually get used to walking all day? Were there times when we wanted to stop? And did travelling so slowly change the way we understood Canada?   These questions rarely have simple answers. Much depends on where we were, the conditions we encountered, and what was happening in our lives at the time. An experience in Newfoundland could be very different from one in Saskatchewan or British Columbia, while something that seemed insignificant during a particular day sometimes became more meaningful when we considered it months or years later.

Reaching the Pacific has provided us the opportunity to look beyond the individual days and reflect on the journey as a whole. It also allows us to consider the differences between what we had expected when planning our walk in 2018 and what we actually encountered while making our way westward.

 
Over the following entries and across the coming months, we hope to explore some of these questions in greater detail, drawing on our journals, photographs, birdwatching observations, and experiences along the trail. These reflections are not intended to replace our daily accounts, nor are they meant to provide definitive answers about what walking the Trans Canada Trail must be like for everyone. They are simply our attempts to make sense of what we experienced, what surprised us, what challenged our expectations, and what we learned along the way.

 
Of course, arriving in Victoria does not mark the end of our larger ambition to explore Canada's national trail network. The northern route toward the Arctic Ocean still lay ahead of us. With that said, reaching the Pacific was an important milestone, and one worth taking the time to consider before continuing north.
 
For now, however, we wanted to look back at the long road from Newfoundland to British Columbia and consider some of the questions that remained after all those kilometres. We hope you find the answers interesting, insightful, or helpful if you are planning your own trek along the Trans Canada Trail.
 
See you on the trail!