Were You Alone on the Trans Canada Trail?

“I am a part of all that I have met.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”

Hiking Coast to Coast on the Trans Canada Trail 

 

One of the questions we are asked most often about walking across Canada is whether we were lonely. Usually it is followed quickly by another: were we frightened when we camped alone, did we ever go days without seeing anyone, how often did we have to defend ourselves from bears, wolves or other wildlife?  While each of these has a simple and undramatic answer, they each nevertheless give way to a mindset about hiking across Canada and long-distance journeys on the Trans Canada Trail.  In particular, there seems to be an image attached to walking across Canada that involves two people disappearing into an almost continuous wilderness, carrying everything they need while moving from one isolated campsite to another across an empty country. Make no mistake - Canada is certainly large enough to create that impression, and before we began I think we had absorbed some of it ourselves. Yet looking back from Victoria after more than 14,000 kilometres, that was not really the journey we had.

 

We have previously written about the challenges of walking across Canada and being on a trail that so few others have ever attempted, and how isolating that experience can be - especially when people have a vast spectrum of options and want you to stop hiking and posting.  With that said...

There were remote sections, of course.  Newfoundland gave us long stretches where the landscape felt enormous, and the trail seemed far removed from towns. In the Topsails we could look across open country and feel very small within it, and there were similar places later in northern Ontario (Casque Isles Trail) and eventually in the Rockies (High Rockies Trail and Elk Valley Trail) where communities became more widely spaced and camping beside the trail was both possible and felt considerably more isolated. Across the country, we heard coyotes on many nights, encountered bears on several occasions and learned to pay attention to signs of wildlife,  weather conditions, and where we chose to camp. But those experiences were never the whole story. In fact, what surprised us most after Newfoundland was how often the Trans Canada Trail moved between communities and through cities rather than amid wilderness.

 

After departing Newfoundland, our hike on the TCT across Cape Breton and mainland Nova Scotia quickly became a succession of towns, villages, rail trails and local pathways. Prince Edward Island was even more clearly a journey through settled countryside, navigating between farms and from community to community. New Brunswick likewise largely followed rivers, roads, former railway corridors and population centres with enough regularity that even when we camped along the trail, we rarely felt completely removed from the surrounding human landscape. By the time we reached Quebec and Ontario, the pattern became unmistakable. From Quebec City through Sherbrooke, Montreal, Ottawa, Peterborough, Toronto, Hamilton, Barrie, Orillia, North Bay and eventually Sudbury, we spent an extraordinary amount of time moving through what in many ways is one long inhabited corridor. There were forests, wetlands, agricultural areas, river valleys, urban greenways and stretches where the trail felt wonderfully peaceful, but there were also subdivisions, road crossings, commuter pathways, parks, rail lines, industrial areas, and large cities appearing with remarkable regularity.

 

Some days it felt less like crossing wilderness than tracing the infrastructure of Canada one step at a time. That was not necessarily a disappointment - it simply was not what we had expected. Before setting out, I think we unconsciously equated Canada's enormous size with prolonged isolation. Yet size and settlement are not distributed evenly. Much of the country's population, transportation network and historical development is concentrated within a relatively narrow southern corridor, and the Trans Canada Trail frequently follows those same connections because that is where the established routes between communities already exist. In that sense, the TCT, the railway and the highways of the nation are telling related geographical stories. They follow rivers because rivers provided natural corridors through the landscape. They connect towns because towns developed along those transportation routes. They pass through agricultural regions because settlement expanded there, and they move through cities because cities became hubs within those networks.  That is also why, as the Trans Canada Trail itself promotes, 80% of Canadians live within 30 minutes of the national pathway. 

 

Walking the trail slowly made that structure visible in a way I do not think we had understood before. When travelling by car or train, the spaces between communities collapse. One town disappears behind you, and another arrives half an hour or an hour later. On foot, that same corridor stretches across an entire day, and you fully experience all the transitions that faster travel hides - the residential outskirts, industrial parks, farm acreages, woodlots, wetlands, small settlements and roadside businesses that sit between places most travellers think of as separate destinations. In this way, instead of moving quickly from one named place to another, we spent our days inhabiting the connective tissue between them.

 

As a result, we encountered people almost constantly. Cyclists stopped to ask where we were headed. Dog walkers wanted to know why we were pushing hiking carts. Farmers waved from fields. Campground owners asked about the journey. People offered water, directions, coffee or simply conversation. In cities, of course, we were surrounded by people, but even in quieter stretches of the TCT it was unusual to feel completely cut off for very long. Long-distance travel on foot may sound solitary, yet in practice it often creates an unusual amount of human contact because you move slowly enough for people to notice you and because you depend on communities in ways that travellers moving quickly through them do not.

 

That also changes the answer to the loneliness question, although perhaps not quite in the way people expect. There is, after all, an important difference between being physically isolated and feeling lonely, and we discovered that one did not necessarily depend upon the other. We have written elsewhere about the emotional isolation of undertaking a journey that so few others have attempted, particularly when compared with the shared companionship of the Camino routes in Europe. That loneliness was real, and there were days when fatigue, weather, uncertainty or the enormous scale of what remained ahead made the journey feel very small and private. There were evenings when we crawled into the tent and realized that the only person we had really spoken to all day was each other, and others when we had spoken with dozens of people but still felt strangely alone in what we were attempting. Yet that was something quite different from being cut off from the rest of the country. For much of our Atlantic-to-Pacific crossing, prolonged physical isolation from other people was considerably less common than we had imagined before setting out. We could be lonely without being alone, just as we could find extraordinary peace and contentment in places where there was nobody else in sight.

 

Perhaps what surprised us most was that walking across Canada did not separate us from the country. In many ways it embedded us more deeply within it. We did not simply pass through wilderness. We passed through neighbourhoods, agricultural regions, small towns, Indigenous communities, provincial parks, tourist destinations, cities and countless places that existed somewhere between all of those categories. The journey was rarely one thing for very long – but to be honest, it could only rarely be called a wilderness trek.

 

That may be why the image of the lone long-distance walker now seems incomplete to me. Walking can certainly be solitary, but it can also be remarkably social. The same slow pace that makes us notice birds, landscapes and changing vegetation also makes us notice the human geography around us. We began the journey thinking that crossing Canada would mean repeatedly leaving civilization behind. Instead, for much of the Atlantic-to-Pacific over 556 days, we discovered how closely nature, communities and transportation corridors overlap, and how often the trail itself depends upon those connections.

There were wild places, tough sections and nights when the sound beyond the tent made us wonder what was moving through the darkness. But there were also people almost everywhere, and looking back from Victoria, that may be one of the most unexpected truths of the journey. Canada is vast, yet the routes that connect us often follow surprisingly narrow corridors through that vastness. For more than 14,000 kilometres, we simply walked along one of them.

 

See you on the trail.