The Lure of the North, the Challenges of the North

“I'll tell the tale of a Northern trail, and so help me God, it's true.

I'll tell of the howling wilderness and the haggard Arctic heights,

Of a reckless vow that I made, and how I staked the Northern Lights.”

Robert Service, Ballads of Cheechako

 

Travelling across Canada

 

When people hear that we have walked across Canada, they actually often mishear us. They tell us about their own drive across the country, the summer they cycled west, hitchhiked to the ocean, or about the Via Rail train they once took from coast to coast. They told stories that touched on shared experiences and a mutual love of Canada.  But they also revealed something deeper - how people understand travel, exploration, and distance.

 

Most of us experience Canada at speed. We pass through it by car, rail, or air. We do this, mostly because of how vast a nation Canada is.  Unfortunately, the result is that by flying over or driving through regions we only skim their surface.

 

Walking - slowly, day after day - changes that relationship entirely – the journey and the moments en route are at the centre. Though most would understandably never set out to hike the Trans Canada Trail or walk from the Atlantic to the Pacific themselves, they understand the curiosity and wanderlust behind setting out.  As such, our story doesn’t actually surprise many we have talked to.  It’s what comes next that most captures people’s imagination.

 

Trek to the Arctic

 

When we say we are walking north - toward the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, the Arctic Circle, and eventually the Arctic Ocean - the conversation shifts. There is a pause. A moment of disbelief.  A spark of curiosity. A sense that we are stepping into something different, doing something unexpected, perhaps something very odd.  Regardless, there is also the sense that we are doing something of interest.

 

For right or for wrong, Canada’s north is unknown to so many.  It remains mysterious and is seen as a frontier – not because it is empty, but because it is unknown. It is still too often imagined as a place of ice and snow, shaded blue on childhood maps, despite being home to Indigenous and Inuit peoples whose presence, knowledge, and stewardship stretch back millennia. The North occupies most of the country’s landmass, yet exists largely outside the lived experience of those who call this country home. 

 

That distance – between the knowing of a place and knowing it through lived experience - is part of its pull.  To us, it seems a land filled with wonders and possibilities. 

 

The Trans Canada Trail

 

The first four years on the Trans Canada Trail taught us that distance is never just geographical. A route of nearly 14,000 kilometers, once imagined as a two-year undertaking (ah how young we were!), took four years. Seasons, weather, wildfires, floors, a global pandemic, detours, exhaustion, logistics, and the realities of sustaining life on trail reshaped and reshaped every plan we made.

 

The work of preparing to continue north has continued over the past year, and it has done so with great uncertainty.  Writing proposals, unsuccessfully seeking support, as well as drafting out itineraries and plans, again and again.  Figuring out where resources can be purchased, and where they need to be mailed to.  Locating (as best we can) camping areas in roadside pull-offs, highway ditches, and – from time to time – communities or parks.   

 

Yet despite the frustrations amid this process, the pull of the North never loosened its grip.

 

The Lure of the North

 

Perhaps that is because of the challenges of getting to and living in the north that the idea of it has long held a particular place in the Canadian imagination. Long before modern adventure narratives, Robert Service wrote of the Yukon as a land that challenges as well as one that, for some, calls.  I have long wondered whether the 'Spell of the Yukon' resonates because of its untamable wildness, its scale and because of the distances of the north. It calls because it reminds us that we too are part of the natural world.

 

Too often, hikes to wild and remote locations (like Canada's north) are framed as attempts to overcome terrain, push beyond our limits, or tick peaks and destinations off a list. None of these has ever been our goal. Our desire - in walking north - is not to test ourselves against the land, but to move slowly and experience it- attentively, respectfully, and with care for the communities, cultures and ecosystems that exist there.  What draws us north is our curiosity.  Walking north, for us, is not about reaching a dot on a map.  It is about understanding what lies between here and there.  What does the Arctic air smell like?  The water of northern rivers taste like? What do the landscapes sound like at night?  What species of birds and wildlife can be see? 

 

There is so much we don’t know and want to experience for ourselves. 

 

Challenges of the North

 

After she reached the Arctic Ocean, Mel Vogel wrote, “if I had walked from the Atlantic to the Pacific then I’m not sure that I would have walked onward to the north.  This trail is hard and I am tired.  But no one walks from the Atlantic to the Arctic and I want to finish this.”  Her words have stayed in our minds for a long time.   Those that have trekked this before us and who are therefore more experienced than us, have shown that walking to the north is hard… in the extreme.  In this region the Trans Canada Trail is not an established path to the Arctic Ocean – it is a route is on the side of the Alaska and Dempster highways that goes on for thousands of kilometers.

 

To step out onto it is to accept being exposed to the weather, walking on the edge of a roadway full of traffic and having little support or refuge in the long distances between communities.

 

One of Sean’s favourite quotations comes from the movie Lincoln, and it has followed us as we prepare to step onto a trail and into a region that we know so little about…

 

“A compass, I learnt when I was surveying, it’ll point you True North from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp, what’s the use of knowing True North?”

 

Though we know a fair amount of what to expect as we trek north into the Arctic and through Canada’s territories, it is also fair to say that we know so little.  Our maps tell us where we are going. But they do not tell us how the days will feel, what difficulties we may encounter, where we will need to slow down, or what lessons the trek will insist we learn. Those truths only emerge through being on the trail.  In this regard, I suspect, we are similar to many Canadians, few of whom get the opportunity to visit the north firsthand.

 

Yet despite the uncertainty, despite the challenges already behind us and those still ahead, the call to the north remains.

 

Return to The Great Trail

 

That understanding and that route on the national pathway brings us back, quite deliberately, to Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, in 2024.

 

Here, at this unassuming crossroads on the Trans Canada Trail, the long east - west journey meets with the route north. We passed this point once before in 2022 – and to be honest, it is little more than a gravel intersection.  But it is here that Fort Saskatchewan marks the spot where the familiar gives way to what we have yet to learn and to where we have yet to hike.

 

We will soon set out back to the trail and to Fort Saskatchewan.  Not to hike more kilometers or to chase a finish line, but to continue what we began so many years ago.  The itinerary we have we know will change.  The plans we have made will have to be alters.  Progress – especially on this trail - is rarely linear, and as with all journeys, our way will have to be made one careful step at a time. 

 

As such, we continue forward - not knowing exactly what lies ahead, but ready, as we have learned to be, to meet the world as it is.  With our backpacks once again filled with gear, and our hiking carts prepared, the north and the unknown are calling and we must go!

See you on the trail!