What is the Best Part of the Trans Canada Trail?

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Annie Dillard

 

Questions from the Trail

 

Some of the questions we are asked most often about the Trans Canada Trail are also some of the hardest to answer.

 

What was the best moment? What is the best section? What stood out the most? What was the hardest part?  What made it all worth it?

 

These questions are usually asked with genuine curiosity and goodwill. But within them is the assumption that long journeys can be reduced to highlights.  That somewhere on a journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic, there must be a single defining highlight that stands out beyond everything else.  Or that the value in such a long hike can only be found in peaks and milestones, or moments dramatic enough to “justify” the effort.

Surely there must be a terrific summit, a great sunrise, a dramatic encounter.  Something that transcends everything else?

 

But these types of questions aren’t actually seeking a specific answer, they are looking for reassurance.  Reassurance that the years, the kilometres, the weather, the uncertainty all added up to something suitably “worthwhile” to justify the effort.  

 

Don’t get me wrong, after 5 years of hiking the Trans Canada Trail from the Atlantic to the Pacific and now north to Whitehorse.  Over this time, the #Hike4birds has trekked across Canada step by step, region by region, and province by province.  In the process, we understand both the impulse and why people ask these types of questions.   We now live in a culture where top lists, must-do activities, and Instagrammable moments are at the centre of so much.  We want the best parts without the long stretches in between.  We want the summit photo without the climb.  And we want the inside scoop without the effort.

 

But the honest truth is that you can’t compress or simplify the Trans Canada Trail in this way…the journey just doesn’t easily break down into lists and specific highlights.

 

Moments between the Moments

 

Certainly, there were moments that stood out. Watching the waters of the Atlantic Ocean break against the coast of Cape Spear, Newfoundland, and seeing puffins in the waters around Witless Bay.  Pushing hard through long kilometres of Nova Scotia as a hurricane headed towards the province and crossing Prince Edward Island on the impeccable pathways of the Confederation Trail. Following and bird watching along the river corridors of New Brunswick.  Exploring the history and shifting responses to us as we navigated across Quebec.  Hiking the rocky shorelines of Lake Superior in Northern Ontario.  The vastness of the agricultural landscapes and the wide skies of Manitoba and Saskatchewan.   The sheer scale of the Rocky Mountains and the passes that we climbed in western Alberta.  And finally, the time spent walking BC’s forests and our first views of the Pacific Ocean.

 

Each province offered something distinct. Each held landscapes and communities worth seeing and experiencing in their own right.  But when people ask us to name the best moment, we find ourselves hesitating - not because there were none, but because the question itself feels incomplete and feels that perhaps it misses the point altogether. 

 

Hiking across the country on the TCT, we don’t see it or experience it as a series of highlights stitched together.  Day after day, step after step, the trail unfolds in ways that are often subtle. Some days are undeniably hard. Others feel unremarkable on the surface. Many blur together when viewed from a distance. And yet, those are the day and the moments that carry the journey forward.  Much like Canada it is the spaces in between the places that hold so much of value.   Similarly, on the Great Trail, most of the experience is held in the moments between the moments.

 

Reframing the Question

 

Rather than searching for and declaring a single instance as the ultimate moment it is the ongoing journey as a whole that is essential.  The small “boring parts”, the logistics, the long days walking – each of these are essential moments in the larger journey that matter just as much.  It is in those moments that the Trans Canada Trail reveals what it actually is, and who we are.

 

It is standing outside a small-town grocery store in Newfoundland, soaked and tired, and being offered help without explanation. It is a conversation in Nova Scotia or New Brunswick with someone who wants to know where you started and where you are going.  It is walking across Prince Edward Island and realizing how quickly strangers become familiar faces who reach out and help. It is navigating Quebec, dealing with the shift in language while still being met with hospitality and warmth. It is traversing long sections of Ontario, having to deal with large backpacks in cities during a heat wave.  It is learning patience on the Prairies, where the land stretches endlessly on and the fields – at first glance – look identical but with time show beauty and wonder.  It is reaching Alberta and British Columbia and struggling over peaks and across mountain ranges, only to find that you are just as amazed with spotting a gopher or grasshopper as you are with seeing a huge black bear. 

 

Each of these are moments that are impossible to point to but which stays with us and which actually fill most of our days on the trail.  None of them announces themselves as “the best.” They do not demand to be photographed, they are hard to convey online in words and pictures, and the meaning they provide doesn’t fit into narratives of triumph or transformation.  Regardless, however, they are the bulk of the journey. 

 

Over time, they also teach us something essential – namely that meaning is not confined to spectacle and drama. 

 

All Moments are Worth It

 

We found ourselves resisting the logic of highlights and “best moments” - not out of stubbornness, but necessity. Because if only the exceptional moments mattered, then most of the Trans Canada Trail would be dismissed as filler. And yet, it is definitely not.  Indeed, it is precisely the “in-between” days that shape a journey of this length.

 

Canada is vast, diverse and beautiful.   It is filled with natural wonders from coast to coast to coast. Each region is worth seeing and experiencing in its own way. But the deeper truth we have learned is that the Trans Canada Trail – like life - is impossible to summarize into a single instance or moment. 

 

Because all moments are worth it.

 

And more often than not, it is the quiet, subtle ones - the moments in between the moments and the moments that resist description and refuse to perform - that matter the most.

 

The Trail has taught us that waiting for the extraordinary can blind us to what is already here.  If not this moment, then what are we waiting for?

 

Connections

 

And if there is a quiet challenge embedded in this answer, it is this: Get out there and experience the world in person.

 

Not only for the peaks and the photographs. Not only for the dramatic encounters. But for the subtle connections, the small interactions, and the steady unfolding of days that rarely make headlines but shape us nonetheless.

 

Walk the trail. Board the train. Stand on the deck of a ship at sunrise. Listen for the gulls. Pay attention to the way light shifts across land and water. Notice who you become in the spaces between departure and arrival.

 

Because in the end, it isn’t a single moment that makes a journey worthwhile. It is the accumulation of all of them.

 

See you on the trail!