Are You the First to Complete the Trans Canada Trail?

“To aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain.”

Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

Are you the First to complete the TCT?

 
After walking nearly 18,000 kilometres across Canada on the Trans Canada Trail - from the Atlantic to the Pacific and onward to the Arctic Ocean - we were asked the same question over and over:
 
“Were you the first?”
 
It is a reasonable question. The world’s longest recreational trail seems to demand classification. First solo. First woman. First continuous. First documented. First duo. First to all three oceans. First to walk. First to paddle. First to photograph. First to blog. The distinctions narrow as they multiply, until the journey itself can begin to feel like something being sorted into drawers.

 
For a long time, I brushed the question aside. There were too many kilometres still ahead of us, too many trail sections to navigate, too many routes to figure out, too many roads to walk, and too many kilometers still waiting ahead of us. Somewhere between the long gravel corridors of the prairies, the ferry decks of British Columbia, the coastal footpaths of the Maritimes, and the endless northern highways that eventually carried us toward the Arctic Ocean, however, I began to understand that the question was not really about the trail.
 
It was about how we measure adventure in this day and age.
 

Setting the Record Straight

 
With all of that said, there is a record to be set straight.
 
For some time, from a number of quarters, there has been an insistence that “no one has completed the trail.” In the narrowest possible sense, that statement can be made to sound true because no one has travelled every possible branch, water route, spur, regional alternative, and evolving alignment of a national network that is constantly changing. The TCT is not one static footpath. It is a vast, shifting system of land routes, water routes, rail trails, road connectors, community pathways, historic corridors, urban greenways, and regional variations.
 
So no, no one has done “all” of the TCT in that absolute sense.
 
But let us be honest.

Dana Meise was the first to complete the Trans Canada Trail from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic, lighting a fire for many of us who followed. 

Sarah Rose Jackson became the first to travel continuously the trail from the Pacific to the Atlantic. 

Dianne Whelan became the first to hike, bike, and paddle her own coast-to-coast-to-coast route while creating 500 Days in the Wild. 

Mel Vogel and Malo became the first woman and first dog to hike coast to coast to coast on the TCT. And we - Dr. Sonya Richmond and Sean Morton - became the first couple to hike coast to coast to coast, the first to document the entire journey in daily blogs, and the first to photograph the entire and route as a lived experience.

Those distinctions matter, not because they make one journey more real than another, but because they prevent erasure. We do not honour the trail by pretending those who walked, paddled, and cycled it were figments of imagination. We honour it by recognizing that the national pathway has already been lived in many forms, by many people, across many years.
 
In our own earlier reflections in our #Hike4Birds we tried to frame this honestly: Dana Meise, Sarah Jackson, Dianne Whelan, Mel Vogel and Malo, and ourselves all travelled versions of the same national pathway, but each journey had its own shape, method, moment, and perspective.
 
That is precisely why these treks matter collectively rather than competitively.
 

The Arms Race of Distinction

 
In the age of GPS tracking, FKTs, Instagram reels, sponsor decks, media hooks, and search engine summaries, exploration increasingly comes with qualifiers. The accomplishment is not simply to complete a route. It is to complete it in a way that can be distilled into a headline.
Being “the first” travels well.
 
It is clean. It is searchable. It is marketable. It cuts through noise. It gives editors a hook, sponsors a sentence, algorithms a category, and audiences something easy to understand before they scroll on.

 
But the more granular the distinction becomes - first winter unsupported, first continuous, first self-supported, first documented, first red-line variation, first duo, first woman, first with a dog, first to photograph, first to blog - the more the language starts to feel like taxonomy rather than exploration.
 
None of this is inherently dishonest. Many of these distinctions are technically true, and some are genuinely important. They can mark visibility, representation, endurance, or a form of documentation that did not previously exist. The problem begins when the qualifier becomes more important than the experience. The problem begins when a journey is valued only to the extent that it can be differentiated from someone else’s or that it is viewed as utterly unique.
 
Spend enough time in long-distance hiking, and you begin to feel that pressure. The route is not chosen only for its beauty, difficulty, history, or meaning, but for its claimability. The variation becomes part of the achievement. The documentation becomes proof. The proof becomes a defence. The defence, which seems to be constantly ongoing, becomes exhausting.

 
We know that pressure because we lived inside it.
 
We photographed because we loved the country and wanted to share it. We blogged because we wanted people to come with us, to see the birds, landscapes, histories, challenges, small towns, industrial edges, rail trails, shorelines, forests, rivers, and roads that make up the Trans Canada Trail. But over time, documentation also became something else. It became evidence. Evidence that we had been there. Evidence that the route existed as we described it. Evidence that the road walking, rerouting, broken sections, kindness, danger, beauty, and frustration were not simply exaggerations.
 
That is a strange thing to realize while walking across a country: that you are not only living the journey, but continually proving it.
 

What “First” Used to Mean

 
There was a time when being first meant something more concrete. Polar expeditions navigated unmapped ice. Alpine climbers attempted faces no one had yet climbed. Early thru-hikers stepped onto routes without guidebooks, water reports, apps, or online forums.
 
Even then, of course, the language of “first” could obscure deeper realities. Peaks described as “first ascents” were often long known to Indigenous communities. Rivers declared “discovered” already had names, histories, travel routes, and relationships attached to them. Exploration narratives have always been shaped by who gets to tell the story, who is believed, and whose knowledge is treated as official.

 
Today, in many parts of the world, the land is rarely unknown in that old geographic sense. Satellite imagery reveals even remote valleys. Trails are plotted publicly. GPS tracks can be downloaded before leaving home. Weather updates arrive hourly. Emergency beacons can summon help from places that once would have been beyond communication.
 
What remains uncertain is often no longer the geography, but the performance. The “first” has migrated from discovery to differentiation.  We are no longer asking only, “What is here?”  We are asking, “How can I do this differently enough to stand apart?”
 

The Trans Canada Trail as a Case Study

 
The Trans Canada Trail is an extreme example because of its scale. It is long enough to invite superlatives, large enough to feel definitive, and complicated enough to resist every simple claim made about it.

 
It is not a single pristine corridor. It includes coastal footpaths, rail beds, highways, ferry crossings, suburban sidewalks, gravel concessions, mountain passes, forestry roads, urban pathways, canal trails, river routes, water crossings, working landscapes, wilderness footpaths, and long stretches where the official line on the map meets the less tidy reality on the ground. In our provincial blog overview, even the short summary of our Atlantic-to-Pacific journey names the variety: Newfoundland’s East Coast Trail and T’Railway, Nova Scotia’s waterways and urban pathways, PEI’s Confederation Trail, New Brunswick’s rail trails and Fundy Footpath, Quebec’s Sentier Transcanadien and cycling routes, Ontario’s waterways, pathways, and roadways, Manitoba’s Whiteshell and prairie landscapes, Saskatchewan’s ferries and range roads, Alberta’s Iron Horse Trail and Rockies, and British Columbia’s mountain rail trails, trestles, tunnels, Fraser River corridor, and Vancouver Island routes.
 

Walking it makes the idea of being first feel strangely fragile.
 
No section begins with a blank page. The route is stitched together from existing pathways and older movements: Indigenous travel routes, trade corridors, rail lines, logging roads, canal paths, ferry crossings, river systems, working roads, community trails, and footpaths worn long before recreational hiking became a national category. Even when the TCT sign is new, the movement through that landscape rarely is.
 
To declare primacy in such a landscape requires a kind of selective attention. You must narrow the focus to the particular configuration of your journey.
 
First on foot.
First as a couple.
First documented daily.
First photographed comprehensively.
First to bird the country along the route.
 
Those qualifiers may be true. They may even be worth saying. But without them, the claim dissolves into lineage.  And perhaps lineage is the more honest place to begin.
 

What Gets Lost

 
The danger is not that people pursue firsts.  The danger is that we begin to believe firsts are the whole point and the basis of meaning.
 
Journeys are not defined by arrival alone. They are defined by the spaces between the moments along the way - the slow reshaping of perception that happens over weeks, months, and years. The recalibration of pace. The humbling of expectation. The way your sense of scale changes when you realize how small your own timeline is against the land, the weather, the communities, and the infrastructure through which you are moving.

 
There is no algorithmic reward for patience. No leaderboard for interior change. No qualifier for cumulative understanding. Yet these are the essential aspects of time outdoors and on a trail.
 
No headline can easily hold what it means to stand at Cape Spear with everything still ahead of us. No neat distinction explains the fatigue of Newfoundland ballast, the relief of kindness in Atlantic Canada, the beauty of the Celtic Shores Coastal Trail, the shock of realizing that Nova Scotia was not a single continuous footpath but a network of rail trails, roads, water routes, and choices. No title captures the feeling of being immersed again in the forests of the boreal after so much road walking, noticing mushrooms, caterpillars, blackberries, nuthatches, mergansers, and the sound of water beside the tent.

No qualifier explains how the trail could be both brutal and generous on the same day. No “first” contains the experience of walking into Quebec as the light failed, realizing too late that two time changes had stolen more evening than expected, and continuing 15 kilometres in darkness beneath stars and the half-moon, exhausted but happy to have reached a fifth province.
 
No distinction captures what it meant to have our understanding of the country changed by roads we never would have chosen, by towns we might never have visited, by people we never would have met, and by landscapes we once thought we knew because we had seen them on maps.

 
The Compostela stamp at the end of a pilgrimage, the summit selfie, the GPS file uploaded to a public feed, the arrival photo at a terminus - these are markers of completion. They are not measures of comprehension or personal growth.
 
When we fixate on who was first, we reduce exploration to sequence. But exploration, at its most meaningful, is layered. It builds on what came before. It adds to a conversation rather than closing it.
 

Resisting the Taxonomy

 
Resisting the pull of firsts does not mean rejecting ambition. It does not mean refusing recognition, pretending effort does not matter, or allowing others to erase what was done.It means holding the distinction lightly.
 
It means saying: yes, this is what we did, and yes, this is where our journey fits, but no, that is not the whole meaning of it.

 
It means recognizing Dana Meise, Sarah Rose Jackson, Dianne Whelan, Mel Vogel and Malo, Bonnie Thornbury, ourselves, and those who will come next as part of an unfolding national conversation rather than a ranking system. It means understanding that every version of the journey reveals something different.
 
A person travelling alone will experience the trail differently than a couple. A cyclist will understand distance differently than a walker. A paddler will know the water routes differently than someone forced to navigate around them. A dog will experience the country through scent and instinct in ways none of us can translate. A photographer sees light and shadow. A birder hears movement in the shrubs before anyone else notices it. A filmmaker thinks in sequences. A walker with no public platform may carry away the deepest wisdom of all and never put it online.

 
Each of us has a unique time on the trail – shaped by individual experiences.
 

A Different Measure of Achievement

 
By the end of the Trans Canada Trail, the question “Were you the first?” no longer irritated me as much or in quite the same way. It still mattered, especially when claims were made that erased those who had come before us. It mattered because accuracy matters. It mattered because people like Dana, Sarah, Dianne, Mel, Malo, and ourselves should not be casually written out of the history of a trail we gave years of our lives to understand.
 
I also came to see that the question – “Are you the first?” was no longer the best question.

 
The better questions are: What did the walking reveal? What did you learn on your travels?  How are you different from these experiences?
 
None of these is an easy question to express.  None of them is about ranking or will make a headline. They are not focused on whether a journey can be compressed into a single achievement or a ten-word answer. Instead, there are questions about what you learned and how you grew as an individual.  They are focused on matters of community, endurance, humility, and the limits of certainty.  They are about how often the most meaningful moments may not have been in spectacular mountain ranges, or at iconic trailheads, but instead took place in the connections you made, experiences you had, and relationships you forged.
 

Final Reflections on Trail Questions

 
The Trans Canada Trail is not one thing. It is a mosaic of regional visions, local labour, historic corridors, compromises, dreams, gaps, roads, waterways, and beautiful acts of community building. There is no denying that the national trail can be both inspiring and frustrating, both connected and broken, both beautiful and deeply practical. Just as the trail across 28,000 km is not one thing, so too will each person’s experience on it be varied. 
 
While there are firsts we could claim, we were not the first to complete the Trans Canada Trail. Yet I don’t think that diminishes the experience, or what we have accomplished and learned in the six years we spent on the trail from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic.  

 
We walked in the wake of others. We walked on routes built by communities, volunteers, Indigenous peoples, railway workers, road crews, trail associations, bridge builders, ferry operators, conservationists, municipal planners, and people whose names we will never know. Others will walk after us, and they will see things we missed, correct things we misunderstood, and carry the story forward in ways we cannot predict.
 
That is not a diminishment of what we did.  Experiences – what came before and what comes next are what give the route meaning.
 
Perhaps the challenge for modern adventure culture is not to eliminate firsts, but to resist letting them become the only measure of worth. Distinction is not the same as depth. Novelty is not the same as meaning. Visibility is not the same as understanding.

 
To focus only on who was first, who went fastest, who documented most, who claimed the sharpest category, or who secured the cleanest headline is to miss the point of setting out in the first place.  Because the point was never only to arrive.
 
The point was to be changed by the country between the oceans. To follow the trail where it existed, adapt where it did not, and learn something from the roads, rivers, rail beds, forests, fields, cities, mountains, ferries, bridges, birds, weather, and people along the way.
 
The point was to step outside the small certainty of ordinary life and discover that the world was wider, more difficult, more generous, and more alive than we had ever realized.
 
The point was not to own the trail.  It was to grow from the experience.  And perhaps, in the end, that is the only measure that matters.
 
See you on the trail!