Nature Trails and Lived Experience in the Age of AI

“One day's exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books.”
 
John Muir, 1872. Quoted by the U.S. National Park Service.
 

Doubt and Critique

 

In recent years, we’ve noticed a subtle but unsettling shift in how lived experience is received online. It isn’t just skepticism about individual stories or photographs - it’s a growing disbelief in experience itself. In an age when words and images can be generated instantly, journeys that take time and unfold slowly, over years and decades, are increasingly met with suspicion rather than curiosity.

 

Many of the trails we write about were walked long before generative AI tools existed. Our hikes on the Bruce Trail began in the early 2000s. Our pilgrimage on the Camino Francés was in 2016.   The East Coast Trail was trekked in 2018. Our Trans Canada Trail journey began in 2019 and took until 2025 to complete. These few examples of dozens of trails and voyages around the world were not retrospective narratives assembled after the fact, but experiences documented as they happened - through travel journals, photographs, changing seasons, and inevitable mistakes that we made en route and off trail.

 

The technology may be new, but the kilometres trekked are not – nor are our blogs. Yet we now receive emails and comments suggesting that none of these journeys ever occurred - that our writing, images, and journals must be artificial or generated. The implication is not simply disbelief in us, but disbelief in the possibility that such things can be done at all. It is a strange reversal: the longer the arc of experience, the more implausible it seems to those encountering it only through screens.

 

More and more, however, I have come to see that this skepticism is not really about evidence. It is about context.

When everything can be instantly created, when more and more of life is mediated through social platforms, videos, tweets, opinion forums, and algorithmic summaries, people begin to assume that nothing is real unless it reinforces their existing view of the world - even if that view is narrow, second-hand, or entirely untested by experience. Put more simply, many people now encounter the world primarily through representations of it, rather than through direct engagement with it.  Lived experiences are being set aside for quick entertainment, and as a result, skepticism has taken the place of knowledge. 

 

We don’t believe this disbelief is personal. It is cultural. It reflects a moment in which the ground beneath storytelling and art has shifted. Journeys that began decades ago are retroactively questioned - not because the trail has changed, but because the relationship between experience and trust has. Addressing this is difficult – as the more time we spend answering critiques, the more it begins to refocus and change the journey itself – and we don’t want to do that to any of our treks and voyages.

 

In answering the AI question, we feel stuck.  To be overly defensive moves authority away from lived experience and toward external validation. It trains readers to expect responses instead of reflection. It rewards bad-faith skepticism. And it misunderstands the nature of the moment we are in: no amount of evidence will convince someone who has already decided not to believe. GPX tracks, timestamps, permits, witnesses, receipts, photographs can all be easily dismissed if disbelief has become the default posture.  And yet, complete silence to the many questions we get does not feel right either – indeed, on some level it feels like in staying silent we are allowing the notion that “we never hiked the Trans Canada Trail” to take root and become the story.

 

This phenomenon is new, and it is destabilizing, especially for those who have been documenting journeys long before AI-generated text or imagery existed. Left unspoken, it creates a devastating erosion of trust. It fosters a sense that lived experience must constantly be defended. It has a chilling effect on storytelling and on efforts to inform and inspire others. 

 

To this end, we write neither to persuade skeptics nor to defend our authenticity. We write to record what we lived, while it was still being experienced.  Our work has always rested on time -  not popularity, clicks or likes. On consistency, not spectacle. On details, specifics, information, the challenges en route, the contradictions in our journey and ourselves, and all the mistakes made or imperfections of the journey. Long trails resist clean narratives and easy answers (though we are going to try to gives some in the coming months). Long-distance trails involve starting, stopping, recalculating, judgment, fatigue, and change - none of which are simple. They take place unevenly, are shaped by weather, access, logistical realities, chance encounters and the unexpected. These long arcs and lifetime adventures are difficult to fabricate convincingly, not because they are dramatic, but because they are ordinary in their difficulty and because challenges en route are often unexpected. 

 

Maintaining Connection

 

The problem is not that AI can create fake content particularly well and that we should all be hyper aware and hyper critical.   The problem is that people forget - or choose to forget - the realities and possibilities in the world around them. When lived experience becomes suspect, nature itself becomes abstract. Landscapes become content. Trails become backdrops. And revealing selfies become the only proof that people seem to accept. And once that happens, connection erodes.

 

This matters beyond questions of authorship or credibility. If we doubt everything, if we assume nature’s wonders are exaggerated or fabricated, then conservation becomes impossible. As Sir Peter Scott observed, “The most effective way to save the threatened and decimated natural world is to cause people to fall in love with it again, with its beauty and its reality.”

 

Love requires belief. Belief requires trust. Trust requires lived experience and connection - not knee-jerk skepticism and critique.  Life and nature require time - not views, likes, or instantaneous consumption. They require patience, presence, and a willingness to be changed by what we encounter. If we lose our connection to the real world, we lose our impetus to care for it, to help our neighbours, to improve our communities, or to protect the landscapes that sustain us.

 

Despite the random dismissals and the cultural noise of this moment, we intend to keep walking forward, to keep sharing, and to keep answering questions about our time on the Trans Canada Trail.  We will continue to share carefully, responsibly, and honestly. Not to convince, but to document. Not to perform, but to remember and hopefully inspire.

 

In the end, the trail remains the only witness that matters. The journey, the memories, and the lived experiences are ours - and no amount of doubt can take them away.

 

“We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.”

 

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949, “The Land Ethic.

 

See you on the trail!