Pieces Left Behind: Trans Canada Trail Sections Not Hiked

Completing the Trans Canada Trail

 

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away.”

Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

Having finished the Trans Canada Trail, it was not long before someone pointed out that we had not, in fact, “completed the entire TCT.”
 
And they are right.
 
There are sections of the Trans Canada Trail that we did not walk. There are paddling routes we did not venture along, and that forced us to make our own way when there was no land trail. There are newly added sections that did not exist, or were not yet part of the national network, when we passed through a province. There are remote branches, urban pathways, alternative routes, and spurs that peel away from the main line we followed across the country. There are places we would still love to see, trails we might one day return to, and sections we left behind because of cost, timing, access, or the simple realities of trying to trek steadily from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic.  You must always remember that we envisioned this hike taking 3 years, not the eventual 6 years – the Trans Canada Trail always seems to take longer than most hikers who have set out on it expected.

 
So, no, we did not walk every kilometre of every trail, paddle each waterway, or follow every spur, and alternative route that now falls under the Trans Canada Trail banner.
 
But that was never quite the point.
 
The notion of hiking the Trans Canada Trail is not, at first glance, as simple as trekking east to west, west to east, south to north, or north to south. Admittedly, when we first began dreaming of our own journey, we hoped it might be that straightforward. We imagined a wilderness path we could follow across Canada: difficult, yes, and certainly long, but still a more or less straight and comprehensive line. A beginning. A direction. An end.
 
The reality was certainly more complicated.

 
There are, of course, the natural complexities of undertaking any long-distance trek. Weather intervenes. Bodies get tired. Roads are longer than expected. Maps do not always match conditions on the ground. Communities are further apart than hoped. Seasons change. Fires, floods, closures, detours, fatigue, cost, and chance all shape the route beneath your feet. But the Trans Canada Trail adds another layer of complexity because the trail itself has long been a work in progress.  It is not only a pathway across Canada. It is an evolving and growing national project.

Anyone looking at the history of the trail can see that its scale has changed dramatically over time. The original vision called for roughly 5,000 to 7,000 kilometres of trail across Canada. Within years, that number grew to 9,000 kilometres, then 16,000 kilometres, and soon after 18,000 kilometres. When we began planning our adventure in 2017 and 2018, the Trans Canada Trail was often described as approximately 22,000 kilometres in length. By the time we had completed the East Coast Trail and set out westward from Mile Zero in St. John’s,

Newfoundland, the TCT – then renamed the Great Trail - was being heralded as 24,000 kilometres long. In more recent years, the network has grown again, now described as roughly 28,000 kilometres of trails, highways, and waterways stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic.

 
That growth is impressive. It is also important. It means the trail is not static. It means that the route a person follows across Canada depends, in part, on when they set out.
 
Many of the sections we hiked did not exist, or were not part of the national network, when Dana Meise and Sarah Jackson undertook their own journeys years before us. In the same way, there are now sections of the TCT that were not incorporated into the system when we set out in 2019. The trail changed around us. It continues to change after us.

 
That is a wonderful thing in one sense. It means more communities are being connected. It means more pathways are being built, restored, signed, and recognized. It means the idea of a national trail is still alive enough to grow.  But it also complicates the idea of completion.
 

The Trans Canada Trail – A Work in Progress

 
If a trail grows by thousands of kilometres over a few years time, then what does it mean to say someone has completed it? Does a past journey become incomplete every time a new section is added? Does a walker who followed the official route available in 2019 need to return in 2026 to walk every new spur, waterway, and alternative corridor? Does the meaning of a coast-to-coast-to-coast trek rest only on whether every future addition has been retroactively included?
 
We do not think so.

Completion, on a trail like this, has to be understood in relation to a person’s goals, an individual’s intentions and purpose, as well as on the trail that existed when the journey was undertaken. Otherwise, completion becomes an impossible and ever-receding target. A person could spend years walking across Canada, arrive at the Arctic Ocean, and then be told that because a new rail trail, paddling route, or regional spur had been added elsewhere, the journey no longer counted.  That notion seems to miss the deeper meaning of setting out in the first place.
 
The Trans Canada Trail is not a single fixed footpath. It is a vast and changing network of trails, roads, waterways, urban pathways, wilderness routes, rail corridors, and community-built sections. It is shaped by geography, funding, local volunteers, provincial priorities, access agreements, natural disasters, and time. To walk it is not to follow a perfect line. It is to move through a living system.
 
And living systems are never finished.

This is why we want to acknowledge the pieces left behind honestly. Not as an apology. Not as a denial of what we did. Not as an attempt to diminish the scale of our own journey or anyone else’s. But because the truth of the Trans Canada Trail is more interesting than a simple claim of totality. The national trail is larger than any one crossing of it. It was larger than the journeys that came before ours, larger than our own, and it will continue to become larger still for those who come next.
 
Our only hope is that amid the drive to grow the TCT, there is an equal or greater push to get more sections off-road and maintain existing trails along the route.
 

Choices along the Trans Canada Trail

 
When we began our #Hike4Birds journey across Canada, we were not setting out to collect every possible branch of the system as though ticking off a catalogue. We were trying to follow the broad arc of the Trans Canada Trail from the Atlantic to the Pacific and to the Arctic. We were trying to understand the country, step by step, community by community, bird by bird, ecosystem by ecosystem, and landscape by landscape. We were trying to see what the trail actually was on the ground - not only what it looked like on maps, websites, or promotional materials.  We also wondered what it would ask of someone who tried to follow it from coast to coast to coast.

 
That meant making choices. It meant sometimes taking the through-route rather than a spur. It meant walking roads when we would have preferred pathways. It meant leaving paddling routes to paddlers. It meant accepting that a section added years after we passed through did not retroactively undo the reality of the kilometres we had already walked. It meant acknowledging that there are places where the official national trail now goes that we have not yet been.
 
And yes, we struggled with that.

Each time we had the option of an alternative route, or discovered that a newly designated section had appeared after we had moved on, or chose not to pay the high cost of reaching a remote section far from the main route, we felt the small weight of passing by.   At times, we were heavily critiqued for these choices.  On a journey this large, it is surprisingly easy to become haunted by what was not done. A missed trail can become an accusation. A branch not taken can begin to feel like a gap in the journey. A new section added later can make the past feel unfinished, as though what was complete enough at the time has somehow become incomplete after the fact.
 
But this, too, is one of the lessons we learned on the trail.
 

No long journey is ever as clean, absolute, or perfect as it appears from a distance. Maps simplify. Lines conceal difficulty. Total distances suggest certainty. Yet on the ground, while living and hiking, everything is more complicated. Weather intervenes. Money runs out. Fires close trails. Rivers require boats and specialized skills. Wilderness routes require permits and reservations.  Or you simply run out of time to keep walking on. And sometimes the most honest thing a walker can do is admit that completion yesterday is not the same thing as completion today.
 

Pieces Left Behind

 
There are pieces of the Trans Canada Trail we left behind.
 
In Nunavut, for example, there is a section on Baffin Island, separate from the mainland and separate from the primary land route we followed north. It was prohibitively expensive for us to reach, and accessing it responsibly would have required permissions, logistics, and resources far beyond what we could manage during our trek. It is part of the national trail, but it was not part of the continuous land journey we were undertaking toward Victoria or Tuktoyaktuk.

 
In Newfoundland and Labrador, new sections have been added since we walked through. The Great Northern Trail, at the tip of the Northern Peninsula on Newfoundland’s west coast, was not part of the route we followed at the time. The Pioneer Footpath in Labrador is also separate from the main route and was newly added after our passage. These are not failures of effort. They are examples of how the Trans Canada Trail continues to evolve.

 
Nova Scotia offers another example. The long stretch from Rum Runners Trail to Harvest Moon Trail corridor, running through southern Nova Scotia from Halifax toward Wolfville, was developed and opened after we had already passed through the province. It is now a beautiful and important part of the trail network, but it was not part of the established route available to us during our walk. This is one of the realities of a living national pathway: the trail you complete is always the trail that exists when you are there.

 
Prince Edward Island itself includes a different kind of omission on our part. We crossed the island on the Confederation Trail from the Wood Islands ferry to Borden-Carleton and the Confederation Bridge. But PEI contains far more trail than the section we walked. We trekked perhaps a third, or a quarter, of the island’s trail system, and there is a great deal more we would have loved to explore if time and the demands of the larger journey had allowed it. That is not a regret exactly, but it is a recognition. Some places invite spending more time and PEI was definitely one of them.  We know we will go back one day and walk Tip to Tip and trek more of this beautiful province.

 
In New Brunswick, the Sentier Nepisiguit Mi’gmaq Trail and the Véloroute de la Péninsule Acadienne were added near the end of 2025, long after we had passed through that part of the country. Both are in northern New Brunswick, both are separate from the main route we followed, and both would involve additional transportation and cost to reach and complete. They matter. They add richness to the national trail. But they also demonstrate the problem with treating “the entire TCT” as though it is a fixed and permanent measurement.

 
Quebec presented its own set of complexities. The Sentier de l’Orignac, from Saint-Siméon toward the Charlevoix section of the TCT, was one small section we did not take. Charlevoix itself required reservations, added costs, and at the time allowed travel only from west to east, while we were moving east to west across the province. These things may sound minor from a desk, but they matter on a long walk. Direction, timing, reservations, and cost can determine whether a route is possible or not.  Pointedly, most of those who have completed the TCT have not ventured on this section either – a reflection of the choices we all make.

 
Ontario is perhaps where the idea of a changing trail becomes most visible. The Prescott and Russell Trail and the developing Algonquin Trail are part of a newer route from Montreal toward Ottawa and onward toward North Bay. As of 2026, the Algonquin Trail appears more than halfway completed, and together these sections seem to be helping create a much more direct route from Montreal to Ottawa to North Bay. For future national hikers, that may change the experience of crossing eastern Ontario and entering northern Ontario entirely. It may also mean that those hikers will not follow the P’tit Train du Nord in Quebec, or much of the Ontario route from Ottawa to Toronto and back up to North Bay that we followed.

That is not a small difference. It means the shape of the journey in central Canada changes dramatically. A future walker may have a more direct passage, but they may miss some of what defined our crossing: the long sweep through Quebec’s rail trails, the particular way the route entered Ontario, and the opportunity to visit the provincial capital that formed so much of our experience. A new trail does not merely add kilometres. It can profoundly alter how others venture along “the same route”.
 
Other Ontario sections also remained outside our journey. The Guelph to Goderich (G2G) rail trail opened after we had trekked through, and while it intersects with the main route, it is also a spur. It presented its own challenges, including limited realistic tenting and accommodation options along the way.  

 
Similarly, the Southwestern Ontario spur, running from Windsor toward Hamilton, is another significant branch, much of it on roadway. We have travelled portions of it by bike and on foot, including sections before setting out on our larger trek around Windsor, Leamington, St. Thomas, and the route from Tillsonburg to Simcoe to Brantford, but we did not treat the entire spur as part of our national through-hike.
 

Northern Ontario adds still more complexity. The Lake Superior Coastal Trail, the Pukaskwa Coastal Trail, the Lake Superior Paddling Route, and Path of the Paddle all speak to the immense scale and variety of the region. The first of these routes requires specialized backcountry planning, and one has high costs associated with it.  The second set of these routes are water routes that involve paddling Lake Superior and across Northern Ontario to Manitoba – an undertaking beyond our skills. All are part of the broader imagination of a national trail, but not all could be afforded or attempted on the foot-based crossing we undertook.  While we completed many of the trail sections in Northern Ontario, throughout much of this area we had to navigate our own way to Manitoba. 

 
The same was true farther west. In Saskatchewan, the Qu’Appelle River Paddling Route and Chief Whitecap Waterway remained outside our trek. In Alberta, the Medicine Hat and Cypress Hills sections were separate from the main route (part of the original vision for the TCT in the 1990s), sitting well to the south, and the Lesser Slave River Water Trail was another northern water route we did not paddle en route to the Arctic. These waterways are important, but they also raise a basic question: when a national trail includes rivers, lakes, and paddling routes, what does completion mean for walkers?
 
We were walking. That was the shape of our journey. To add significant paddling sections would not merely have extended the trek; it would have changed the nature of the undertaking. It would have required different equipment, different skills, different logistics, and likely a different timeline. Perhaps another person’s Trans Canada Trail journey will be more multi-styled than ours. Ours was a journey on foot, with all the beauty and limitations that implies.

 
British Columbia, too, contains pieces we did not walk. The Princeton to Hope section of the Kettle Valley Rail Trail was affected by fire and is now decommissioned, creating a gap in the TCT. The Vedder Spur offers an alternative approach into the Greater Vancouver area – it was an optional route from the trail through Hope and into the GVA that we followed.  The Sea to Sky Trail, from the Salish Sea toward Whistler, is separate from the main route we followed, though it is one section we still hope to explore in the near future. Even at the Pacific, the idea of completion did not become simple. There were still alternate ways in, alternate pathways out, and trails worth returning to.

 
In the Northwest Territories, the CANOL Heritage Trail remained beyond our route, as did the Mackenzie Highway to Yellowknife section, which is separate from the main land trail and functions more as a spur off the paddling route and the Mackenzie River toward the capital. Like Baffin Island, these northern sections remind us that Canada’s geography resists tidy achievement. Distance is not the only challenge. Access, remoteness, weather, cost, and safety all matter. The North exists on its own terms – and we know that in many ways it is well beyond our abilities to attempt this section.
 
In addition to all of these named sections, there are countless small urban and local pathways across the country that are part of the Trans Canada Trail network, but each are often far from the main line of a national journey. Some pass through parks, neighbourhoods, waterfronts, or regional systems.  Unfortunately, this sprinkling of pathways across the country were not reachable in any feasible means by us while trekking across the country.
 

Completing the Trans Canada Trail

 
And this is where the question returns to us: what does it mean to complete something like the Trans Canada Trail?
 
If completion means walking every official kilometre of every branch, spur, waterway, local connector, newly added segment, and future reroute, then no completion can ever remain complete for long. The trail will keep changing. New sections will be added. Old sections will be closed. Better routes will (hopefully) replace dangerous ones. Waterways will be included. Urban trails will shift. Communities will build, repair, rename, and reimagine their pieces of the national pathway.

 
But if completion means giving oneself fully to the journey that existed at the time - following its broad national line, accepting the realities on the ground, moving through its communities and landscapes, and being changed by the undertaking - then perhaps completion is not such a rigid thing after all.
 
Perhaps it is better to think of trekking the Trans Canada Trail as something closer to a pilgrimage.
 
A pilgrim does not possess, nor need to complete, every road to Santiago. A hiker does not own every mountain pass. A walker across Canada certainly does not know the whole country simply by crossing it. The value of the journey lies not in reducing a place to a perfect line, but in accepting it as it is when you are there and growing from the experience.
 
That is why the pieces left behind matter. They keep us honest. They remind us that Canada is bigger than our journeys, and the Trans Canada Trail is bigger than any one hike across it. They also remind us that humility is part of slow travel. To walk for years across a country is not to conquer it. It is to be continually informed by it.

 
We did not walk every section of the Trans Canada Trail. We did not paddle every waterway. We did not reach every remote branch. We did not return to every new trail added after we had passed through. But we did walk from the Atlantic to the Pacific and to the Arctic. We walked through provinces, seasons, cities, forests, farmlands, mountains, highways, rail trails, boreal muskeg, prairie skies, and northern roads. We walked long enough to learn that the line on the map was never the whole story. 
 
There will always be pieces left behind. That is true of trails, of pilgrimages, and perhaps of life itself. The goal is not to walk every kilometre simply so nothing remains unclaimed.
 
We travel to explore, to see, and to grow.
 
See you on the trail!