What We Wish We Had Known Before Hiking the Trans Canada Trail

Things that We Wish We Had Known Before Hiking the Trans Canada Trail

“We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

This entry is, in some ways, a companion to the lessons we learned while trekking our #Hike4Birds the Trans Canada Trail from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic. Those lessons came slowly, over six years, 10 provinces, two territories, thousands of kilometres, and more than a few moments when the journey we had imagined gave way to the one that was actually taking place under our feet.

This entry is slightly different. It is about what we wish we had known before setting out.

Not what we wish we had packed. Not which shoes we should have worn. Not whether one tent peg, water filter, power bank, or rain jacket would have solved everything. Gear matters, of course, and on a trail as long as the Trans Canada Trail, it matters a great deal. But gear was never the hardest part of the journey.

Perhaps most importantly, what we most wish we had understood before setting out was the difference between a trail on paper and a trail on the ground.

Before we began, we had maps. We had distances. We had the few guidebooks where they existed, online resources where they did not, and the confidence that comes from having set out on long-distance trails and pilgrimage a country beforehand. We had walked the Camino Frances, Camino Portuguese and Via Podiensis. In the process of each of these, we had walked the width and length of other countries. Equally, we had hiked long-distance routes such as the Bruce Trail. We understood blisters, rain, hills, fatigue, and the discipline of getting up the next morning and continuing on even when you don’t want to.

But the Trans Canada Trail was something else – this is why it often takes so much longer to complete than expected.

The next thing we wish we had known is that the TCT is not one trail in the way many people imagine a trail to be. It is not a single constructed footpath with consistent signage, regular maintenance, predictable surfaces, or one obvious route from coast to coast to coast. It is a national network. Coastal footpaths become rail trails. Rail trails become urban pathways. Urban pathways become road connectors. Road connectors become highways, gravel concessions, forest roads, mountain passes, and northern shoulders. It is best understood as a national thread rather than a continuous wilderness corridor, and that remains the most honest way we know to explain it.

That distinction matters because it changes everything about planning.

On paper, the math seems simple. If you walk 25 or 30 or 35 kilometres a day, then a certain number of kilometres should take a certain number of days. Before setting out, we did that math too. From the safety of an untested formula, even 500 or 600 days seemed generous. Then we stepped onto the trail and discovered that Canada cannot be reduced to a spreadsheet. Eight kilometres on the Fundy Footpath could take almost everything we had. Forty kilometres on a northern highway shoulder might be possible in one long, steady march. The distance was never just distance. It was surface, weather, traffic, access, resupply, fatigue, safety, mood, season, and luck.

With that said, we also wish we had known how much road walking there would be on the Trans Canada Trail.

This is not a criticism so much as a necessary truth for anyone planning a long-distance TCT journey. You need to be comfortable with roads. Not just quiet country lanes with birdsong in the ditches, but highways, industrial edges, suburban arterials, gravel concessions, causeways, shoulderless stretches, and places where the trail exists because the road is the only available means between two better sections. In Nova Scotia, we quickly learned that the wonderful local trails were often separated by long road connectors, even though stretches such as the Celtic Shores Coastal Trail, Musquodoboit Trailway, Atlantic View Trail, Salt Marsh Trail, and Cole Harbour Trail showed how beautiful the province’s trail system could be when it came together.

In places like Northern Ontario, the prairies and walking to the Arctic roads make up the vast majority of the “trail”.

Road walking is not only physically tiring. It is mentally exhausting. Traffic changes the nervous system. So does noise. So does the need to stay constantly alert to transport trucks, blind corners, poor shoulders, loose gravel, heat shimmer, distracted drivers, and the strange vulnerability of being a person moving slowly through a world designed to move fast. Over time, highway walking became one of the parts of the TCT that most affected our energy and our mood. It was not always dramatic, but it was cumulative. Some days the road simply wore us down. En route to the Arctic, nearly 3000 km of highway walking over two years beat us up more than we can yet clearly express.

We wish we had known, too, that continuity is more complicated than it sounds.

People often talk about walking “the Trans Canada Trail” as though there is one line to follow. In practice, continuity can be interrupted by water routes, missing trails, private land issues, seasonal closures, construction, washed-out bridges, fires, floods, ferry schedules, or routes that work for cyclists but not for walkers with carts. In water routes in Cape Breton, around Lake Superior in Ontario and in Northern Alberta meant that we had to make our way around a section that could not simply be walked. In Saskatchewan, we could sometimes see the trail we were meant to reach, but the route shown on the app was blocked by fences, gates, warning signs, and no practical access, forcing us to backtrack and create another plan.

That was one of the hardest early lessons: the app, the map, and the signs will not always agree.

Sometimes the app showed a route that no longer seemed to exist on the ground. Sometimes a local sign pointed one way while the digital route suggested another. Sometimes there were Trans Canada Trail signs far from where we expected them to be, and no signs where we most needed them. Sometimes, everyone locally knew that access had changed, but the available mapping had not caught up. At those moments, the question was not whether we were “really” on the TCT in some pure abstract sense. The question was how to move safely and honestly through the landscape in front of us while staying “true” to our goal of following the Trans Canada Trail.

 We wish we had known that rerouting is not a failure.

Before setting out, we imagined that walking every step would mean following one clear route across the country. What we learned is that walking every step sometimes means making responsible decisions when the mapped line becomes unsafe, inaccessible, closed, damaged, or impossible for the way you are travelling. Rerouting was not an abandonment of the journey. It was part of the journey. It was how the TCT actually had to be walked. Some areas and circumstances demanded this reality, and it took us a long time to accept it.

We also wish we had better understood how much trail conditions would vary by province, season, and year.

The East Coast Trail and T’Railway in Newfoundland were nothing like the Confederation Trail in Prince Edward Island. The Dobson Trail and Fundy Footpath in New Brunswick were nothing like the Route Verte in Quebec or the Waterfront Trail in Ontario. Manitoba’s Whiteshell, the Crow Wing Trail, and prairie roads were different again. Saskatchewan surprised us with ferries, range roads, the Qu’Appelle Valley, prairie mud, and distances that made the province feel far more varied than its reputation suggests. Alberta carried us from the Iron Horse Trail through Edmonton, Calgary, the foothills, and into the Rockies. British Columbia brought mountain passes, trestles, tunnels, wildfire damage, highways, and eventually the Pacific. The TCT was never one thing. It was always many things, stitched together.

This is also why different users experience different versions of the “same” trail.

A cyclist, hiker, paddler, local walker, and cross-country trekker may all be using the Trans Canada Trail, but they are not always experiencing the same thing. A gravel rail trail that feels endless and exposed on foot might be wonderful by bike. A technical footpath that is exhilarating for a hiker may be impossible with wheels. A road connector that is tolerable for a cyclist may feel dangerous and demoralizing to someone walking. A water route may be central to the national pathway for paddlers, while creating a break in continuity for those trying to cross the country on foot.

We wish we had known that cities would not always be the easy part.

Before setting out, we imagined remote stretches would be the most difficult and urban areas would be places of relief. Sometimes they were. Cities offered grocery stores, libraries, transit, coffee, laundromats, gear shops, and beds. But they also brought their own complications. The route could be harder to follow. Traffic increased. Accommodation became expensive. Our tired, sunburned, threadbare appearance did not always fit urban expectations, especially when combined with carts and camera gear. In Quebec City, a police encounter left us with broken camera equipment and a painful reminder that being visibly out of place can change how people see you.

That was another thing we wish we had known: once you step outside ordinary expectations for long enough, coming back is not simple.

There is a romantic version of this idea. It says that long journeys change you, that you return wiser, freer, and more yourself. That may be true. But there is also a harder version. Once you have spent years living by distance, weather, landscape, kindness, uncertainty, and the daily discipline of continuing, it can become difficult to re-enter systems that value predictability, credentials presented in the right order, tidy résumés, conventional timelines, and ordinary explanations. A long journey can expand your sense of the world, but it can also make it harder to fit back into the one you left.

We wish we had known how much the weather would shape everything.

We expected rain, wind, heat, and cold. We did not fully understand how often the weather would decide the shape of our days, seasons, and years. In Nova Scotia, a hurricane made landfall. In Prince Edward Island, the same system damaged sections of the Confederation Trail. Winter reached us in Quebec. In Manitoba and Saskatchewan, heat and smoke became defining conditions. In Saskatchewan, we woke to thick, oily, brown wildfire smoke despite the fire being hundreds of kilometres away, a reminder that on a trail this large, weather and disaster are never only local.

Later, fires and smoke became more than uncomfortable conditions. They changed the future of the trek. In British Columbia, we dealt with damaged trails and smoke-filled highways after fires affected the route between Princeton and Hope. In 2023, widespread wildfires across Canada forced us to step away from our planned northern continuation because walking into remote landscapes under those conditions would have been unsafe and irresponsible.

We wish we had known that community would matter as much as gear.

The kindness of people along the route did not solve every problem, but it changed the journey for the better time and again. In Newfoundland, the trail felt connected to the community, and chance meetings with people we had encountered earlier made the island feel smaller, warmer, and more generous than we had expected. Across the country, people offered advice, water, campsites, rides around impossible sections when needed, places to rest, encouragement, birding information, local history, and sometimes simply the reassurance that we were not invisible.

Looking back, we wish we had been more open to that kindness at the beginning. We were cautious. We were trying to prove that we could do this ourselves. We were also still learning how much of the TCT depends on local knowledge and local goodwill. The longer we walked, the more we understood that accepting help is not the same as failing. On a journey across Canada, community is part of the trail.

We wish we had enjoyed more of it while we were in it.

That may sound strange, because we enjoyed it so much. We saw puffins, whales, caribou, shorebirds, pelicans, prairie skies, boreal forests, mountain passes, salmon rivers, and the Pacific Ocean. We walked through national parks, small towns, industrial edges, fishing harbours, cities, farms, forests, wetlands, and places we would never have known otherwise. We gave presentations, shared birds with people, photographed landscapes, and carried our #Hike4Birds across the country.

But we also spent a great deal of energy documenting, posting, explaining, defending, and trying to make the journey visible to others while still living it ourselves. We do not regret sharing the trail. The blogs became a record of a journey that might otherwise disappear into memory. But if we could go back, we might give ourselves more permission and more time to simply be present. To sit longer beside the water. To watch birds without immediately thinking about captions or trying to get a clear enough photograph. To let some days belong only to the day itself.

Next, I think we both wish we had been more prepared for online criticism and institutional discomfort.

This is perhaps one of the harder truths to include, but it is part of the story. We expected weather, fatigue, road walking, and logistical problems. We did not expect the level of anxiety, suspicion, vitriol, and commentary that sometimes followed us online. We did not expect how draining it would be to try to share honestly about the TCT while also being told that our lived experience was wrong, harmful, exaggerated, or impossible. By the time we moved north in later years, online criticism had become one of the forces that affected how much we wrote and how much we shared in real time. Indeed, we have yet to share our final two years of hiking on the Trans Canada Trail for this very reason.

Speaking of online, we wish we had been more technologically prepared.

When we began, we thought the important thing was to walk and write. In many ways, it was. But we also wish we had understood more about websites, image protection, SEO, backup systems, blogging platforms, digital archiving, and how easily years of work can become difficult to manage after the fact. We shared hundreds of thousands of images, over 1000 posts, and years of daily entries while also trying to move across the country under our own power. In hindsight, we wish we had built better systems before we began.

Most of all, we wish we had known that the trail would not be what we thought it was.

That does not mean it was less. In many ways, it became more. It was not the continuous footpath we imagined. It was not always peaceful. It was not always beautiful. It was not always safe, clear, supported, or easy to explain. It was a route of astonishing generosity and deep frustration, of local brilliance and national inconsistency, of breathtaking landscapes and exhausted highway shoulders. It was rail trails, water routes, city pathways, gravel roads, ferries, national parks, boardwalks, mountain passes, and places where the only option was to keep going.

It has all of this because the Trans Canada Trail is not one thing, nor one route. It is a vast and evolving corridor across a country that is itself vast, uneven, beautiful, complicated, and unfinished.

Final Reflections

Had we known all of this before setting out, would we still have gone? Yes.

But we would have gone with different expectations. We would have planned less rigidly. We would have accepted help sooner. We would have worried less about whether every day matched the vision we began with. We would have understood that adaptation was not a weakness but a necessary skill. We would have known that the real trail would always be more complicated than the mapped one.

And perhaps that is the most honest advice we can offer those who come next.

Plan carefully. Study the maps. Read our blogs. Use our itineraries and provincial reflections. Check the route online. Carry what you need. Respect local conditions. Be prepared for roads, reroutes, weather, smoke, closures, water routes, and days when the signage is nonexistent, and the app is not enough. But do not mistake planning for certainty.

The Trans Canada Trail will not be exactly what you imagine. But then again, it couldn’t be and shouldn’t be.

Like any great journey, it will take the plans you bring to it and reshape them until they fit the country beneath your feet and the moment you are experiencing them.

Enjoy the trail – it is without a doubt the adventure of a lifetime for those who set out onto it.

See you on the Trail!