Is the Trans Canada Trail Actually a Trail?

“The whole is something besides the parts.”
 
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book VIII, 6

 

Reflections After Completing the Trans Canada Trail

 

Now that we have finished walking the Trans Canada Trail from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic, one of the questions we are asked most often is also one of the hardest to answer simply: was the TCT actually a trail?

 

The short answer is yes.  The longer answer is that we had to change what we meant by the word trail and dramatically shift our expectations.

 

What is a Trail?

 

When we began planning our #Hike4Birds journey, we carried many of the same assumptions other hikers do. A trail was something reasonably continuous beneath your feet. It might cross roads, pass through communities, venture briefly onto a sidewalk, or occasionally follow a short connector, but fundamentally it was a pathway that is off-road. Our previous long-distance hikes such as those on the Bruce Trail and East Coast Trail, as well as our Camino pilgrimages, had reinforced that expectation. There was usually a recognizable route to follow, even when the terrain, signage or surfaces changed. We expected Canada and a route ultimately 28,000 km in distance to be larger, rougher and more complicated, but I do not think we fully understood just how differently a national trail of this scale could and perhaps needed to be constructed.

 

Newfoundland did little to challenge that assumption at first. The East Coast Trail, a beautiful coastal pathway, felt unmistakably like hiking; the Grand Concourse carried us through St. John’s, and the T’Railway Trail then provided a long former railway corridor across much of the island. The surfaces between the three routes were substantively different, but the route still felt coherent. Nova Scotia began to complicate things as great local trails were connected by stretches of road, while Prince Edward Island briefly restored our sense of what a continuous national pathway could look like through the Confederation Trail. Then New Brunswick changed the question completely. There the TCT alternated between being a marsh trail, a forest path, the Fundy Footpath, a municipal pathway, and the shoulder of roadways, as well as a designated water route where there was no corresponding land trail for us to follow.

 

By that point, it was becoming clear that asking whether the Trans Canada Trail was “really a trail” might be the wrong question.

 

What we were following was not one purpose-built hiking path stretched across the country. It was a network created by connecting hundreds of existing local and regional routes into something national. This is in many ways the best means to understand the nature of the Trans Canada Trail.  Former railway lines became rail trails. City waterfronts and suburban greenways carried us through urban areas. Gravel roads and rural concessions bridged gaps between established pathways. Mountain trails, ATV routes, ferries, highways and paddling routes all became pieces of the same larger system. Some sections looked exactly like the long-distance trail we had imagined before setting out. Others looked nothing like it.  That distinction became increasingly important as we moved across the country from coast to coast to coast.

 

In Quebec, long stretches of cycling and rail-trail infrastructure could feel wonderfully developed. In Ontario, the route moved through everything from urban pathways to rural roads, rail trails, to highways in the north to wilderness paths on the shores of Lake Superior. Manitoba and Saskatchewan made road walking increasingly central rather than incidental. Alberta led us along prairie roads and established trails through Edmonton’s river valley and eventually into mountain routes in Kananaskis and the Rockies. British Columbia offered some of the most beautiful rail trails and mountain sections of the entire journey, but it also included urban connectors, damaged infrastructure, road detours and our time paddling the Salish Sea Marine Trail.

 

In addition, the core reality of the route north to the Arctic – is that beyond Dawson’s Creek, across Northern British Columbia, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, the Trans Canada Trail is overwhelmingly a journey on the side of a series of busy highways including the Alaska Highway, the Klondike Highway, Dempster Highway, and Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway.

 

Of course, none of these details makes the Trans Canada Trail unreal. It simply makes it different from what many people imagine when they hear the word trail – and, in our experience, it is very different from how the Trans Canada Trail is often promoted and envisioned by most.

 

I think part of the confusion comes from comparing it with routes built around a more singular purpose. A long wilderness footpath suggests immersion in protected landscape. A pilgrimage route suggests a corridor connecting places of cultural or religious meaning. A rail trail follows a well-established and defined former transportation line.  Each of these types of trails does specific things and has specific features - the Trans Canada Trail attempts something broader. It connects communities, landscapes, local trail systems, cities, rural regions and transportation corridors across an entire country.   Because of this, we increasingly came to think of it less as a single wilderness trail and more as a national thread – a network of local trails that had been tied together.  To this end, even the organization admits the route is simply a guide.

 

Each changes how the trail is experienced. On some days we were unquestionably hiking. We climbed rugged coastal paths, crossed forest trails, followed mountain routes and moved through places where the landscape dictated every step. On other days we were walking a former railway line at a steady pace for hours. Sometimes we followed a paved path through the centre of a city. Sometimes the route was a rural road or on the shoulder of a highway. Elsewhere it crossed water and required us to take a ferry, shuttle bus (Confederation Bridge), kayak, or make the decision about how a pedestrian could responsibly move around a paddling section where no land trail existed.  Despite these varying types of trail and aspects of the TCT, the national route remained continuous in our minds, and as an idea even when the experience changed completely.

 

This is also why the online map can be misleading if taken too literally.  In more ways than one, you have to zoom in very far to start to begin to understand what the Trans Canada Trail is like on the ground.  Zoomed out, it is a clean line across the screen that suggests continuity, but it does not provide many clear details. It does not show the difference between eight demanding kilometres on a rugged wilderness footpath and forty kilometres on a flat rail trail or sixty kilometres on a prairie road. It cannot tell you how exposed a highway shoulder feels beside transport trucks, how peaceful a city greenway can be early in the morning, or how difficult it is to reconcile a designated water route with a journey being undertaken primarily on foot.  The map shows where the national route is intended to go, but it cannot always tell you what walking, cycling or paddling that line will actually involve. As we came to learn – only experience on the trail does that.

 

Trails foster Connections

 

Perhaps that was one of the most important things the Trans Canada Trail taught us about trails themselves.  Before this journey, I think we tended to define a trail by its surface. Dirt path, boardwalk, rail bed, gravel track. After nearly 18,000 kilometres across the national network between the Atlantic and the Pacific and Arctic, I am less certain that the material beneath your feet is what makes a trail a trail. Perhaps what matters more is connection: whether a route carries people through a landscape, links one community to another and creates enough continuity that someone can move through the country by following it.

 

That broader definition does not mean every section works equally well for every user at all times. Some parts are excellent for hikers. Others are clearly better suited to cyclists. Certain water routes make sense for paddlers but create complicated decisions for someone travelling on foot or cycling. Some road sections are quiet and reasonable; others can be frustratingly sandy or overwhelmingly stressful by being distinctly unsafe. Calling all of those sections part of one national trail does not erase their differences, and understanding those differences is essential for anyone planning a long journey on the TCT. (This is why we have published hundreds of blogs, images, and daily entries to allow people to assess sections and know what each part of the Trans Canada Trail from coast to coast is like.)

 

If anything, I think completing the route made us less interested in deciding which parts qualify as “real trail” and more interested in understanding what each part contributes to the larger network.  Each section plays its own role – even those we would most like to see improved and moved off-road.  Together they also reveal something about the difficulty of creating and maintaining a pathway across a country this large.

 

So, is the Trans Canada Trail actually a trail?  Yes - but only once we stopped expecting the word to mean one continuous off-road footpath or a maintained cycling route end to end.  Perhaps that variety is not a contradiction in the Trans Canada Trail. Perhaps it is the thing that defines it. Perhaps also that is why it continues to develop year by year and why it is important to maintain it.

 

See you on the trail.