What is the Hardest Part of Hiking the Trans Canada Trail?

“There it is. Ten-word answers can kill you in political campaigns. They’re the tip of the sword… Every once in a while… there’s a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong… Other than that, there aren’t very many unnuanced moments.”

 

President Josiah Bartlet, The West Wing

 

Everyone Wants to Know the Answer

 

People often ask us what the hardest part of hiking the Trans Canada Trail was.

 

It is an understandable question. After all, from the outside, a trek across Canada seems as though its difficulties should be obvious. Surely the hardest part must be the distance. Or the weight of carrying a backpack day after day, week after week, season after season. Perhaps it is finding safe places to sleep, carrying enough food, locating water, dealing with blackflies, ticks, extreme heat, unexpected snowstorms, wildfires and smoke, long stretches of road walking, flooded pathways, or the sheer physical exhaustion of moving forward for thousands upon thousands of kilometres.

 

Make no mistake - all of those things were hard. There is no need to pretend otherwise.

 

We walked through freezing rain, summer heat waves, prairie winds, waist-high rivers, washed-out trails, long road sections, and stretches where the national pathway seemed to exist more confidently on a screen than on the ground beneath our feet. We carried food, filtered water, patched gear, dried soaked tents, limped on sore feet, and learned again and again that

Canada is far larger on foot than it appears on a map.

 

But those were not the hardest parts.  The hardest part of the Trans Canada Trail was mental.

 

It was the need to keep going long after the romance of the idea had worn away. It was staying focused when the trail turned out not to be a trail at all. It was continuing when the official route meandered east, south, north, and back again, while every instinct in your body simply wanted to keep moving west. It was remaining committed to the national pathway when Canada is roughly 5,600 km from coast to coast, but the route wound more than 14,000 km from the Atlantic to the Pacific alone.

 

It was waking up each morning and choosing the trail again.  It was making the choice to keep putting one foot in front of another day after day. 

 

The Trail You Imagine and the Trail You Are Given

 

Before we began, we imagined the Trans Canada Trail as a line across the country. Complicated, yes. Long, certainly. But still, in our minds, a line. We would begin at the Atlantic, walk west, reach the Pacific, and then turn north toward the Arctic.

 

The reality was – as many of you now know - far more complicated.

 

The TCT is not one trail. It is a network of rail trails, footpaths, ATV routes, municipal paths, provincial park trails, road shoulders, highways, water routes, ferry crossings, urban greenways, rural concessions, mountain routes, and community-built pathways. At its best, it is extraordinary. At its worst, it can leave you standing in the middle of nowhere, wondering whether the problem is the map, the signage, the route, your judgment, or your own refusal to just give up.

 

That uncertainty is exhausting.

In Prince Edward Island, the Confederation Trail showed us what the TCT can feel like when a route is carefully maintained, signed, and supported by local communities. It was wide, flat, accessible, bird-rich, and welcoming, with amenities, and a sense that walkers and cyclists were expected and valued. It was not a wilderness challenge, but it was a deeply enjoyable trail experience.

 

Elsewhere, the same national pathway could become something else entirely. In Ontario, after slogging through a section near Silver Lake, we quipped that it did not qualify as a trail under any definition of the word we had ever read. We pushed through shoulder-high vegetation, mud, steep hills, raspberries, wild roses, grasses, deer flies, and sections that seemed to dead-end into private property or vanish entirely. Yet that same night, exhausted and cut up, we listened to Common Nighthawks, Whip-poor-wills, frogs, splashing water, and the quiet of a beautiful lake beneath bright stars. That contradiction - misery and wonder in the same stretch - was the TCT in miniature.

 

This was the mental challenge. Not simply that some days were long or hard, but that the trail asked us to hold contradictory truths and uncertainty all at once. A section could be dangerous and beautiful. A province could be welcoming and hostile. A route could be nationally celebrated and locally impassable.

 

A day could be demoralizing and still end in wonder.

 

The Mental Weight of the Unexpected

 

On any long-distance trail, a certain amount of discomfort is expected and, over time, becomes a little normal. Your feet hurt. Your shoulders ache. You are dirty. You are hungry. Your clothing smells terrible. You smell terrible.   You learn to ration water, dry gear, patch things, and keep moving. The body adapts more than people imagine.

 

The mind is different – as John Milton once observed – “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..” . 

 

The mind begins to wear down when every plan becomes conditional. When a campground at the end of a long day is closed. When a trail is washed out. When a road is dangerously unsafe. When the bridge has no shoulder and a lot of traffic. When the app says one thing and the signs say another. When you have already walked 30 km and realize you may have made almost no meaningful westward progress, in fact you may now be further east than you were at the beginning of the day.

 

In Saskatchewan, at one point the online map appeared to lead us toward a regional trail system, but the reality on the ground was a line of “Private Property,” “No Trespassing,” surveillance, and police-warning signs. Below us we could see the very trail we were trying to reach - the valley, the bridges, the parked cars were all there - but between us and the route were multiple barbed wire fences and gates wired shut. Sean cut his arm trying to navigate the situation, and after repeated attempts we had to backtrack 10 km and create another plan. Later, locals simply told us that everyone knew the trail could only be accessed from the other side.  Nothing online or in our planning had suggested that this was the lived reality of this section. 

That sort of day is difficult physically, but it is far harder mentally. You are not merely tired. You are tired and confused. Tired and frustrated. Tired and doubting whether you should have known better. Tired and wondering why a national pathway would send walkers somewhere they cannot actually go.

 

This is just one example of a day on the Trans Canada Trail where we wondered whether anyone from the organization had ever stepped onto a specific section of trail or simply added to a map on a computer one afternoon.

 

These sort of questions, doubts and frustrations build up, stay with you, and slowly burn away at your reserves.

 

The Hardest Days Were Not Always the Longest Ones

 

Some of the hardest days were not the longest distances. They were the days when our plans shattered and standing in a river, or a prairie field we had to figure out what to do next with nothing to help with the decision.  They were the days when we had to make decisions we did not want to make.

 

In Quebec, leaving Mont-Laurier, we walked for nearly nine hours in torrential rain along the Trans Canada Highway. Around 50 mm of rain fell. Logging trucks, transports, dump trucks, and construction vehicles roared past, each one sending a wall of water over us. There was nowhere to shelter, nowhere to stop, and no way to experience the landscape except as noise, spray, and the effort to stay warm. We described it then as perhaps the hardest hike we had ever done - not because walking beside a road is technically difficult, but because of the mental effort required to keep going in those conditions drains everything out of you. 

 

In Alberta, near Fort Saskatchewan, we faced a different kind of decision. The TCT led toward a bridge where concrete barriers came right to the white lines and there was no safe way to cross except by walking directly in lanes of high-speed traffic. We had to choose between rigidly following the route and risking our lives, or breaking our own rules and taking a taxi 700 metres across the bridge. We chose safety. That choice was correct, but it was not easy.  It forced us to confront the tension between purity and responsibility, between completion and common sense.  We knew there would be critique and there was for the choice.

 

Those were the moments that stayed with us. Not because they were dramatic in the way people expect adventure stories to be dramatic, but because they required judgment and hard choices. They required us to ask what it means to follow a trail honestly when the route itself sometimes asks too much and might well kill you if you try.

 

Falling Behind Is Its Own Kind of Exhaustion

 

Another mental challenge we faced from almost day 1 onward – the realities of falling behind on our planned itinerary. 

 

Long-distance hikers know that schedules are partly fiction, but they are also necessary. You need to know how much food to carry. You need to know when you might reach the next town. You need to know whether weather, road conditions, or seasonal variations will become lived realities. You plan because planning keeps you safe.

 

But on the TCT, lived realities often disrupted our plan.

 

A 25 km day could become 35 km because there was nowhere to camp. A short section could take all day because the pathway disappeared. A road walk could become dangerous because traffic was faster or heavier than expected. A planned trail could become impassable because of water, vegetation, construction,  or private-property barriers. A route that looked direct on the app could become a long meander along rural roads or through towns

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In each case, the hardest part was not merely walking extra kilometres. It was the emotional effect of realizing that your effort did not always translate into progress. You could work all day, push hard, endure discomfort, and still end the evening feeling behind.

 

That is demoralizing.  And yet the only way forward was still forward. 

 

The Challenge of Staying Cheerful in Public

 

There was also the mental challenge of sharing the journey while living it.  A private hike and a public project are not the same thing. Our #Hike4Birds was always about more than simply getting from one coast to another. We hoped to encourage people to reconnect with nature through birds, Citizen Science, and to spend time outdoors. We photographed, blogged, presented, answered questions, wrote about trail conditions, and tried to share not only the beauty of the route but also the realities of walking it.  That mattered to us.

 

But sharing the trail publicly also meant opening ourselves to criticism from people who were not there. Some insisted that if something unexpected happened, we must have planned badly. Others told us what gear we should have carried, what decisions we should have made, what routes we should have taken, or why our experiences could not possibly be accurate. We wrote in Manitoba that if we followed everyone’s advice, we would each have 300 pounds in our backpacks and still be in our first province. 

 

The criticism was not the hardest part by itself. People will always have opinions. The harder part was continuing to write honestly in spite of it.  It was harder still to continue to follow our own plans and approach amid such much critique.

In this way, there is a particular fatigue that comes from trying to remain fair, thoughtful, and generous while being told you are exaggerating, complaining, lying, or doing the trail wrong. It takes effort to keep describing beauty after a dangerous day. It takes effort to acknowledge kindness when hostility has shaken you. It takes effort to continue inviting people to “Come Walk With Us” when some people seem determined to make the trail smaller, harsher, and less welcoming.

 

The Social Weight of Sharing

 

In this way the TCT taught us that the hardest parts of a trail are not always the realities,  geography or topography of the region you are in.  Weather can be brutal, but weather is impersonal. Mud does not hate you. Rain does not question your motives. A hill does not care who you are.  People are more complicated.

 

In many places, the kindness we received was overwhelming. In Ontario, Robert proudly showed us the Cataraqui Trail and treated us to dinner; Anil offered food and water in Verona; Kathy and her family gave two dirty hikers showers, laundry, treats, and a place to rest; Jill and Darwin welcomed us in Campbellford, shared food and trail stories, and walked with us through their community.

 

Those moments mattered greatly and helped carry us across the country when times got tough

 

But other encounters were harder. In Manitoba, we experienced repeated scrutiny, racialized questioning near the southern border, people demanding to know whether we were “real Canadians,” self-styled patrols asking for passports and cameras, vehicles spraying gravel, hostility around masks during COVID, and later harassment linked to our time in the province. Those experiences shaped not just how we felt in the moment, but how safe we felt moving through the landscape.

 

That is part of the truth too.

 

The mental challenge of the TCT was not only internal. It was also the strain of being visible, vulnerable, slow-moving, and often out of place. Walking makes you accessible. You cannot roll up a window, accelerate away, or disappear into a vehicle. You are simply there, on the shoulder, in the town, on the concession, in the campground, at the grocery store, trying to get through the day.

 

Most people were kind. But the unkindness stayed with us, too. At times becoming harder to carry than our backpacks.    Indeed, it was this weight that ultimately led us to stop posting about our daily experiences on the Trans Canada Trail.

 

The Hardest Part Was Ourselves

 

Still, when we strip everything back, the hardest part was not the trolls, the critics, the roads, the mud, the insects, the heat, the rain, the barbed wire, the smoke, or the long distances. The hardest part was ourselves, or at the very least our minds and the mental strain throughout the trek.

 

Long before the TCT, we had learned about what we came to call “Day 4” - that point on a hike when excitement fades, the body hurts, doubts rise, and quitting begins to seem not only reasonable but wise. We felt it on the Camino de Santiago, the Via Podiensis, the Bruce Trail, the Rideau Trail, and the East Coast Trail. On the TCT, that same pattern did not disappear simply because we had more experience. If anything, the scale of the journey made the mental challenge more persistent.  Each year brought us a “Day 4”, each province brought us face to face with doubt, and sometimes each section of trail left us questioning our own resolve.

 

There are always reasons to quit. You are tired. You are sore. You are cold. You are wet. You are hungry.  You are lonely. You are behind. You are not sure this matters. You wonder whether anyone understands. You wonder whether you understand. You begin to ask why you are out there at all.

 

In Newfoundland at the outset of our trek, we wrote that the mental war you wage on yourself can be the most difficult challenge to confront and overcome. The physical issues - gear, pack weight, food, water, conditioning -  can be adjusted over time. The harder part is what happens inside your own mind when doubt begins to sound reasonable.

 

Our rule we have long followed is - never quit on a bad day. Never quit when tired, wet, hungry, angry, embarrassed, overwhelmed, or afraid. Go one more day.  Take time to eat.  To sleep. To shower if possible. Do laundry. Take a seat. Rest the mind. Then decide. Usually, after a little food, warmth, and sleep, the world looked different.  That rule has carried us through more than one hard moment on more than one trail.

 

No Ten-Word Answer

 

So what is the hardest part of the Trans Canada Trail?  Well, the truth is that it was not one thing or anything so simple to express.   It is not the distance, though the distance is immense. It is not the terrain, though the terrain changes constantly and can be a real challenge. It is not the backpack, though weight matters. It is not finding water, though water can define a day. It is not road walking, though roads can be dangerous and demoralizing. It is not criticism, though criticism can wound and stay with you. It is not even exhaustion, though exhaustion changes how you see everything.

 

The hardest part is continuing to believe in the journey when the journey stops looking like what you imagined.

 

It is continuing when the trail disappears. Continuing when the map is wrong. Continuing when the route turns away from the direction you long to go. Continuing when people misunderstand you. Continuing when institutions disappoint you. Continuing when your body hurts. Continuing when the country feels too large, the pathway too unfinished, and your own certainty too fragile.

 

The hardest part is learning to accept rather than expect.  And perhaps that is why the Trans Canada Trail matters and why we keep writing about it after completing our national hike.

 

Not because it is perfect. It is not. Not because it is always safe, clear, welcoming, or complete in the way people may imagine. It is not. But because walking it forces you to encounter the country and the complexities of life, the world, and yourself honestly - the beauty and its contradictions, its generosity and its hostility, its perfected pathways and its non-existent sections.

 

To focus only on the hardship would be unfair. To ignore the hardship would be dishonest.

 

The truth lies somewhere in between.

 

The Trans Canada Trail humbled us. It frustrated us. It frightened us. It exhausted us. It gave us moments of extraordinary kindness, astonishing beauty, deep loneliness, and unexpected grace. It made us question our plans, our assumptions, our abilities, and sometimes even our reasons for continuing.  But each morning, we got up.   We packed the tent, lifted our backpacks, continued along the route, and took another step.

 

Because the hardest part of any undertaking is insurmountable only when you allow yourself to give up.

 

See you on the trail!