When the Story Walks Away from You

“Waste your time

Keep scrolling online

Another day gone

Tell yourself you're doing just fine

What could go wrong?”

Jessie Reid, Every Stranger

After the Trail

By the time winter and the end of last year arrived, the time away from the Trans Canada Trail had begun to round out (though never dull) in our minds and the sharpest edges and toughest moments of the journey started to fade. The trail as a whole had begun shifting from a daily undertaking to a part of our lives that had come to its end, to simply memories. Time in the north started taking its place alongside the Atlantic mornings, prairie winds, mountain passes, and the long weeks and distances that defined so much of our #Hike4Birds across Canada.

The walking has stopped, but in many ways, the journey and work with it have not. It never really does - especially if you are still editing tens of thousands of pictures, figuring out how you feel about it all, and wondering how (or whether) to share it.

As such, in the weeks since leaving the trail, we found ourselves in a familiar in-between space. Not quite finished, not ready to continue writing about it, but also…not quite ready to begin something else. We have both found that it is often during these quieter times, while the realities of life come back to the forefront, that things become clearer.

Digital Challenges Arise

Perhaps it has always been a great irony that a hike dedicated to getting people outdoors has spent years posting blogs and photographs online. 

Over the past year or so, we discovered something we never anticipated: that our Atlantic-to-Pacific writing had been lifted, reworked through artificial intelligence, and republished (actually several times) in a number of forms. It has been tuned into Amazon-published books and presented as a Kindle guide to hiking the Trans Canada Trail. The dates, stages and details aligned exactly – including highlights that the TCT allows you to go “Hike 4 Birds among other wildlife” or that “the Trans Canada Trail is best understood as a 6 year pilgrimage”. The daily observations, regular comments and trail anecdotes were unmistakably ours. The challenges, the sequence of events, even the routines of the journey - all recognizable beneath a slightly revised voice and a lot of generalization. Indeed, a lot of generalization to the point of being dangerous to those who may well be planning their own trek.

At almost the same time, we learned that a number of other individuals had also copied large numbers of our photographs directly from our blogs and were selling them online. Each was available as a digital download, with payments due to sellers in other countries. When we reached out, we were told - without hesitation - that it was us who must have stolen their images. The responses were utterly shameless and without any sense of remorse. Even when shown that the file names were in many cases the same, there was no regret, just more accusations.

Then we went to a regional photo competition and discovered several of our images had been entered by another participant. Not long after at another competition, we discovered the same thing.

In the first case, the individual claimed to have been the first to hike every section of the TCT in the 1970s (when in fact it was founded in 1992), and in the second case, the couple claimed that they had driven the entire length of the national pathway, taking pictures.

Now, anyone who has spent time on the Trans Canada Trail or read our daily blogs knows how hollow this explanation is. Vast sections simply CANNOT be driven. Many moments CANNOT be reached casually. Being out there on foot, on a bike or paddling matters and are, in many places, the only means to vast sections of the Trans Canada Trail. Anyone who chose to “drive” the TCT would miss far too much to consider claiming to have photographed the Great Trail.

Subsequently, we have watched the media use our images without acknowledgement for stories about the TCT. Seen other bloggers and hikers who publish dozens of entries daily, and are clearly AI-generated travel sites have used our stories and pictures without acknowledgement to publish “The Ultimate Guide to Hiking Canada” or “Easy Steps to Hiking Across Canada” styled articles that are equally short on details and absurdly generalized. And we have found YouTube videos that are full of our images and accounts.

All of these have generated and copied content for the clicks and likes, but without the experience and essential details. Perhaps these people don’t even know where the content they are mass-producing comes from.

And no wonder – look up the Trans Canada Trail on ChatGPT or Gemini, and it is our pictures that often show up – even if people didn’t mean to use them, ours as well as Dana Meise, Sarah Rose, and Mel Vogel’s are the images that they are being handed by AI. Even those that purport to be AI-generated often produce images of Sean and me. 

Apparently, the process even has an online term to describe it. It is known as “scraping images” and “lifting stories”. In fact, Come Walk With Us is known online as what is called a “High-Value Target for Scraping” owing to the daily experiences and thousands of trail images published on it.

Travel Bloggers, Trail hikers and other online resources that we have found have entire paragraphs of our blogs lifted into their identical descriptions of locations, the same sequence of highlights, the same travelled distances and “stages”, the same photographs, and even the same trail anecdotes! All of which is before we get to Pinterest pins linked to articles about the TCT that are again filled with our images.

What a world….

We won’t pretend that this discovery did not hurt. It did. There was a lot of anger and a real sense of disillusionment that comes from seeing your stories taken from you. There is frustration from having people around the world write to you claiming that they have hiked the Trans Canada Trail and that you have taken their images. Especially in those cases were we have been accused by others who have downloaded and reproduced low-res versions of our images to create AL Guidebook accounts when it was us who took the journey. There have been tears, long nights, upset and more than a few visits to a local pub.

Our experiences had been taken, altered, and claimed by others who – more often than not – never once stepped onto the trail itself.

Honesty and Humility

After lots of reflection, we have come to see that what has unsettled us most was not the taking of our words, our stories, or our images. It was the loss of care with the material and how it is being presented, flattened, and monetized. These reproductions, generated in seconds through AI, strip the experience from the experience.

From the beginning, our goal on the Trans Canada Trail was never simply to “complete” it. We walked to understand it and the country. To experience how landscapes change not just across provinces, but across seasons and years. To learn how Canadian communities and people connect - or don’t. To pay attention to birds, weather, water, and the logistical realities that shape every long-distance journey. Our writing was never meant to be filled with false positivity, make us look herculean, athletic, or present hollow Instagramable moments. Nor was it meant to be a comprehensive guide – as NO such thing does or can likely exist for the Trans Canada Trail.

It was meant to be honest and to inspire others.

That honesty includes lived experiences and details. And detail matters - especially on a trail as complex, fragmented, and continually evolving as the Trans Canada Trail.

Generalized Guidebooks and Copied Accounts

The versions of the journey we saw republished as Amazon books were each strikingly light on specifics. Distances blurred into generalities. Challenges were smoothed into abstractions. Some so poorly handled that they are in fact, dangerous as a guide. (example – “You need food on the trail. Plan for that.” Or “Consider wearing shoes on the trail”) In such books, the trail reads cleanly and simply, but it was woefully incomplete and dangerously ignorant. Presented as a guide, it risks giving readers a false sense of simplicity. Trust us when we say there are rarely simple and straightforward days on the Great Trail.

 

Of the many AI-created guides that we have found online. Each gave the illusion that the TCT can be approached without deep planning, without respect for local knowledge, without the need for adaptability, and with no respect for the influence and impact of uncertainty on the trail.

Point in fact to clear up a few repeated misconceptions repeatedly reproduced in these “guides: -

The Great Trail is NOT a single trail. The Trans Canada Trail CANNOT be completed in a single season. It DOES NOT have luggage transport. There are NO cafes at the end of each day’s stages. There are NO stages. YES others have hiked it, biked it, and paddled it coast to coast to coast. NO you cannot trek the entire trail and back again in a single year (covering 56,000 km in 1 year - seriously?!?). There is NO best time of the year when hiking a 28,000 km route.

In almost every one of these “guides” the advice and commentary is horrifying in how misleading and wrong they are. In fact, it is dangerous how much misinformation is included and how incorrect so much of them are.

The TCT is NOT a route that tolerates shortcuts in understanding or in trying to rush sections. Food carries and resupply points are not theoretical. Weather conditions can be serious. Towns that look close on a map can, in fact, be days and weeks apart on foot. Conditions change day to day, month to month and year to year. Historic forest fires, unexpected floods, trail closures, access issues, and seasonal limitations (let alone a global pandemic) shape the route in ways that cannot be relayed in simple terms. And certainly cannot be conveyed by those who have never undertaken this route – though I suspect could be appreciated by those who have done long-distance hikes such as the Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail.

To be absolutely clear, there is NO comprehensive guide to the complete network of trails incorporated into the Trans Canada Trail network – because there are too many variables. The Trans Canada Trail is not simple and cannot be approached as simply a long hike.

A trail like this demands preparation, humility, context, and adaptability. Details matter. Honesty matters. It demands a willingness to say, often, this worked for us…but it may not work for you. Any guidebook that generalizes or website that makes such claims is misleading you if you are planning this trek.

And it is definitely a trek worth undertaking. It is the expedition of a lifetime to venture from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic. But it is NOT a straightforward NOR is it a simple undertaking.

Photography and Intent

Yet the same problem does not stop with words, distances, or invented advice. It extends to the images as well. In many ways, the photographs have been even harder to see misused, because they were not simply quick snapshots or quick illustrations for the journey. They were part of the record of having been there. They showed the terrain, the distances, the birds, and the moments of wonder that made the Trans Canada Trail real. When those images are copied, stripped of context, and sold or reused by others, the problem is not only copyright or ownership. It is the same loss of care. The same flattening of lived experience into content.

We want to be very clear about something. From the outset, we have willingly granted permission for our photographs to be used by conservation organizations, nature groups, travel boards, and Eh Canada Travel - anywhere they could help support Canadian wildlife, protected landscapes, and inspire responsible Canadian tourism. We believe deeply that images can inspire curiosity, conservation, and connection.

What we never consented to was the wholesale copying of those same images by private individuals or use by other bloggers, stripped of context and resold for profit on image websites. None of the images we used were taken casually from a roadside, pulled off line, or AI-generated. They were captured after long days, difficult approaches, and brief moments of wonder on the ground that required patience and the experience of being there. Without that context, an image becomes scenery and worse…simply just more digital content that clutters people’s feeds.

Our images taken and on our blog are NOT AI-generated and we don’t want them to become more online slop put out by bots or those simply searching for clicks without the effort.

These distinctions matter. The issue was never their reuse in the service of the public or Canadians learning about this wonderful nature - it was the removal of authorship, context, and care in the hope of private gain.

Lived Experience in the Age of AI

There is a broader issue here, one that extends beyond our own experience. We are living in a moment when stories can be extracted, flattened, reshaped and repackaged with remarkable speed. Artificial intelligence can revise tone, shift voice, and rearrange language … but it cannot replace experience. It cannot know which details are essential for safety, or which omissions matter.

Worse, when it is asked to do so it often fosters generalizations developed off other blogs and online content another version of AI has also drafted. The result being that the content gets worse and worse and worse. More and more generalized. More and more inaccurate and misinformed.

 It can give you the “best images” for an entry it just wrote, but you never learn why those images are beautiful or relay the importance of the moment for those who took them.

Like school, like friendships and relationships, and as in life - the Trans Canada Trail resists any kind of simplification. It always has. It always will. It is not a single line, nor is it a fixed experience. It changes by section, region, province, season, and by year. What is passable one year may not be the next. What feels manageable in one region can become overwhelming in another. What one person is able to do, another may not have the possibility to undertake. We learned this not through abstraction or Google searches or Gemini AI results, but through lived experiences and daily adapting our plans to the realities of the moment.

“Hope and Wait”

As we wrote, in the days immediately after discovering what had been taken, there was a lot of grief. Not just for the work that was stolen, poorly rewritten and sloppily reposted, but for the deep sense that something intimate had been (and likely will continue to be) handled carelessly.

There is a vulnerability in long journeys that is easy to underestimate and hard for those not on the trail or who have never undertaken a similar experience to understand. When you share openly - about doubt, exhaustion, fear, and perseverance - you assume a certain good faith. Losing that trust is exhausting in ways that are really hard to put into words.

But with time and a number of long walks in our community… a little bit of peace of mind returned. Don’t get us wrong, the frustration remains but also another perspective as well.

The Importance of Experiences

We came to see that while our stories have been taken and our photographs are being sold the experiences and the memories are ours entirely. No Google result or AI-generated article someone reposts can understand the trail we and the few others who have undertaken it do.

Few others have stood on the Atlantic shore and taken those first steps westward. Few others have carried the weight of the thousands of kilometres under heavy backpacks, or continued on when the day’s progress felt impossible. Struggled through marshes, droughts, hurricanes making landfall, and freezing conditions. Each of these are lived experience, not an AI-generated result.

No algorithm walked those kilometers and no replication can substitute for the experience. The lived act of walking from coast to coast to coast - remains intact, rooted, and ours. The work changed into Kindle e-books and AI guides flattens the experiences but never really understands them – and I suspect those “authors” don’t either.

And perhaps that is one of the most important lessons that the trail offered us after so many years. That in a world where stories can walk away from you, experiences still matter. That meaning is not owned through publication or platform, but through lived reality. And that no matter what is taken, no matter what is claimed, the journey can never be taken from us.

That …and meaning will always be a great deal further than one click, one search, and one AI-generated result away.

See you on the trail!