Does Walking on Roads Count as Hiking?

What Does It Really Mean to Walk the Trans Canada Trail?

 “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

 

Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

 

Considering Different Approaches to the Trans Canada Trail

 

Anyone who has followed our journey across Canada on the Trans Canada Trail will know that we have spent an extraordinary amount of time walking on roads which are part of the national pathway. We have followed quiet country lanes, dusty prairie concessions, busy provincial highways, stretches of the Trans Canada Highway, and eventually the northern highways that carried us toward the Arctic Ocean. Some of those road walks offered beautiful landscapes, remarkable wildlife encounters, and unexpected opportunities to meet people. Others were exhausting, uncomfortable, frightening, and sometimes downright dangerous. We rarely looked forward to long stretches of pavement, and there were certainly days when we would gladly have traded the road beneath our boots for almost any reasonably maintained footpath through the woods.

 

Yet those roads were part of the route we had undertaken to follow. They connected the trails, towns, landscapes, provinces, and eventually the three oceans that defined our journey. We could dislike walking them, question the wisdom of particular alignments, and occasionally decide that a route was simply too dangerous to follow as mapped, but we could not pretend they were not there. For better or worse, walking across Canada meant walking on roads.

 

This raises a question that has come up surprisingly often over the years, particularly when discussing long-distance hiking with people who have strong ideas about what constitutes a trail: does walking along a road actually count as hiking?

 

At first, the answer might seem obvious. Walking is walking, regardless of what happens to be beneath your feet. Yet the question becomes more complicated when it concerns a national pathway assembled from wilderness footpaths, abandoned railway corridors, sidewalks, rural concessions, gravel roads, and major highways. It becomes more complicated still when people begin comparing accomplishments, describing themselves as having hiked a trail from end to end, or criticizing others for the routes they have chosen.

 

When the Trail Becomes a Road

 

During our #Hike4Birds journey across Canada for six years, we met two other long-distance travellers who were also attempting to follow the Trans Canada Trail toward the Pacific. Like us, they were interested in crossing the country and experiencing the national pathway. Their approach, however, was rather different. When they encountered off-road trails, they walked. When the route reached a road connector, they returned to their motorbikes and rode to the next trail section. Where the official route followed roads for considerable distances, they simply drove those sections before resuming their hike somewhere farther along. This means that rather than hike or cycle across most of Northern Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, they rode motorbikes or drove in their car.

Their explanation was straightforward: roads were not trails, and therefore road sections did not need to be hiked.  In one sense, anyone could understand the attraction of that reasoning. In our own case, we had already experienced enough road walking to know that following a busy highway shoulder is rarely anyone's idea of an enjoyable day outdoors. If the object was simply to visit and explore the most interesting recreational trails along a cross-country route, then skipping the roads might well produce a more enjoyable experience. Indeed, there were many occasions when we wished that we could hasten some stretches of roadway and highway.

 

What troubled us was not their decision to travel in this way. Everyone has different interests, physical abilities, limitations, priorities, and reasons for being outdoors. One could, after all, set out on something such as the Camino Francés or the Continental Divide Trail or Via Francigena and simply decide that the full route was not to their liking or beyond their abilities and begin skipping forward - that is a choice open to anyone.  There is no obligation to walk across an entire country or the full route of a trail simply because someone else has chosen to do so. Nor is there anything inherently wrong with combining hiking and motorized travel to explore different regions of a country the size of Canada.  If only because the nation has a lot of great road trips available out there.

 

The difficulty arose in how the resulting journey was described. They eventually reached the Pacific and reported having explored an extraordinary number of kilometres of the Trans Canada Trail. Yet much of the distance they had covered had been travelled by motorbike rather than on foot or by their own efforts. Their own periodic blog entries somewhat admit this fact, but they also strive to repeatedly obscure it and claim that they "ventured along the entire TCT".

 

We found ourselves wondering what exactly it means to say that someone has hiked a trail. If a person walks the forest paths, follows the mountain trails, and explores the most attractive sections of a national route, but drives the road connections between them, have they hiked the entire pathway? Or have they undertaken a different kind of journey, one that combines hiking with road travel?

 

To us, those are not necessarily interchangeable accomplishments.  Hiking across a country and driving across a country are two very different experiences.

 

Hiking Is Not Defined by the Surface Beneath Our Feet

 

The difficulty with dismissing road walking as something other than hiking is that it confuses the character of the surface with the activity being undertaken. We have walked beautiful stretches of the Trans Canada Trail along paved urban greenways, former railway lines, gravel paths, and rural roads. We have also followed official off-road trails that were badly eroded, flooded, overgrown, damaged by storms, or difficult to distinguish from the surrounding landscape. The surface beneath our boots changed constantly, but our means of travelling did not. We were still carrying what we needed, moving through the landscape under our own power, and accepting the time and physical effort required to cover the distance.

 

Walking thirty kilometres along a highway does not suddenly become something other than walking simply because the route is unpleasant. In many respects, it can be more physically and mentally demanding than covering the same distance along a sheltered rail trail. Pavement pounds the feet and joints, traffic requires constant attention, and a lack of shade, water, or safe places to rest can make an otherwise straightforward distance surprisingly difficult.

 

None of this makes road walking more admirable than hiking through the forest. It simply means that the kilometres do not disappear because they are less scenic. And often - especially on a trail as long as the TCT it is hard to know where the "scenic areas" are until you have ventured to them.  Indeed, if we were to exclude all road sections from the definition of a long-distance hike, we would have to reconsider a great many established walking routes around the world. Anyone who has completed a Camino in Spain, France, or Portugal knows that pilgrimage routes regularly follow village streets, agricultural roads, paved lanes, and busy urban approaches. Long-distance trails seldom exist independently of the communities and transportation networks through which they pass.

 

The Trans Canada Trail is an especially striking example because of its enormous scale. It is not a single wilderness footpath but a network connecting existing trails, communities, roads, rail corridors, and waterways across a vast country. Roads are not merely accidental interruptions to the experience. In many regions, they are an essential part of the officially designated route.

 

Whether we particularly enjoy those sections is a different question and a different debate for another time.

 

Everyone Hikes Their Own Hike

 

There is an expression commonly heard among long-distance walkers: hike your own hike. At its best, it is a reminder that outdoor experiences are not competitions and that different people bring different goals, interests, abilities, and expectations to the trail.  All of which is completely understandable. 

 

We believe strongly in that principle. Our own approach to long-distance walking has always involved stopping for birds, taking photographs, visiting communities, learning about local histories, and spending time in landscapes rather than simply passing through them as quickly as possible. Other walkers may prioritize distance, physical challenge, ultralight backpacking, solitude, speed, or completing particular sections. There is no single correct way to find meaning in a long journey.

 

Someone who chooses to hike only the off-road portions of the Trans Canada Trail is still hiking. Someone who cycles the rail trails or travels the national pathway using a combination of walking, paddling, and cycling is undertaking a worthwhile journey. Someone who explores Canada by motorbike, stopping frequently to walk through parks, forests, and communities, may have an equally remarkable adventure - but it is fundamentally different from crossing the nation under your own effort. With that said, none of those experiences needs to be dismissed simply because it differs from ours, Dianne Whelan's, Mel Vogel's, Sarah Jackson's, or Dana Meise - each of whom crossed the country by their own efforts.

 

But respecting different ways of travelling does not require us to describe them all in the same way. A person who cycles across Canada has cycled across Canada. Someone who drives between hiking destinations has undertaken a journey that combines driving and short walks. Someone who walks continuously from one destination to another, including the roads connecting the trails, has completed a different physical undertaking. These distinctions are not judgments about the value of the experience. They are descriptions of what happened and are important distinctions.

 

There is room for all of these journeys. What seems unnecessary is the suggestion that kilometres travelled by motorbike somehow become kilometres hiked because they happen to follow a route designated as part of the Trans Canada Trail.

 

Choosing What Matters to You

 

Ultimately, the question of whether someone should walk the road sections of the Trans Canada Trail depends on what they hope to accomplish and their comfort level. If the purpose is to enjoy nature, explore particular trails, spend time outdoors, or discover different parts of Canada, there is no reason to insist upon following every kilometre of the national pathway. In fact, for many people, doing so would make very little sense. Some road sections are unpleasant, some are physically demanding, and others present safety concerns that should never be minimized simply for the sake of maintaining an unbroken line on a map.

 

We have never believed that reaching a destination justifies placing yourself in unnecessary danger. Throughout our journey, we sometimes had to reconsider the official route, choose safer alternatives, or accept that the conditions in front of us mattered more than the line displayed on a screen. Completing a long-distance walk requires persistence, but it also requires judgment. There is no contradiction between believing that road walking counts as hiking and recognizing that not every road should be walked.

 

For someone whose ambition is to hike the Trans Canada Trail as a continuous journey, however, the roads cannot simply be excluded from consideration. They are part of the distance, part of the geography, and part of the experience that separates walking across Canada from visiting a selection of trails throughout Canada.

 

Perhaps the more useful question is not whether roads count as hiking, but what we actually mean when we describe a journey as a hike. Are we talking about the places we visited, the pathway we followed, the distance we covered under our own power, or the overall experience of travelling across the country? Those things can overlap, but they are not necessarily identical. For us, walking the Trans Canada Trail meant accepting the national pathway as something far more varied, imperfect, and complicated than the continuous recreational footpath many people (ourselves in 2019 included) imagine. We enjoyed some sections far more than others. There were roads we would never willingly choose to walk again, trails we wished could have continued indefinitely, and days when simply finding somewhere safe to stop felt like an accomplishment.

 

Yet all of those experiences contributed to our understanding of Canada. The roads took us through working landscapes, agricultural regions, remote communities, industrial corridors, and northern territories that might otherwise have remained places on a map. They reminded us that the country is not composed exclusively of the spectacular natural landscapes featured in tourism photographs. It is also connected by ordinary infrastructure, maintained by people whose lives take place along those same roads, and are shaped by distances that are difficult to appreciate until you undertake them on foot.

 

Walking those distances did not always make for enjoyable hiking. But it was still hiking and the result of our own efforts. And perhaps that is where we would leave the question. Everyone is free to choose the journey that suits them, and no one needs to walk the roads of the Trans Canada Trail simply to satisfy another person's definition of adventure. But if we choose to describe what we have accomplished, there is value in being accurate about how we accomplished it.

 

Hike your own hike, certainly. Just be honest about which parts you actually hiked or cycled and which parts you drove.

 

See you on the trail!