Did We Ever Want to Quit Hiking the Trans Canada Trail?

“You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
 
Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
 

Realities and Limitations on Trans Canada Trail

 

People sometimes ask whether we ever wanted to quit the Trans Canada Trail, usually with the expectation that there must have been one particular dramatic moment when everything became too much. Perhaps a storm, an injury, a bear encounter, an unsafe road, or some terrible day when we looked at one another and decided we had simply had enough. Over almost six years and nearly 18,000 kilometres, however, the question was never that simple. There were certainly days when we wanted to stop walking, stretches of road we desperately wanted to get off of, areas we were ready to leave, seasons we were tired of fighting through and moments when we genuinely questioned whether we had enough left to continue the larger journey. Those feelings were not all the same, and over time we came to understand that “wanting to quit” could mean many different things depending on what, exactly, we wanted to stop.

 

Early in the trek, a bad day could feel enormous because we had relatively little Trans Canada Trail experience against which to measure it. Newfoundland taught us that quickly. We arrived with years of hiking and Camino experience behind us, but the scale, weather, terrain and demands of crossing a province on foot were still new, and on difficult days it was easy to allow the misery of a single moment to grow until it seemed to describe the entire journey and define the entire day. We eventually adopted the idea that we should never make a major decision about stopping on the worst day. Eat something, get a decent night’s sleep, let the weather pass if possible, and see whether the world looks different in the morning or in a few days. Often it did, and what had felt impossible at the end of an exhausting day became manageable again after rest and distance from the immediate frustration.

 

That principle served us well, but the farther we travelled, the more we understood that it could not become an excuse for ignoring reality. There is a difference between persevering through discomfort and continuing into conditions that are unsafe or physically unsustainable.  In one region, when we became targeted for our presentations and commentary, we began to delay our postings to obscure where we were at any given time along the TCT route.  As a result, while we strove to keep regular daily posts coming out, the need for safety meant that we had to shift our approach to putting out images and blogs.  

 

Later in Alberta, when highway conditions became dangerous, and our experiences on the road made it increasingly clear that remaining on the mapped route was no longer sensible, continuing blindly would not have demonstrated commitment to the journey so much as commitment to a line on a map. By then we had begun to understand that sometimes the way to keep going is to stop doing what you are doing, reassess the situation and find another way forward. Persistence was less about refusing to change and more about preserving the larger journey when a particular plan no longer made sense.

 

There were also many times when what we wanted to quit was not the TCT at all. We wanted to quit a day. We wanted the hail or the rain to stop, the extreme heat to break, the traffic to disappear or the next community to arrive sooner. We wanted to be done with a highway shoulder, a long climb, a stretch of mud, a flooded trail or another night of wondering where we could safely camp. Sometimes we wanted a section of pathways to end because our bodies and minds were ready for the psychological lift of crossing another boundary. None of those feelings necessarily meant that we wanted to abandon the larger journey. Long-distance hiking and exhaustion have a way of making temporary frustration sound and feel much more permanent while you are living inside it, and part of becoming more experienced was learning not to confuse the two.

 

By northern British Columbia en route to the Arctic, however, that distinction became harder to maintain. The Alaska Highway was taking more from us than we had expected. There were long distances between reliable services, increasingly heavy supplies to carry, relentless traffic, repeated climbing and descending, regular uncertainty about where we could stop, and the constant vigilance required when walking beside fast-moving vehicles. At Liard River Hot Springs, the effort and drain finally caught up with us. The notes in our travel journals and unreleased blogs from that region are not subtle: there were tears, we did not want to walk on, we did not want another day beside a busy highway, we did not want to explain the journey to another person, and we were tired of carrying the tension built up by distracted drivers. In my journal I wrote that I thought “that we had bottled up too many of the stresses of the trek and that they were beginning to eat away at us.”

 

That morning felt different from simply being tired at the end of a hard day because the idea of continuing itself had become emotionally exhausting before we had even started walking. Yet the North added another aspect to these moments and frustrations.  Practically speaking, we did not have enough food and supplies to remain where we were, and Lower Post, the next realistic opportunity to resupply, was roughly 186 kilometres ahead. We could not solve the problem simply by declaring a rest day because the logistics of the route - especially in the north - rarely provided that choice. So we continued, not because we woke suddenly inspired or because some heroic reserve of determination appeared, but because at that moment moving forward remained the sole practical option available to us. Sometimes perseverance on a long journey looks less like courage than like responding to the circumstances and realities immediately in front of you.

 

That distinction matters when people ask whether it was motivation, perseverance, or plain stubbornness that carried us across Canada. Sometimes they certainly did, but at other times logistics carried us, habit carried us, curiosity carried us, the knowledge that the next community was only a few days away carried us, the idea of clean laundry or a meal at a table carried us.  In addition to that, we were fortunate to be able to carry one another.

 

There were days when the excitement of what lay ahead was enough, and others when we simply put one foot in front of the other because that was what the day required.  There are days I think Sean was done, but I was excited for a region or an Important Bird Area, just as there were times when I was sick or tired, and Sean’s energy pulled me through.  Looking back, I think long journeys contain far more ordinary persistence than dramatic courage, and that ordinary persistence is probably what carries people the farthest.

 

The most serious answer to the question, did we ever want to quit the Trans Canada Trail, arose only twice in 6 years.  The first time was around Calgary, Alberta, when years of accumulated frustrations and exhaustion began to outweigh our enthusiasm for the journey itself. By then, we had already walked more than 11,500 kilometres across Canada, endured the interruptions and uncertainties of the pandemic, repeatedly adjusted our plans, and spent hundreds of days navigating a national trail that was often very different from what its maps and promotional materials suggested. There had been wonderful experiences, extraordinary kindness and remarkable landscapes along the way, but there had also been difficult roads, disconnected pathways, logistical complications and an almost continuous need to solve problems simply to keep moving forward. Individually, most of these difficulties were manageable. Collectively, however, they began to take a toll. We were tired of constantly having to reconsider our route, tired of defending our decisions, and increasingly aware that the effort required to continue was affecting our ability to appreciate the very experiences that had inspired us to begin walking across Canada in the first place.

 

What made that period different from an ordinary difficult stretch was that we were no longer simply wondering how to get through the next day or reach the next community. We were questioning whether we wanted to continue committing so much of our lives to the larger undertaking. There was still an enormous distance between the Pacific Ocean and us, let alone the Arctic, and the prospect of continuing for several more months (at the time) and possibly several more years (to the Arctic) was difficult to contemplate when we were already so worn down. We had begun this journey out of curiosity, a love of nature, and a desire to encourage others to explore and reconnect with the landscapes around them. Somewhere amid the logistical challenges and growing frustrations, it was becoming difficult to hold on to those original intentions. For all of these reasons - and a few others that don't bear discussion - the result was that for a time, stopping seemed less like abandoning a dream than recovering something of the lives and interests that had led us onto the trail in the first place. Yet we also knew that exhaustion could distort our perspective, and that making such a consequential decision while frustrated and depleted might not reflect what we would want once we had some distance from the immediate circumstances.

 

The second time came during our final year on the Trans Canada Trail.  By the time we reached Eagle Plains on the Dempster Highway, our mindset was no longer about wanting a bad day to finish. We had begun the year (perhaps unwisely) already tired after more than a thousand kilometres of walking across Spain (Via Augusta, the Via de la Plata, the Camino Sanabres, and Camino Finisterre), struggled through the failed attempt on the Dawson Overland Trail, backtracked, dealt with enormous resupply issues, misjudged how much food we would need between Dawson City and Eagle Plains, and ultimately had to call a friend for help when supplies ran dangerously low. When we finally reached Eagle Plains, our bodies were visibly depleted. Our clothes were hanging from us, everything seemed to hurt, we were exhausted, and neither of us could bring ourselves to return to the road.  Instead, we took a break off the trail to regain our perspective – and to eat and sleep … a lot.

 

For perhaps the clearest time on the entire journey, the question was no longer whether we wanted that day's walk to end. We were wondering whether we wanted the season to end. Whether we wanted to just be off this seemingly never-ending trail. In Sean’s travel journal, he noted “that if a bus south had been available, we probably would have taken it and returned another year to finish what remained…or just gone home and be glad to be done with the whole dam thing.  Six years of our lives have been swallowed by this trail; at the moment, I don’t want to give it another day or another step.” There were only 518 kilometres between Eagle Plains and Tuktoyaktuk, but at that moment the number might as well have been much larger. Ultimately, we spent several days away from the road talking, eating (lots of eating), resting and trying to decide what we actually wanted to do, rather than simply reacting to how exhausted we felt in the moment. 

 

That was not a moment when we needed someone to tell us never to quit. What we needed was enough distance from the immediate exhaustion to make a decision we could live with. Eventually we chose to continue, but I would not want to turn that moment into a universal lesson about perseverance. Had we decided to stop at Eagle Plains and return another year or simply be done then and there, the previous six years would not have disappeared. Thousands upon thousands of kilometres of walking would not suddenly have become meaningless because our bodies and minds had reached their limits during one particular summer. Sometimes stopping is failure, but sometimes it is common sense, sometimes it is temporary, and sometimes it is simply the end of what a person is willing or able to give to a particular journey.

 

The longer we walked, the less useful the language of quitting seems to have become because so many other possibilities existed between continuing exactly as planned and abandoning the journey altogether. We could rest, reroute, reconsider, accept help, change the schedule, stop for a season, come back later or decide that a particular route no longer deserved the sacrifice it was demanding. By the end, the important question was less “Are we quitting by doing this?” than “What are we actually trying to preserve?” Was it the itinerary, the expectations of people following on social media, the line on the map, or the intention of undertaking the journey? Experience gradually taught us that those things were not always the same thing, and when they came into conflict, stubbornness was not automatically the same as strength.

 

All of this might seem or sound overly emotional.  I don’t deny that most days on the Trans Canada Trail were wonderful.  Out of more than 750 days on the TCT, a couple of bad ones certainly don’t outweigh the good.  And I admit that there were hundreds of days when not much was particularly dramatic. We got up, packed, walked, looked for birds and wildlife, found food and water, took photographs, talked to people, made camp and did it again. Those ordinary days carried us much farther across Canada than determination ever did. But there were also days when continuing required a conscious decision, and a few when deciding whether to continue at all was genuinely difficult. Sometimes we wanted to stop for twenty minutes, sometimes until morning, sometimes until we reached the next town, and sometimes we wanted nothing more than to be finished with a particular road, province or season.

 

In all that time only twice did we come very close to deciding that we had given the journey everything we had.  We continued, but not because stopping would have made us failures. We continued because after resting, accepting help and thinking about what remained, we decided that we still wanted to know what was farther beyond the horizon. At that moment, and because of the kindness of others, that was reason enough.

 

See you on the trail.