Is the Trans Canada Trail Safe? What Six Years of Walking Across Canada Taught Us

Is the TCT Dangerous?  Were you Afraid? Was it Safe?

"Security is mostly a superstition.”

Helen Keller, Let Us Have Faith

Of all the questions we are asked about our six years walking across Canada on the Trans Canada Trail, one of the most difficult to answer is also among the simplest: Was it safe?

The difficulty is not that we are reluctant to discuss the risks we encountered, or that we experienced nothing unnerving or frightening during our journey. Rather, it is that safety is a complicated and often deeply personal consideration. What one person regards as an acceptable risk or terrifying may be entirely unreasonable to someone else. A situation that leaves one walker feeling uncomfortable may scarcely register with another, while an experienced wilderness traveller who feels perfectly at ease in bear country may be considerably less comfortable walking along the shoulder of a busy highway.

 
There is also an important difference between feeling safe and actually being safe. Familiarity can give us confidence in circumstances that involve considerable risk, while unfamiliar situations can provoke anxiety even when the likelihood of something going wrong is relatively small. Neither confidence nor fear provides a particularly reliable measure of danger on its own.
 
Perhaps more importantly, the possibility of something unexpected happening is not confined to wilderness environments or long-distance hiking trails. We can be injured walking down the stairs at home, crossing a familiar street, heading to the grocery store, or working in our own backyard. Accidents, illness, difficult encounters, and unpredictable events are part of everyday life. Choosing to undertake an extended journey does not suddenly introduce uncertainty into an otherwise risk-free existence. It changes the circumstances in which we encounter those uncertainties and, sometimes, the resources available to respond to them. 

Regardless, we can appreciate why people wonder whether the Trans Canada Trail is safe to venture down, hike on, or cycle along.  It’s a reasonable question.

 
Before beginning our journey across Canada, we spent considerable time considering the challenges we might face. We researched wildlife, weather conditions, water availability, highway corridors on the route, remote landscapes, and the distances separating communities. We also thought about the practical implications of travelling for months with everything we needed carried in our backpacks. Much of this preparation was informed by our previous long-distance hiking experiences, although we understood that walking across an entire country the size of Canada would introduce situations that we could not necessarily anticipate. As Sean likes to say, you “have to expect the unexpected to be prepared.”

 
One of our more memorable exchanges during those preparations was with a fellow Canadian long-distance walker also on the TCT a year ahead of us. Wondering whether carrying bear spray was advisable, we emailed her to ask for her opinion. Her response was immediate: "Yes, of course."
 
Naturally, we were curious about what difficult encounters she might have experienced with bears during her travels, or what advice she might have for safety, so we wrote back to ask. Her reply was rather unexpected.
 
"Oh, it's not for the bears; there are some crazy people out there."

We have remembered that exchange ever since. It was amusing, but it also illustrated how easily our assumptions about danger can differ from someone else's experiences and concerns. We had been thinking primarily about wildlife encounters, while her answer reflected an entirely different consideration. In the end, we did carry bear spray, although the conversation left us thinking more broadly about what preparation and personal safety might actually involve.

Over the following six years, as our #Hike4Birds journey carried us almost 18,000 kilometres between the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans, we encountered a wide variety of circumstances that required us to think about safety. There were remote landscapes where weather, wildlife, or the distance from assistance demanded preparation and being careful en route. There were roads and highways where passing traffic – sometimes less than a foot away - required constant attention. There were also difficult trail conditions, unexpected closures, and occasions when our plans had to change because continuing would have introduced risks we were unwilling to accept.

We spotted bears, foxes, coyotes, wolves, moose, deer, snakes, raccoons, squirrels, and lots of birds - just to name a few - and never had a problem. 
 
There were also a small number of uncomfortable encounters with other people. At times, these experiences influenced how and when we shared our location publicly, particularly when we were travelling through isolated regions. We do not believe those incidents were representative of the communities we visited, or of the overwhelming majority of people we met. Indeed, some of our most memorable experiences involved extraordinary generosity, kindness, and assistance from complete strangers. Nevertheless, the less pleasant encounters were part of our journey too, and excluding them would present an incomplete account of what we experienced.

 
Yet there were also hundreds of entirely ordinary days when our greatest concerns involved finding drinking water, deciding where to stop for a snack or break, watching birds, or wondering whether our feet would tolerate another twenty kilometres before stopping. It would be misleading to allow a handful of difficult incidents to define six years of travel, just as it would be misleading to suggest that our journey was without risk simply because we completed it.  It would also be remiss to say that another person’s journey would go without incident.  Over the course of hiking across a city, a region, a province and the country, a lot can and does happen. 

 
So, was the Trans Canada Trail safe?
 
We cannot answer that question for everyone, nor can we guarantee that another person following the same route will encounter the same conditions or have the safe experiences we did. What we can do is describe the risks we encountered, explain how we approached them, acknowledge the decisions we might make differently, and distinguish between the situations we anticipated and those that surprised us.  Ultimately, our experiences taught us that safety on the Trans Canada Trail is not a simple characteristic of the national pathway. It depends upon where you are travelling, the conditions at the time, the activities you are undertaking, the preparations you have made, and the circumstances you encounter along the way.

 

The Risks We Cannot Anticipate

 
As a case in point of navigating the unexpected that can take place - Perhaps one of the more memorable lessons about safety came during our journey through British Columbia, and it involved something we had carried for thousands of kilometres specifically to protect ourselves.

 
Throughout our travels, we had taken the usual precautions when moving through bear country. We remained aware of our surroundings, paid attention to wildlife activity, and carried bear spray in case we ever needed it (no not for the people). Like many pieces of emergency equipment, we hoped never to have a reason to use it, but considered it a sensible precaution given the environments through which we were travelling.  Then, one day in British Columbia, during a break on the trail, we began to hear a strange hissing sound. Moments later, it sounded more like an aerosol can going off. It wasn't until we started coughing and our eyes started burning that we realized the noise had come from the bear spray canister on the side of Sean’s backpack.  It had begun to leak and was rapidly covering him and his equipment in its contents.
 

There had been no bear encounter, no threatening animal, and no reason for the spray to have been discharged. Nothing had apparently triggered it. One moment we were simply continuing our journey, and the next we were dealing with an entirely unanticipated problem involving the equipment we had carried to make ourselves safer.
 
After years of considering the possibilities of wildlife encounters, unpredictable situations, road traffic, difficult terrain, and human behaviour, it was almost absurd that one of our more memorable safety incidents involved our own bear spray randomly going off. We had spent considerable time preparing for situations in which we might need to use it, but had not imagined that the canister itself would become the problem.  In retrospect, the incident seems an appropriate illustration of one of the things we came to understand about risk during our journey across Canada. We can research conditions, prepare carefully, carry appropriate equipment, make sensible decisions, and avoid circumstances that appear unnecessarily dangerous. All of these precautions matter, and we would never suggest otherwise. Yet none of them can eliminate the possibility of something unexpected happening.

 
Nor is that uncertainty peculiar to the Trans Canada Trail.  We can slip on the steps outside our own homes, be injured crossing a familiar street, encounter an aggressive dog while walking through our neighbourhood, or experience an entirely unexpected mechanical failure while driving somewhere we have travelled hundreds of times before. Familiar surroundings do not make us immune to accidents, just as unfamiliar places are not inherently dangerous simply because we do not know what to expect.
 
This does not mean that all risks are equal, or that we should disregard legitimate concerns. Walking beside high-speed traffic presents different hazards than following a peaceful woodland pathway. Travelling through remote northern landscapes requires different preparations than spending an afternoon on an urban greenway. Weather, terrain, wildlife, personal circumstances, and access to assistance all influence the consequences of something going wrong. Recognizing these differences is part of travelling responsibly.

 
Moreover, just because there is the possibility of danger does not serve as evidence that the entire journey is inherently unsafe.  We walked into areas that the police warned us were “funky” and told us to be careful, only to be greeted with complete kindness.  So each situation requires context.
 
Over six years and almost 18,000 kilometres, we experienced occasional moments of genuine concern, made decisions to avoid situations that seemed unnecessarily risky, and sometimes discovered that our expectations had been mistaken. We also encountered an extraordinary number of people who offered directions, water, meals, accommodation, encouragement, and assistance without expecting anything in return. Most days of our 759 days on the Trans Canada Trail were not defined by danger, but by the ordinary routines of travelling slowly through an enormous and remarkably varied country.
 
If we had allowed every possible misfortune to determine whether we should begin our journey, we would never have left Cape Spear. Equally, had we assumed that enthusiasm, experience, or careful preparation made us invulnerable, we might have placed ourselves in situations that could have been avoided.
 
Somewhere between those extremes lies the judgment that long-distance travel requires.

 
We cannot promise another hiker or cyclist that the Trans Canada Trail will always be safe, any more than we can guarantee that they will encounter danger. We can share the circumstances we experienced, explain the precautions we took, and encourage people to consider their own abilities, knowledge, comfort, and willingness to accept uncertainty. Ultimately, everyone must decide which risks they are prepared to manage and which they would rather avoid.
 
And perhaps that is what we would most like people to understand when they ask whether we felt safe walking across Canada.
 
The world has never been entirely predictable, whether we are travelling thousands of kilometres from home or simply stepping outside our front door. Yet unpredictability does not mean that the world is an inherently unsafe place, nor that the possibility of something going wrong should prevent us from experiencing it.  Sometimes, despite all our preparations, the most unexpected thing that happens is that your can of bear spray opens up unexpectedly.
 
We cannot know everything that awaits us when we step out the door. But that uncertainty, by itself, is not a reason to remain inside.
 
See you on the trail!