What Would Canada Lose Without the Trans Canada Trail?

 After walking it from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Arctic, we learned that the answer is much larger than a line on a map.

Why the Trans Canada Trail is Important

When we set out to walk the Trans Canada Trail, we had no idea how completely the journey would change the way we understood both the Trail and the country it crosses. Over 556 days, we walked on our #Hike4Birds Expedition almost 14,000 kilometres from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, becoming, to our knowledge, the first couple to complete that crossing on foot and the first to document the journey continuously as we travelled. We were also only two among a remarkably small number of people who have walked across Canada on the Trans Canada Trail, joining long-distance trekkers including Dana Meise, Sara Jackson, Dianne Whelan and Mel Vogel, who travelled with Malo.

Later, we continued north toward the Arctic Ocean, following the land route through western Canada and the North. The number of people who have travelled the Trans Canada Trail from coast to coast to coast is smaller still, with Dana Meise, Dianne Whelan and Mel Vogel among the few whose journeys have extended toward all three of Canada’s oceans. It is an extraordinary distinction, but increasingly we have come to believe that its real value is not in being able to say that we crossed the country.

The value lies in what those thousands of kilometres allowed us to see and learn about this amazing country, its peoples and natural wonders.

For years we moved through Canada slowly enough to watch the national line on the map become something entirely different on the ground. We walked through hundreds of communities, followed trails built and maintained by volunteers, explored former railway corridors that had been transformed into public pathways, crossed wetlands and forests, walked beside rivers and highways, entered small towns that most travellers simply drive past or fly over, and met people whose generosity and pride in their communities repeatedly reshaped our understanding of the country.

We shared much of that journey as it was lived from the trail - through photographs, daily blog entries, bird observations, talks, articles and the stories of the people and places we encountered. In doing so, we came to see the Trans Canada Trail from a perspective very few people have had the opportunity to experience: not simply as a recreational route linking three oceans, but as thousands of local places joined together by a national idea.

That perspective has also left us convinced that the greatest value of the Trans Canada Trail has surprisingly little to do with walking across Canada.

From Many One 

Before we began hiking, the Trans Canada Trail existed for us largely as a line on a map. It stretched from one side of the country to the other. That scale was part of what made the idea so compelling, calling us to set off on the journey of a lifetime. There was something extraordinary about the possibility of stepping onto a trail beside the Atlantic Ocean and, one day, reaching the Pacific and then the Arctic.

But that is not how we remember it now.

After years of walking, the line dissolved into hundreds of individual places. Instead, it became the T’Railway Trail crossing Newfoundland, the Confederation Trail passing through Prince Edward Island, rail trails of Quebec and Ontario, prairie pathways linking small communities, mountain trails in Alberta and British Columbia, waterfront routes, forest tracks, wetland boardwalks, country roads and urban greenways. Each had its own history, character, challenges and community of people who cared about it.

Some sections were spectacular. Others were modest. Some carried us through landscapes people travel across the world to see, while others passed behind community centres, through farmlands, suburban neighbourhoods or into towns whose names rarely appear in national travel stories. Yet over time we came to understand that these less celebrated places were not secondary parts of the Trans Canada Trail. In many ways, they were the point.

The national Trail exists because communities across Canada chose to protect, build, restore and connect local routes. Former railway beds were converted into recreational corridors. Bridges were repaired by local volunteers and military engineers. Signs were installed. Trails were cleared after storms. Wetlands, shorelines and river valleys remained accessible. Municipalities, Indigenous communities, trail organizations and countless volunteers invested years and decades of effort into places that might only appear as a small portion of the route on a national map.

Walking the entire trail made the scale of that accumulated effort impossible to ignore.

We could cross Canada only because thousands of people, most of whom we would never meet, had decided that a pathway through their community was worth creating and maintaining. Long before we arrived, someone had attended meetings, applied for funding, negotiated access, restored a bridge, cleared brush or simply kept insisting that a particular piece of trail mattered.

That realization slowly changed the way we understood the Trans Canada Trail. Its greatest achievement was not simply that all these places could eventually be connected from ocean to ocean. It was that a national idea had given thousands of local projects a reason to become part of something larger.  Like the Transcontinental railway and Trans Canada Highway beforehand the Trans Canada Trail is one of this nation’s premier national projects.

And once we began seeing the TCT that way, another question became much harder to ignore: what happens when the support that helped hold those pieces together begins to disappear?

The People Who Keep the Trail Alive

One of the things that becomes obvious when travelling the Trans Canada Trail for months and years rather than for a few hours or days is how much of it exists because somebody, somewhere, decided to care for a particular piece of ground. Sometimes that responsibility belonged to a municipality or conservation authority. Sometimes it was a provincial or regional trail organization. In other places, it seemed to rest on the shoulders of a remarkably small group of volunteers who had spent years developing regional kilometers of pathway.

We were fortunate to meet many of those people – Trail Builders - along the way.

They rarely spoke about their work as part of some grand national undertaking. More often they talked about the trail through their community, access to nature that they had helped preserve, the path that they had developed, the section repeatedly damaged by flooding or under threat from forest fires, the difficulty of finding others to continue the needed work or the hope that more visitors might discover the route they had worked so hard to maintain. Their concerns were undoubtedly local and practical, but together their regional efforts had piece by piece made the national trail possible.

There was something humbling about arriving on a section of trail and realizing how much work had taken place before we ever set foot upon it. Someone had fought to preserve the corridor. Someone had written the grant proposal. Someone had raised money. Someone had placed the signs, cleared the fallen trees or repaired the washout after a storm. Long-distance hikers and cyclists may receive attention for travelling extraordinary distances, but our journeys are only possible because countless people have already done the often unacknowledged work of creating somewhere for us to travel. The farther we walked, the more difficult it became to separate the Trans Canada Trail from those individual acts of essential stewardship.

We also saw what happened where resources were limited.

Sections became overgrown. Signage disappeared or failed to exist. Bridges deteriorated. Floods, wildfire and erosion damaged routes that regions struggled to repair. In some places, the people caring for the TCT were confronting infrastructure problems that could no longer reasonably be solved with volunteer labour and community goodwill alone.

None of this diminished our admiration for the Trans Canada Trail. If anything, it deepened it. The imperfections made visible just how ambitious the project across such a vast nation really was. Canada had not created one perfectly engineered recreational pathway stretching across the nation. It had connected thousands of locally maintained trails, roads, pathways and corridors into something that allowed a person to keep moving across an entire country.

That achievement deserves to be celebrated. It also deserves to be maintained.

The Places We Would Never Have Known

Long-distance travel is often imagined as a journey between destinations. We visit the places whose names we already know, photograph the landscapes we have already seen in guidebook, movies, YouTube videos and social media.  As we do so, we move between them as quickly as possible. Yet one of the great gifts of walking – let alone hiking the Trans Canada Trail was that efficiency was never really an option. The Trail continually took us into the spaces between the places most Canadians recognize.

We walked into communities we had never heard of before beginning the journey. We followed trail corridors into small towns, crossed agricultural regions that tourists more often view through a windshield and spent months travelling through landscapes that rarely feature in national tourism campaigns. Some places had famous attractions somewhat nearby. Many did not. What they had instead were local histories, cafés, campgrounds, museums, community parks, small businesses, trail systems and people willing to explain why their particular corner of Canada mattered.

Throughout our lives, we have both crossed the country by car on summer vacations with family, and recognized many of the places we now visited from the names on highway signs.  We have also travelled repeatedly on Via Rail’s Ocean and Via Rail’s Canadian annually to visit family and friends, recalling mention of some of these locations from on board announcements. And of course we have flown across the nation – a means of transition by which few of the details of the country as a whole even seem to exist.

Walking across the country and living in each community en route changes the perspective of the nation entirely.

A trail entering a community gave us a reason to stop. We needed groceries, meals, water, laundry, replacement equipment and occasionally somewhere to sleep. We visited bakeries, cafés and restaurants, stayed at campgrounds and locally owned accommodations, explored museums and historic sites and depended repeatedly on small businesses that were never intended specifically for long-distance hikers. The practical necessities of travelling slowly became opportunities to spend time in places most people now simply have passed through.

Yet what remains with us most strongly is rarely what we purchased. It is the conversations, local history, and regional pride in what is produced in each community.

Someone behind a counter would ask where we had come from and then tell us something about the town. A resident would explain why an old railway station still mattered. A trail volunteer would point toward a historic site or wetland we might otherwise have missed. Farmers talked about the land around us. People described industries that had disappeared, businesses their parents had worked in and had hoped would survive as well as changes they had watched reshape their communities over decades.  Gradually, these places stopped being points between more famous destinations and became destinations in their own right.

This is one of the qualities of the Trans Canada Trail that is difficult to appreciate from a national map. The TCT does not simply allow people to travel across Canada. It gives trail users reasons to explore and to enter communities, remain there for a while and experience the landscapes and histories that distinguish one region from another.

For us, this meant discovering Newfoundland communities along the former railway, travelling through the farmland and small towns of Prince Edward Island, following cycling trails across Quebec and Ontario, crossing prairie communities where agriculture, migration and railway history remained written into the landscape, and entering western towns where trails followed rivers, mountains and former industrial routes. Northward, the experience changed again as distances grew, services became fewer, and the relationships between community, road, landscape and survival became increasingly visible.

None of these places needed to become another Banff, Niagara Falls or Old Quebec City to be worth visiting. Their value was precisely that they were themselves.  This is where we began to understand the tourism potential of the Trans Canada Trail differently. It was not simply about attracting people to one enormous national route. It was about allowing hundreds of communities to become part of a larger journey without requiring them to surrender the things that made them distinctive.

A national trail can lead a cyclist into a small-town café, encourage a family to spend an afternoon exploring a neighbouring community or persuade a traveller to stay somewhere they had originally intended only to pass through. It can connect several communities into a longer cycling or walking experience and give former railway corridors, waterfronts, historic routes and natural spaces new relevance as places people actively seek out.

The benefits do not depend upon thousands of people walking across Canada.

In fact, most people using the pathways and cycling routes of the TCT will never travel more than a tiny fraction of the national route. They may spend a morning cycling between two communities, walk beside a river while visiting relatives, explore a rail trail during a weekend away or choose a destination because they discovered a trail worth experiencing there.

After years of walking through the places between Canada’s best-known attractions, we came to believe that this may be one of the Trans Canada Trail’s greatest strengths. It encourages a kind of exploration and understanding of the nation through travel that is slower, more dispersed and more attentive. Instead of simply moving people between famous places, it gives them reasons to notice what lies in between.

And those places, we discovered, are where much of Canada is actually found.

The Most Important Part May Be the Part Close to Home

For all the kilometres we travelled on the Trans Canada Trail, one of the lessons that stayed with us most strongly was that distance is a poor measure of value.

We spent years trying to connect oceans. Most people never will, and they should not have to in order to benefit from what has been built.  For someone living beside the TCT, its most important section may be the two kilometres they walk every morning. It may be the local rail trail where a family rides bicycles after supper, the wetland boardwalk where children learn to recognize birds, the riverside path used by an older resident to remain active or the green space that gives someone a peaceful place to step away from the pressures of the day. Those uses are less dramatic than crossing a province or completing a national expedition, but they may be more important.

The Trans Canada Trail offers something that has become increasingly valuable: access to the outdoors without necessarily requiring a ticket, a reservation, specialized equipment or a long journey from home. In many communities, people can simply step onto a local section and walk, cycle, watch birds, explore a shoreline or spend an hour outside.  That access to nature and the outdoors without high costs is increasingly important.

Outdoor recreation is often marketed as something that requires expensive gear, distant wilderness trips, organized activities or carefully planned travel. Those experiences can be wonderful, but they certainly are not equally accessible to everyone. A community trail offers another possibility. It provides somewhere to move, breathe, explore and reconnect with the natural world without first having to purchase an experience.

Our own #Hike4Birds journey began with the hope of encouraging people to spend more time in the outdoors, notice the birds and wildlife around them and become more connected with the natural world through citizen science. Walking across Canada reinforced something we had long believed: meaningful experiences in nature do not have to happen in remote wilderness.

They can happen beside a neighbourhood creek, be discovered in the flower growing in the crack in the pavement, or on a forest trail only steps from home.  Over the years, some of our most memorable encounters with birds and wildlife occurred in places that would never be described as wilderness. The TCT repeatedly showed us how much nature survives within and around communities, and how important accessible pathways can be in helping people notice it.

And perhaps most important is the fact that a connection to nature often leads to something more.  People are more likely to care about a wetland they know, a river they walk beside or a woodland where they have watched birds return each spring. Protecting access to these places is therefore about more than recreation. It gives people opportunities to form relationships with the landscapes around their own communities. This is another reason we came to see the Trans Canada Trail differently after walking it. Its national scale is extraordinary, but its greatest value may often exist at the smallest scale possible: one person, one pathway and one nearby piece of the natural world.

What Happens If We Stop Maintaining What We Built?

Yet for all of the dedication over the course of decades to building and maintaining the Trans Canada Trail, and for all the possibilities that it gives way to its existence is not guaranteed.  Just as the Trans Canada Trail was not created all at once, so too it will not disappear all at once either – but without ongoing support, key aspects of it will invariably begin to disappear.  That may be one of the dangers.

A national trail can seem permanent when viewed on a map or in an article online.  From a distance, the idea can still feel intact, while on the ground the network, which relies upon thousands of individual sections and ongoing commitment, can begin to break apart.  When one bridge has to be closed, when one corridor is washed out, one section becomes impassable due to floods or one local organization no longer has the resources to maintain its trail, the loss may initially seem small. Yet those small losses accumulate. 

During our journey, we saw sections damaged by flooding, wildfire, erosion and severe weather. We encountered places where signage was limited, where infrastructure had aged and where local groups were doing everything they could with the resources available to them. In many cases, the people responsible for maintaining these sections were volunteers or small organizations facing problems that increasingly required professional expertise, significant funding and long-term planning.

Goodwill can accomplish an extraordinary amount. But goodwill cannot replace every damaged section.  It cannot repair every washed-out trail surface, rebuild every culvert, restore every fire-damaged corridor or absorb indefinitely the rising costs of maintaining public infrastructure.

This is why the current uncertainty surrounding future support for the Trans Canada Trail matters. The existing federal contribution agreement is scheduled to end in June 2027. Whatever happens after that date will affect far more than a national organization or a line on a map.

It will affect the communities that have invested decades in building and maintaining local trails. It will affect volunteers who have already contributed countless hours to keeping those places accessible. It will affect residents who use them every day, small businesses that benefit from trail-based tourism and visitors who discover communities because a pathway brought them there.

Most importantly, it raises a larger question.

After more than three decades of building one of Canada’s most ambitious national projects, are we prepared to protect what has already been created?  We have already invested the money, labour, imagination and volunteer effort required to transform former railway corridors, waterfronts, forests, wetlands, rural routes and community pathways into a network reaching across the country.

Allowing those assets to deteriorate would not simply mean losing pieces of a recreational trail. It would mean slowly losing pieces of a national project that communities across Canada spent a lifetime building together.

What are We Asking Canada and Canadians to Protect?

We have written elsewhere about why continued support for the Trans Canada Trail matters to communities, regional tourism, access to nature and the future of this national project. In our recent article for Eh Canada Travel, we look more directly at the broader case for protecting the Trail and the many local benefits that flow from maintaining a connected national network.

Why the Trans Canada Trail Matters: Investing in Canadian Communities

This reflection is something slightly different. It comes from having walked the TCT from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic. It comes from years spent following that line across the country and discovering what existed behind it: volunteers, communities, small businesses, regional histories, acts of kindness and thousands of local places that had been connected to something larger.

We set out believing that the great achievement of the Trans Canada Trail was that it allowed someone to walk across Canada. We no longer believe that. The greater achievement is that it created a framework through which communities across the country could protect local pathways, provide access to nature, welcome visitors and connect themselves with neighbouring regions and with the nation as a whole.

That is what we risk losing if the Trail is allowed to weaken section by section.

For that reason, we have been doing our best to contact trail organizations, provincial tourism organizations, nature and conservation groups and political leaders to express our support for continued investment in the Trans Canada Trail. We hope others will do the same. Supporting the Trans Canada Trail is not simply about preserving a route for the very small number of people who may one day attempt to walk from ocean to ocean.

It is about protecting a national project created through decades of work by communities and volunteers. It is about supporting regional tourism and the small businesses that benefit when people travel more slowly through Canada. It is about ensuring that people continue to have affordable and accessible places to walk, cycle, watch birds and spend time in nature. And it is about protecting something increasingly rare: a physical connection between communities, regions and people across an enormous country.

We were fortunate enough to follow that connection from the Atlantic to the Pacific and onward to the Arctic. What we discovered was that the Trans Canada Trail is much larger than the line we followed.

It is the thousands of places, people and communities that give that line meaning. And that is worth protecting.

Trans Canada Trail – Not Just a Trail

See you on the Trail!