Exploring British Columbia on the Trans Canada Trail: Our Walk, Stories, and Resources

British Columbia on the Trans Canada Trail

From the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean

When we crossed Elk Pass from Alberta into British Columbia in September 2022, we were beginning the tenth and final province of our Atlantic-to-Pacific #Hike4Birds on the Trans Canada Trail. Behind us lay three years of travel across Canada, thousands of kilometres of walking, and an extraordinary collection of landscapes, communities, challenges, and experiences. Ahead lay the Rocky Mountains, the valleys and historic railway corridors of southern British Columbia, the Fraser River, and eventually the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

After so many years of moving west, the possibility of completing our coast-to-coast journey was finally beginning to feel real. Yet British Columbia would prove to be considerably more complicated than the final stage of an adventure approaching its conclusion.  Our route carried us through some of the most spectacular mountain landscapes in Canada, but also past enormous coal mines, through logging operations, industrial corridors, and communities where working landscapes occupied the same valleys as rivers, wildlife, and recreational trails. We crossed remote mountain passes, followed the historic Columbia and Western and Kettle Valley railway corridors, walked across the famous wooden trestles of Myra Canyon, and encountered tunnels, damaged trails, wildfire landscapes, and difficult route connections.

As autumn advanced, snow and increasingly cold weather reminded us that the time remaining before winter was growing shorter. Flood-damaged sections of the Kettle Valley Rail Trail forced us to reconsider our plans, while accumulated exhaustion made the final approach to the Pacific more demanding than we had anticipated.

Eventually, we followed the Fraser River through the Lower Mainland into Vancouver, where we finally reached the Pacific Ocean. Yet even that remarkable moment was not the end of our journey. The western terminus of the Trans Canada Trail remained on Vancouver Island, requiring us to continue through coastal forests, historic railway corridors, and the communities of the Cowichan Valley before following the Galloping Goose Trail into Victoria.

Four years and approximately 14,000 kilometres after leaving Cape Spear, Newfoundland, we finally reached Clover Point, completing the Atlantic-to-Pacific portion of our journey after 556 days on the trail.

Throughout British Columbia, we continued documenting our experiences in daily journals, sharing photographs, birds and wildlife observations, local histories, and the practical realities of travelling through Canada on foot. Since completing the northern portion of our coast-to-coast-to-coast #Hike4Birds, we have expanded this collection with planning resources, itineraries, cycling assessments, and reflections on what the journey taught us.

Whether you are exploring the Kettle Valley Rail Trail, researching a longer journey across British Columbia, interested in the birds and wildlife of the Pacific coast, or simply curious about what it was like to finish walking across Canada, we invite you to explore these resources and Come Walk With Us.

Follow Our Walk Across British Columbia

Our complete British Columbia Trans Canada Trail journal brings together the daily entries, photographs, experiences, and observations from our journey across the province.

Beginning with our arrival through Elk Pass and the descent into the Elk Valley, the journals follow us through Elkford, Sparwood, Fernie, Cranbrook, and Kimberley. These first stages introduced us to the remarkable contrasts of southeastern British Columbia, where forested mountain landscapes existed alongside coal mines, logging roads, and the industrial infrastructure of communities built around natural resources.

Our reflection, Seeing the Whole Landscape, considers how these working environments complicated the familiar image of British Columbia as a place of untouched wilderness. Along the Trans Canada Trail, the landscapes we encountered were seldom as simple as the photographs used to advertise them.

Beyond Kimberley, we climbed toward Grey Creek Pass and descended to Kootenay Lake before continuing through Nelson and Castlegar. Here, mountain terrain, water connections, and difficult trails frequently shaped our progress more than the number of kilometres remaining on the map.

From Castlegar, we followed the Columbia and Western Rail Trail through tunnels and historic railway landscapes toward Christina Lake, Grand Forks, and Greenwood. The Kettle Valley Rail Trail then carried us west through Midway, Rock Creek, Beaverdell, and Myra Canyon, where the famous trestle bridges offered one of the most extraordinary examples of railway heritage and recreational trail development we encountered anywhere in Canada.

Continuing through Penticton and toward Princeton, we confronted the realities of travelling through landscapes altered by wildfire, floods, and damaged infrastructure. Our journal, Broken Trails and Natural Disasters: Princeton to Hope, is part of this larger account of a route that could no longer always be followed as originally planned or as mapped by the trail organization.  From Hope, we followed the Fraser Valley west through Chilliwack, Abbotsford, Mission, Fort Langley, and Pitt Meadows before entering Vancouver. After years of walking toward the Pacific, reaching the coast was an extraordinary experience, but our journey still had another chapter.

On Vancouver Island, the Trans Canada Trail led us from Nanaimo through the Cowichan Valley, along the Cowichan Valley Trail and Sooke Hills Wilderness Trail, and eventually onto the Galloping Goose Trail toward Victoria.

Our final travel journal and blog post, Atlantic to Pacific Connected: Victoria to Clover Point, records the conclusion of this remarkable chapter. Joined by members of the Victoria Natural History Society, we completed the final steps to the western terminus, connecting our arrival on the Pacific coast with the beginning of our journey at Cape Spear, where members of Nature Newfoundland had walked with us in 2019.

Readers can follow the complete collection chronologically, explore individual regions and trail systems, or begin with those final days on Vancouver Island and work backward through the experiences that brought us there.

Planning a Walk or Cycle Across British Columbia

For those considering their own adventures on the Trans Canada Trail, we have assembled several resources examining the possibilities and challenges of travelling across British Columbia on foot or by bicycle.

Our British Columbia planning and research guide explores the route, communities, resupply opportunities, camping considerations, water availability, transportation connections, and logistical questions involved in preparing for a longer crossing. Complementing this, our walking itinerary for the Trans Canada Trail in British Columbia documents our daily stages, distances, rest days, and the circumstances that shaped the time required to reach Victoria.

British Columbia contains some of the most remarkable recreational pathways along the national route. The Elk Valley and Chief Isadore trails, the Columbia and Western Rail Trail, and the Kettle Valley Rail Trail offer distinctive opportunities to explore mountain valleys, historic railway infrastructure, and the communities of the southern Interior.  While farther west, the Fraser Valley connects river landscapes, agricultural communities, and urban pathways toward Vancouver, while the Cowichan Valley and Galloping Goose trails provide memorable opportunities to explore Vancouver Island.

Yet British Columbia also demonstrates how challenging a national trail can become when its sections are affected by natural disasters, changing access arrangements, remote terrain, and limited services. The damaged Kettle Valley corridor between Princeton and Hope was one of the clearest examples we encountered of how a route that exists on a map may no longer be available on the ground.

We have also examined whether the Trans Canada Trail in British Columbia can be cycled, considering the opportunities offered by the province's celebrated rail trails and urban pathways alongside the practical challenges of remote mountain routes, changing trail conditions, highway connections, and water crossings.

For a broader introduction, our guide to understanding the Trans Canada Trail in British Columbia explores the provincial network, its distinctive trail systems, and the realities of travelling from the Continental Divide to the Pacific coast.

These resources are intended to help future visitors appreciate the possibilities and limitations of the national pathway rather than prescribe a particular adventure. Our crossing took place in 2022, and current trail conditions, closures, access arrangements, ferry services, camping regulations, and route alignments should always be confirmed before setting out.

Discovering British Columbia's Birds and Wildlife

Birding and encouraging people to reconnect with nature remained central to our #Hike4Birds throughout British Columbia. The province offered an extraordinary range of environments, from subalpine forests and mountain valleys to dry interior grasslands, rivers, wetlands, coastal rainforest, and the marine habitats of the Pacific coast.

Our account, Birding and Wildlife on the Trans Canada Trail in British Columbia, brings together observations from these changing landscapes and explores the different ways we experienced nature as we travelled west.

In the Elk Valley, autumn migration brought mixed flocks of songbirds through the mountain forests, while the dry interior introduced us to different birds and wildlife associated with open grasslands, lakes, and river corridors. Around the Kootenays, Okanagan, and Fraser Valley, the presence of water repeatedly concentrated wildlife within landscapes shaped by forestry, agriculture, mining, and settlement.  Our arrival at the Pacific brought another striking change. Around Stanley Park and the Salish Sea, seabirds, waterfowl, and coastal habitats replaced the inland environments that had dominated much of our journey. On Vancouver Island, the coastal forests, wetlands, and estuaries offered yet another natural landscape and Important Bird Area to explore.

From migrating warblers in the Rocky Mountains to Black Oystercatchers along the Pacific shore, British Columbia repeatedly reminded us how many different environments and species can exist within a single province.  Together with our daily journals and posted entries, these observations preserve the birds and wildlife we encountered during the final provincial stage of our Atlantic-to-Pacific journey.

Reflections from Our Tenth Province on the Trans Canada Trail

British Columbia brought together many of the lessons we had been learning since leaving Newfoundland in 2019. Its spectacular landscapes offered some of the finest walking experiences of our journey, yet the province also challenged our assumptions about wilderness, infrastructure, endurance, and what it meant to follow a national pathway across an entire country.

Our reflections on hiking the Trans Canada Trail in British Columbia revisit these contrasts, from the beauty of the historic railway corridors and coastal trails to the difficulties of navigating damaged infrastructure, dangerous connections, industrial landscapes, and unpredictable weather.

Several individual reflections examine particular moments when the experience of walking forced us to reconsider our expectations. The Trouble With Almost There explores the curious difficulties that emerge when the end of a long journey begins to feel close, even though substantial distances and challenges remain.

In When the Trail You Planned No Longer Exists, we reflect on the consequences of flooding, wildfire, and damaged infrastructure, and the limitations of treating a trail as a permanent route through a changing landscape.

Our reflection, Reaching the Ocean Is Not the Same as Reaching the End, considers the difference between arriving at Vancouver and actually completing the Atlantic-to-Pacific section of the Trans Canada Trail in Victoria. After years of moving toward the western coastline, we discovered that reaching the ocean was an important milestone, but it was not quite the conclusion of our journey.

Finally, Did Reaching the Pacific Feel Like Finishing the Trans Canada Trail? explores what it meant to arrive at Clover Point after 556 days of walking, knowing that the northern portion of our coast-to-coast-to-coast undertaking still lay ahead.

Looking back after completing our journey to the Arctic Ocean, British Columbia remains the place where our original ambition of walking from the Atlantic to the Pacific became reality. Yet perhaps its greatest lesson was that reaching a destination does not erase the significance of everything experienced along the way.

Come Walk With Us Across British Columbia

Today, with our coast-to-coast-to-coast #Hike4Birds complete, we hope these collections offer something for anyone interested in exploring British Columbia and the Trans Canada Trail. Some readers may be researching the Kettle Valley Rail Trail or the pathways of Vancouver Island, others may be considering a longer journey across the province, while still others may be interested in its birds, natural history, communities, and changing landscapes.

Our complete British Columbia archive remains the best place to discover the full collection of daily journals, photographs, itineraries, planning resources, birding observations, and reflections. We invite you to begin wherever your interests lead you, whether in the Rocky Mountains, along the historic railway corridors of the southern Interior, beside the Fraser River, or among the coastal forests of Vancouver Island.

For us, British Columbia was the tenth province of an adventure that began at Cape Spear on June 1, 2019, and eventually carried us approximately 14,000 kilometres across Canada to Clover Point in Victoria. Those final steps on the Pacific coast completed the first great geographical chapter of our journey, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on foot.

But it was not the end of #Hike4Birds.  From Victoria, our thoughts eventually returned to Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the long northern route toward the Arctic Ocean. That next undertaking would lead us through northern Alberta, British Columbia, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories, carrying our exploration of Canada into another remarkable collection of communities, histories, landscapes, and experiences.

Thank you for joining us, whether you followed our journey across British Columbia in 2022 or are discovering #Hike4Birds for the first time.

See you on the trail!