The Trans-Canada Trail currently has 15,525 kilometres of operational pathways that span the country.Brian Atkinson
You can't see Canada at 100 kilometres an hour. If you're planning a cross-country trip this summer, Pierre Camu recommends you take the Trans Canada Trail - a quieter, more scenic alternative to asphalt.
"It would be a rediscovery of Canada at slow speed," he says.
The trail was dreamed up 18 years ago by Mr. Camu, an Ottawa resident, and Calgarian Bill Pratt. The two were contracted to plan events to commemorate Canada's 125th birthday. The final project they proposed was a cross-country nature trail, which they started with $400,000 of government funding.
Their goal was to patch together a network of paths that stitched the Pacific mountain ranges to the waterways that feed the Prairies, along to the Canadian Shield, eventually snaking east through Newfoundland into St. John's Harbour. The trail could be navigated by foot, bicycle, horseback or boat. In the winter, it would be open to snowmobilers and cross-country skiers.
"Once you are in the middle of the trail like this ... it's the silence that impresses you. And of course the birds and the wind and the leaves," says Mr. Camu, now 87. "You forget the noises of the city. They disappear completely. It's another environment."
By the end of last year, the Trans-Canada Trail boasted 15,525 kilometres of operational trail. The organization hopes to finish the coast-to-coast network (a total of 20,000 km) by 2017, in time for Canada's 150th birthday.
Last year, it spent more than $3-million on operations - much of that went to trail and pavilion construction and signage.
Trail extensions are organized by community groups. They receive seed funding from the federal government, but must raise the bulk of the money themselves (through local governments and private donations) to pay for construction.
On Saturday - International Trails Day - two of the 86 pavilions along the massive, networked trail (in Gatineau and Calgary) will be named in honour of Mr. Camu and Mr. Pratt, who died in 1999.
Mr. Camu says his wish is for all Canadians to see at least one pavilion in their lifetime, but that's not enough for Dana Meise. The Prince George, B.C., resident is a forester, but spends half his year walking the trail, with a goal of crossing its entire length.
Mr. Meise, 35, had been itching to discover new parts of Canada since he was a boy, when he told a teacher he wanted to be an explorer like Alexander Mackenzie or Simon Fraser, he says. "When I was 10, a teacher told me it had been all explored and it couldn't be done any more and I was crushed!"
But he never outgrew his dream. In 2008, he flew to Newfoundland and began a cross-country expedition by foot, via the Trans-Canada Trail.
From April to October each year, he spends each day walking, asking strangers for only water and directions (although he usually gets offers of food, shelter and company as well). His calf muscles have conquered about 5,200 km so far, he said Friday by phone from a patch of trail near Almonte, Ont., outside of Ottawa.
He has hiked trails made of old rail beds in New Brunswick, along bike paths in Quebec, and down quiet country roads in Ontario.
"The roads - they're making them more efficient or straighter. By doing that, you cut off all these little communities that have amazing history," he says.
Mr. Camu (due to his age, he says) has traversed only a few stretches of the trail in Calgary, Montreal, Prince Edward Island and the Thousand Islands region, along the St. Lawrence River, which remains his favourite.
When he cycles two kilometres deep into his preferred trail in that area, hemmed in by the thick forest, he sees a different Thousand Islands than the vacation playground motorists know - one full of small, but intimate, discoveries.
"You'll see a small hill and it opens and you see a small village with a church in the middle of it. It's beautiful to discover that. You stop, look, take a photograph, go down the hill and see the village and have a beer or a small lunch," he says.
The Trans-Canada Highway is wrongly romanticized, says Mr. Camu, who has written extensively about geography and transportation. (He also produced the Atlas of Canada in 1957.)
Even through fairly unpopulated stretches of the highway, it is impossible to escape industrialization. There's the loud hum of vehicle engines and the omnipresent logos for fast-food chains at rest stops. The hidden towns and villages are reduced to mere signposts, he says.
"On the trail, it's manicured. You don't see shacks. You don't see ... French fries."