Feature H I K I N G Writer Tyee Bridge skips the airport and eschews the train station in favour of lacing up a pair of old runners and setting out to walk the urban Vancouver stretch of the Trans Canada Trail.
A Nice Long Walk illustrations by
Amanda Siegmann
OUR TRANS CANADA TRAIL walk began near Douglas Coupland’s pixelated Digital Orca sculpture in Coal Harbour. I’ve always found it mesmerizing and I wanted to linger for a few minutes, but I felt the clock ticking. We were going to put in over 30 kilometres that day, and we were behind schedule. It was a perfect morning: chilly but cloudless, the sun already well launched into pale blue sky. The kind of Vancouver day that announces the possibility of a life beyond rain. A nice long walk. Get off-screen and out from under the domestic roof. The sky as my ceiling! Fresh air and fitness! Profundity at every turn! This was the idea: a two-day urban hike on the Trans Canada Trail. Begun as a national project in 1992, the TCT was renamed the Great Trail in 2016. This was part of a federal rebrand that also bills it as the longest trail in the world at 24,000 kilometres, running from Vancouver Island to the Northwest Territories to Newfoundland. However, unlike other long-distance routes that are actually trails in the way we understand the word—the Pacific
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