Hitting the Ground Walking

Hang around the footwear department at your local Mountain Equipment Company as I do, and you’ll soon understand that walking with a purpose — which is more than merely putting one foot in front of the other — has become hugely popular. Inspired by fiction (Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry), memoir (Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path), and beauty (Rizzoli Press’s gorgeous Great Hiking Trails of the World), Canadians of all ages and demographics are fanning out across the country and the globe to tackle the West Coast Trail, the Appalachian Trail, the Camino de Santiago, and even the Everest Base Camp Trek. (Pro tip: “Slightly big” is better than “My toe’s hitting the end,” and make sure your heel is secure. I also recommend a stiff Vibram sole with self-cleaning treads, and I advise would‑be hikers to stay away from trail running sneakers. Your feet will thank me.)

As a part-time shoe dog, I was rather shocked to learn that the best-selling guidebook author Nicola Ross reached not for a pair of Merrell Moabs or Salewa Alps but for Keen closed-toe sandals when she hit the Bruce Trail to research and write her latest book, 40 Days & 40 Hikes: Loving the Bruce Trail One Loop at a Time. “I have a condition known as Morton’s neuroma,” she explains, “and Keens don’t irritate the affected nerves in my feet.”

At 900 kilometres, the Bruce Trail is Canada’s longest marked pathway. It is named after James Bruce, the governor general of the Province of Canada from 1847 to 1854, who is also the namesake of Bruce County and of the narrow finger of rock, trees, and soil known as the Bruce Peninsula. First conceived in 1954, to protect the rugged limestone cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment and the flora and fauna found in the adjacent Carolinian ecosystem, the trail starts at Queenston Heights, not far from where the Niagara River tumbles over the escarpment caprock at its famous falls, and ends in Tobermory, at the northern tip of the peninsula. Like most natural features, the escarpment doesn’t respect international borders; its geomorphology extends from upstate New York to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Ross has the Niagara Escarpment in her bones. Born and raised on a forest acreage near the Caledon Hills, north of Toronto, she gave up a distinguished career as an international environmental consultant several years ago and made a successful transition to guidebook writing. Her six-volume Loops & Lattes series explores many popular hiking destinations in southwestern Ontario. This latest book is something of a love letter to Ross’s most beloved track. Retracing a route trod many times previously, she eschews the genre’s typical painstaking details about directions and distances for a more personal and intimate exploration of how the Bruce Trail has helped define who she is.

The dramatic tension in most books about long-distance walking is built upon weather, fitness, mental state, blisters, and rumination on life’s opportunities missed. Lost souls often seek out wilderness to get back in touch with who they really are or want to be. Surely, they think, three weeks on an ancient pilgrimage route will result in some kind of spiritual awakening, if not a tightening of the beltline. Ineptness, usually born of inexperience, often brings hilarious results, as seen in Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, from 1998, and even Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, from 2012. Of course, as a “professional hiker,” Ross doesn’t make the rookie mistakes that result in getting lost, hypothermia, spraining an ankle, or becoming sick from drinking bad water.

Throughout 40 Days & 40 Hikes, Ross wears her affection for the trail and the rich Niagara Escarpment ecosystem on her merino wool sleeve. Admittedly, I was somewhat skeptical about why anyone might be interested in a book that, unless you make copious notes and use a highlighter, provides very little in the way of practical advice on how to navigate the Bruce Trail. And then I saw the point: the challenge with taking most one-way hikes is that you don’t have the time to explore the myriad side trips and unbidden tracks that can lead madly in all directions. Ross helpfully magnifies the scope of the Bruce Trail by detailing dozens of possible deviations. She tackles the Bruce Trail in a new way, so that readers don’t have to.

Ross’s narrative is broken up into forty-two chapters, which map out a route that she completes over forty-two days — though not consecutively. (Ross explains that she took time off in midsummer to research and write a feature story on environmental threats posed by the expansion of a gravel quarry near her home.) Often Ross commuted from Caledon to a trailhead and then back, repeating the process the next day to complete another segment. While she might not have lugged a stove, tent, and sleeping bag as the typical backpacker would, her daily output impresses: on most days, she logged twenty kilometres or more, over six to seven hours. At journey’s end, she had proven “trail-tough,” as she calls it, and had dropped a few kilos along the way.

Some self-doubt did creep in while Ross hiked — the sort of dilemma that frequently occurs in environmental circles. What’s more important, the trail or the ecosystem? For almost a century after the creation of Canada’s first national park in 1885, public lands were largely set aside for recreational purposes, which explains why there are golf courses and ski resorts in Jasper and Banff, Alberta. By the early 1970s, a new scientific philosophy had arisen, centred on ecosystem protection. Now in many parts of Canada, tourism and recreational activities are “locked out” of pristine landscapes, where endangered species are reintroduced and nature bats last.

Few guidebook writers make a killing from their life’s work; their motivation comes from sharing intimate knowledge of a particular region in the hope that if and when the time arises, their books will prompt engaged citizens to come forward and protest a proposed gravel pit, housing subdivision, coal mine, or clear-cut logging plan. Unless they’ve already been “protected” by some form of government agency or, in an increasing number of cases, by privately held land trusts, areas unaffected by human development are in a permanent state of endangerment from the forces of capitalism. Ironically, the most effective way to preserve wild spaces lies in building and publicizing trails that can show visitors from near and far the need to protect them.

At times, Ross wonders whether her successful Loops & Lattes guidebooks contributed to overcrowding and trail erosion along the Bruce Trail during the worst years of the pandemic. But she seems to conclude that the more the merrier. Since there will always be developers and aggregate miners nibbling at the escarpment’s edges, the trail and the larger ecosystem need all the friends they can get.

Described as a “ribbon of wilderness,” the Bruce Trail serves as a pedestrian link between parks, conservancies, and recreation areas. It might be hundreds of kilometres long, but in many places — especially its southern sections — it’s only as wide as the road allowance. Much of the route takes advantage of rights-of-way through private property, where a change in ownership and some new No Trespassing signs can force a detour. Even with those occasional bypasses, the trail is not the most scenically stupendous walk. But for eight million people in southwestern Ontario, even a short loop can provide a necessary reconnection with nature. Often it’s the pathways that lie right outside our front door that are the most meaningful.

After completing an ambitious trail undertaking, most hikers will admit that there are good days, bad days, and flat-out boring days involved. Ross, even when describing parts of the Bruce Trail that she’s travelled many times, always finds enthusiasm for her subject matter. She teaches a workshop called “Writing with All of Your Senses,” and it shows: she took ample time to stop and smell the roses (or the bark of a yellow birch tree), and her language never descends into cliché. On exceptional days, she achieved a kind of flow state that she calls “Jordan,” where the kilometres felt effortless and her mental faculties were fully engaged with her surroundings. She includes whimsical sketches of trailside ephemera (maidenhair spleenwort, white oak leaves, and the toggled laces from her trusty Keen sandals) taken directly from her field notebook.

I first saw a white Bruce Trail marker on a tree while skiing at Beaver Valley in the 1960s, and my most memorable hiking experience happened there over three flawless days in October 1996. My father, whose given name was Bruce, loved nothing better than exploring the escarpment, taking us kids on road trips to Skinner’s Bluff, the Pretty River Valley, and Eugenia Falls.

A retired geography teacher and school principal in Kincardine, he’d just concluded a round of chemotherapy to fight colorectal cancer, but he felt fit enough that fall to consider an overnight hike on the trail with me and my wife. Cows lowing in golden pastures soon gave way to hardwood forests and the blazing colours that make the Bruce the best possible place to be on a warm autumn day. We tested the purity of the Beaver River, then filled our drinking bottles (still probably not the best idea, given the amount of livestock nearby) and trod carefully along the escarpment as a hawk drifted on an overhead thermal. To paraphrase John Muir, the American naturalist who studied plants near Meaford, Ontario, before leaving for California, nature’s peace flowed into us as sunshine flows into trees. One of my favourite photos is of my dad on that hike: kitted out in a white Tilley hat, adjacent to a Bruce Trail sign. Ross’s 40 Days & 40 Hikes would have been his kind of book.