Coast to coast, one step at a time
For Sarah Jackson, the journey really is the destination
Sarah Jackson was freezing.
On a remote stretch of trail in Manitoba last spring, she and her hiking partner were trudging through sleet. Freezing rain numbed her fingers. They had run out of drinking water, but it was too cold to risk the hypothermia that could grip her if she stopped moving.
“Usually you can melt snow, melt ice, all of this, but no matter what we tried with any of that, it was not clean water and it tasted really awful,” Jackson said.
“We were exhausted and we couldn’t stop walking because it was so cold.”
Sitting in the unseasonably warm October sun beside Lake Ontario on Tuesday, Jackson is a long way from that difficult day — figuratively and geographically.
The 25-year-old sociology student from Edmonton is walking across the country, following the TransCanada Trail. She left Victoria, B.C., in June 2015 after dipping her toe in the Pacific Ocean at Mile Zero.
She’s aiming to arrive in St. John’s, NL, next March. If she’s successful, she’ll be the first woman on record to complete the trek.
The 21,452-kilometre trail was meant to be finished years ago, but there are a few spots where it’s not yet joined up with the rest.
Jackson is following the route as closely as possible where it exists, and taking the most direct feasible route between unconnected sections where the gaps are.
She took a month off to spend time with her family last Christmas and was back home for two weeks in August.
Aside from that, she’s been on the trail every day, pushing steadily eastward, walking between 20 and 50 kilometres per day.
That’s a total of 330 walking days for anyone who’s counting, but Jackson isn’t — not really, anyway. The distance isn’t the point, she says. So what is? “This is the question, hey?” she says, laughing.
“Just to do it,” she adds with a George Mallory shrug.
Her uncle hiked the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain when Jackson was a little girl and she was captivated by his stories from the trail. She hiked Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro a few years ago and that cemented her love of long-distance walking. The idea of a Canadian trek took hold as she was finishing up her sociology degree.
“I’d looked into a few different trails in the States, but just that whole concept of being able to see Canada in a different kind of a way really appealed to me.”
There is no shortage of cross-Canada trekkers these days. People cycle, hitchhike, skateboard. Many travel for a cause, using their journey to raise money for cancer research, awareness of social issues, etc.
Jackson doesn’t have a specific cause beyond a spirit of self discovery and personal challenge.
That said, she has spent a good deal of time contemplating her place as a woman, a white person and a colonial settler in this vast country. After all, she says, with so much time on the road, your own thoughts can get pretty loud.
“I think setting out I was also interested in not taking up as much space,” she said. Most people who cross Canada tend to follow the other TransCanada — the highway version.
Few follow the somewhat meandering route of the TransCanada Trail from one end to the other. That’s part of what appealed to Jackson.
“It’s been interesting to go from being welcomed into someone’s home in say, rural Saskatchewan and watching people sort of live off the land a little bit more compared to walking into an urban hub.
“Contrasting those two worlds is crazy. But at the same time, you can find similarities in people as you go across the whole way,” she said.
Though she often hikes alone, Jackson has had people join her on her journey. Friends and family have kept her company through stretches of the trek and even strangers at- tracted to her story have occasionally joined in.
When she’s in towns and cities, she often crashes on the couches of friends or strangers to save money. Out on the road, she sleeps in the tent she carries in her 20-kilo pack.
She’s worn through three sets of Scarpa Hunza backpacking boots. The fourth pair is already showing its age. She carries everything she needs to be self-sufficient, including a stove, fuel and sleeping bag. She even has a flint and steel, bear spray and a knife. “I feel naked without it,” she says. Her friends and family track her progress online, logged by a SPOT GPS transmitter, and she posts photos daily on her Instagram feed, @SaraRoseWalks.
The hardest days are the badweather days, she says, though winter isn’t necessarily the worst.
“Winter in general is less hard walking through, but definitely more hard living in,” she said.
“Setting up camp in -20, -30 weather; you crawl into your sleeping bag at night and it takes two hours to warm up before you can even think about going to bed.”
The coldest night she’s faced was -35 in Saskatchewan last winter.
Jackson said she saved for a year before hitting the road and moved back in with her parents in the months before setting out. She keeps herself going financially by living cheap on the road. Her diet, she says, consists mainly of granola (often in bar form), nuts, noodles and instant potatoes.
She never intended to cross the entire country. It just sort of happened.
“When I was passing through Edmonton, at that point I had been at it for a while already and I knew that it was something I was still enjoying. That’s when I had the end destination in mind,” she said.
One of the highlights, she says, was crossing the Prairies. “I’m a Prairie kid, too, and I love the open skies.
“No matter how hard the day has been, at the end of the day, I can look up at the sky and be so overcome with how lucky I am and what a beautiful place it is.”