Canada’s new 700km island path

Pink and and purple lupins swayed along Prince Edward Island’s Highway 101, where I’d just walked out of the town of Kensington. It was 09:00, and the road was busy with cars whose drivers seemed intent on finding coffee or getting to work. The smell of cow wafted across the wind before I spotted the animals grazing on the ridge. They were standing next to a sign that said, “Get high off our milk. Our cows are on grass.”

It was my fourth day walking the Island Walk, a new 700km route that circles Canada’s smallest province. Starting on PEI’s rural west end, I had walked past vinyl-clad farmhouses with ocean vistas, along a boardwalk beneath whirling wind turbines, and above red clay cliffs that plunged sharply into the sea. I had stopped for a midday country music hour at the Stompin’ Tom Centre, honouring Canadian singer-songwriter Tom Connors. I’d tromped through the rain along a secluded, wooded trail where swarms of canny mosquitos tried to shelter under my umbrella. And after learning about PEI’s major crop at the Canadian Potato Museum, I had fuelled my day’s walk with an extra-large cheese-topped baked potato served with freshly made potato chips. You know that a place is serious about its spuds when your potato comes with a side of potatoes.

Now, walking near the centre of the island, with the breeze blowing and the wildflowers blooming, I realised that I was noticing things I’d never have attended to if I were behind the wheel of a car. A shingled barn, its green paint fading, that looked nearly abandoned except for its meticulously mowed lawn. Two pale-yellow butterflies flitting past a basket of marigolds mounted on a fence post. A swath of ocean barely visible through a clearing in the trees.

Bryson Guptill, the PEI resident who conceived the Island Walk, wanted to encourage both islanders and visitors to explore the region at this slower pace. After he and his partner Sue Norton hiked sections of the Camino de Santiago in Spain and France and the Rota Vicentina in Portugal, Guptill began wondering why there wasn’t a similar walking route through the towns and country landscapes of their home province.

He set to work mapping a path around PEI, which officially became the Island Walk in 2020. The walking and cycling route is divided into 32 segments that travellers can tackle individually, as I did, or as an extended circuit around the island, passing its Atlantic coast beaches, through its national park and into the villages where the Anne of Green Gables novels – perhaps PEI’s best-known export – were set.

But it wasn’t a straight road from conceiving the idea to launching the Island Walk. And, as a growing number of people discover this route, its creators are facing some ongoing challenges.

A retired government policy analyst, Guptill had been volunteering with Island Trails, a non-profit organisation whose mandate is to develop and maintain PEI’s walking paths. He and Norton regularly walked many of the island’s woodland trails, as well as the 273km Confederation Trail that follows a former rail line across the island’s centre.

BBC