Hiking the Bruce Trail When You Don’t Know What You’re Doing

Hiking the Bruce Trail When You Don’t Know What You’re Doing

Submitted by Guest Author: Karen Hamilton (2nd from left)

I’m not your typical hiker. I’ve never been to a Tilley store. I’m afraid (read: terrified) of all wildlife. In the early days of my hiking career, my “equipment” consisted of a pair of worn-out sneakers and a school backpack I stole from one of my kids.

But when I was fifty-two, my friend Monica invited me, along with four other women, to help her strike “Hike the Bruce Trail” from her bucket list. The plan was to hike one weekend a year until we completed the End-to-End. How hard could it be? (Spoiler alert: hard!)

We set out on our first hike in the fall of 2014 and immediately got lost. I’m talking before we even got to the trail. You see, we were trying to find the end parking spot, the place where we would leave a couple of cars to drive back in when we finished the day. We assumed we were looking for a parking lot, something large and paved, perhaps with a helpful neon “Park Here” sign flashing at the entrance. But after two hours and more expletives than you probably want to hear coming from the mouths of middle-aged women, we were still searching. Finally, we found what we were looking for: the “parking lot.” Or, as I like to call it, “that bit of extra gravel at the side of the road that we kept driving back and forth past all morning.” 

Things progressed well enough until the afternoon when we got caught in a torrential downpour. Despite having thought to bring five different kinds of deli meat so we’d have a variety for lunch, none of us had had the foresight to pack a rain poncho. Or, for that matter, any kind of rain gear. By the end of our first weekend, we were soaked and had hiked just twenty-five kilometres.

Distance was the cause of much discussion in our second year when we did the math and realized that if we kept to our ‘blistering pace,’ most of us would be dead before achieving the End-to-End. Survivors, should there be any, would have to finish with walkers and oxygen tanks in tow. So we decided to pick things up a bit, and instead of one hike a year, we would do two: one in the spring and one in the fall. 

And so we carried on, putting one foot in front of the other and slowly upping our hiking game as we went. At some point, we downloaded the Bruce Trail app. While it didn’t keep us from getting lost, I do clearly recall getting less lost. We also learned how to streamline bathroom breaks, no small feat for six middle-aged women with bladders the size of acorns. And we slowly acquired new equipment – proper packs, hiking poles and bear bells. (Speaking of bears, I am happy to report we didn’t have any close-up encounters with wildlife (see: “terrified” above) except for a wild bobcat in the Niagara region, which turned out to be a large house cat.)

This year, we completed our End-to-End journey ten years after it began when, on the first weekend in October 2024, we reached the cairn that marks the northern terminus of the Bruce Trail. I still don’t consider myself a typical hiker, whatever that is. But I have learned that every journey, whether hiking or life in general, is simply about putting one foot in front of the other. And most importantly, if you can, stumble through it with friends.