Where Nobody Knows Your Trail Name

Few blazes, fewer trail angels: Canada’s Great Divide Trail offers a rare chance to go back in time and experience the birth of a thru-hike.

- Ted Alvarez

THE GREAT DIVIDE TRAIL traces the spine of the Canadian Rockies for 746 miles, but I only needed 18 to see how wild it can be.

After miles of sublime, airy ridge walking on Jasper National Park’s Skyline Trail, I exited a tunnel of trees into a wide patch of tundra sweeping up to the fortress of 8,839-foot Mt. Tekarra. The view and a howling wind dazed me enough that it took a few seconds to catch a chocolate brown shoulder flecked in silver out of the corner of my eye. A paw the size of a pie followed, and then I saw the shovel nose, beady eyes, and small ears confirming this was a griz, 25 yards away. Way too close.

I hightailed it up an adjacent tundra bench, waited for 30 minutes, and doubled back about 200 yards farther down the way. As I neared the trail again, I choked when I saw another silvered hump passing through a break in the trees, 10 feet away. Way too close. With bear spray in hand and my heart hammering, I leapfrogged another 200 yards up the trail. Had the griz I saw before returned, or was this a second one?

You want to experience a two-month immersion in a North American wilderness the region’s first explorers would recognize? This is your hike. “This is a hard, hard trail that takes some of the best thru-hikers in the world and humiliates them,” says Liz “Snorkel” Thomas, who hiked it in 2016.