The first person to complete the world's longest hiking trail is a filmmaker

National Geographic

09-02-2025

This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
Dianne Whelan, 59, is an award-winning Canadian documentary filmmaker and author. In 2015, with little hiking experience, she set off from St John's, Newfoundland, to walk, bike and canoe the Trans Canada Trail, which stretches some 14,900 miles across the country as the longest trail network in the world. For most of her six-year journey she travelled solo, filming for her latest independent documentary, 500 Days in the Wild.
Where does your passion for the outdoors come from?
I grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. When I was five, I remember being mesmerised watching frog spawn hatch into tadpoles. Right from there, I felt very connected to the natural world. By the time I was 12, I was carrying a photo of mountaineers Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, who were the first to summit Everest, in my copy of The Hobbit, one of the first books I ever read. I then did the Outward Bound programme when I was a teen — a 21-day course where learned survival skills to be able to head off into the wild with a backpack.
What did the route involve?
My goal was to complete the journey in one continuous line, beginning on the Atlantic coast and making my way across Canada to Alberta, where I'd head north up to the Arctic Ocean before heading back down to the finish line on the Pacific. In all, the route is made up of 487 separate trails, involving lots of paddling and portages — where you carry your canoe between two bodies of water — in addition to hiking and biking.
I had this idea that it'd be nonstop and I'd push myself through all seasons. But when I was on the Path of the Paddle [a primarily water-based section of the trail through northwestern Ontario] two-and-a-half years into the journey, the water froze around me, and I had to set up camp and bushwhack out, hauling the canoe. One of the First Nations elders I'd met saw this on social media, reached out and said, 'Winter is not a time for travelling, it's a time for sewing buttons. Be like the bear — it's time to hibernate.' So there ended up being some stopping and starting along the way, often while I waited for ice to melt.
Where did your inspiration for the trip come from?
My mom told me about this unbelievable new trail, and part of what intrigued me was that it had never been done. And the conditions in my life were just right. My marriage of 13 years had ended, my dog of 16 years had died. Everything that was tethering me was not there anymore. Yes, it was sad, but it was also a unique opportunity to go and do it.
How did you prepare?
I gave up my home, sold my car and basically got rid of my bills. I didn't have special equipment — just my old knapsack and mountain bike. When I came to my first water trail, I borrowed a friend of a friend's canoe. Fitness-wise, it was all on-the-job training. How else do you prepare your body to be active for nine hours a day?
It was a very grassroots unfolding, and in hindsight that was my superpower. The problem with overplanning is you become rigidly attached to the plan. I did leave with a schedule, but I burned it on day 10, when I was berating myself for not having done what I thought I could do in three days. The trip was supposed to last 500 days — hence the name of my film — but ended up taking six years.
What was your daily routine like?
One of the key things on a journey of this length is self-care. If the waters were calm, I'd paddle longer days; when the weather wasn't good, I'd stop. There was nobody to help if something went wrong. I really came to recognise my own fragility.
When my body was tired, I'd set up camp, sometimes spending two or three days writing and making a lot of food — usually bannock bread or pancakes, as they travel well. And I'd take really good care of my equipment, because you never know when things will go sideways because you haven't.
How did you feel on the trail?
Not for one day did I feel lonely, even though I'd go months without seeing anyone. Suddenly, what mattered was the direction of the wind, the animal prints around me. I felt an awakening of something that's probably in all of our ancestry — a connection to my environment. I learned the old way of travelling isn't doing it without a motor, it's with reverence for the land. For all the fear people have of nature, it's our home.
What was it like travelling solo as a woman?
There's no bravado here — I was afraid of being a woman camping alone at night, that I couldn't lock my door. But over the course of my journey, I was helped by hundreds of strangers. When I left home, I thought the world was run by psychopaths, but it turns out it's full of kind people.
What was it like travelling with your partner for some of the way?
I've been out since my 20s, and I began a relationship on the trail with another woman, which turned out to be one of the greatest gifts of the whole journey. She paddled up to the Arctic Ocean for a few months with me, then lived in a van to meet me on the trail whenever I needed to resupply. We'd have fires on the beach, watching the sky dancing with the Northern Lights. That was the beginning of our relationship — the five-month first date, we call it.
We never saw another canoe in that time, but we heard that there was a man behind us kayaking and a couple in a canoe ahead of us. It's interesting how news spreads on the trails. The man eventually drowned five miles behind us, and Julien from the couple was eaten by a bear. Not only did my partner and I have the beauty of the experience, but we also had to confront the adversity of storms, forest fires and the sheer psychological terror of someone being eaten by a bear. We went through a lot together, and now we can handle anything — we are still together.
How did it feel to cross the finish line?
It was a real lowlight actually — having to reconnect to this other way of living after having been unburdened of needing to make money for bills for so long. Luckily, having 800 hours of film footage to sift through gave me something to focus on.
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