How big is Canada?

Tracing one warm line through a land so wide and savage

• The Citizen-Record (Cumberland)
• BY JONATHAN RILEY TRURO DAILY NEWS

Huge. No matter how you measure it. Canada is huge.

In terms of area, it's almost 10 million square kilometres. The longest straight line you can draw through Canada is 5,158 kilometres long — from the northwest tip of the Yukon to Cripple Cove Newfoundland near Cape Race. The Trans Canada Highway is 7,714 kilometres long, crosses six time zones and is the world's longest continuous transnational highway.

The Trans Canada Trail will be 24,000 kilometres when it is all connected.

So Canada is big — really big. Jesse Wignes and Jackie Freeman know exactly how big first hand — they cycled across, west to east, in 2013.

"It's a massive, massive country,” said Wignes. “We broke the trip down into provinces but it is a slog day after day. Going up through the Maritimes in early September, the weather was turning, and we were thinking, let's just get finished.”

Still, Wignes remembers the trip fondly and now maintains the website bikingacrosscanada.ca as a resource for people planning a similar trip; Freeman maintains the Biking Across Canada Facebook group. “It was part of our research, we were reading other people's journals to get information but they were scattered all over the Internet so we put the journals in one place,” she said.

Freeman says the trip gave her a good appreciation of the size of our country. "You really learn how big it is — in my mind Saskatchewan is three days wide, Ontario is a couple weeks big and Canada is three months big,” she said. “But what you really learn is how much we all have in common — how we all love where we're from.”

She said learned a lot about Canada but ...

“Like how everyone on the north shore of Lake Superior has a sauna in their backyard," she said. "But mostly Canada just gets bigger — I learned about all the places we couldn't visit because we were just passing through. I've never been to Calgary, I've never been to Banff."

Wignes and Freeman estimate about 50 people cycle across Canada every year. Freeman says she has heard from several groups who have been planning for a couple years to make the trip this year because of the Canada 150 celebrations.

The Biking Across Canada website also contains tips for would-be Trans Canada cyclists including an answer to the No. 1 FAQ: How long does it take to bicycle across Canada?

"Really quick riders can tour across in two months. But if you take in scenery, visit family and friends along the way and stop at all the tourist spots, plan for 3-4 months."

Arvid Loewen of Winnipeg completed the fastest bicycle trip across Canada in July 2011.

At the age of 55, he cycled from Vancouver to Halifax in 13 days and six hours.

For parts of the trip he was riding 20 to 21 hours a day, with only two hours of sleep a night and the last 40 hours he pedalled straight through without sleep.

The first European to cross Canada was Alexander MacKenzie of Scotland in 1789. The Dene First Nations people pointed him up the Dehcho or MacKenzie River which he followed to the Arctic Ocean — not the Pacific he had hoped to reach. He went back to England, studied navigation and then tried again in 1792. He over wintered at a fort he built in what is now Alberta and reached the Pacific coast on July 20, 1793, the first recorded transcontinental crossing of North America north of Mexico, beating Americans Lewis and Clark by 12 years.

The first record of a person walking across Canada was John Hugh Gillis of Cape Breton — it took him eight months in 1906 mostly following the railroad tracks. In 1921, five people raced across Canada on foot including the first recorded woman to walk across, Jenny Dill of Halifax. It took her and her husband just 138 days.

Mark Kent, then 17 years old, was the first to run across Canada in 1974. He started in Victoria and 125 days later ran into St. John's 125 days later. He used up 14 pairs of sneakers, consumed 181 packages of Tang and chewed up and swallowed 120 pounds of steak.

In 2015, Kent told Canadian Running that the trip gave him a real appreciation for Canada.

"Both its people and its landscape," he said. "I often wonder: why do people leave Canada to go to other places when everything is right here? It's just spectacular. Even the Prairies. People say that it's just flat, that there isn't much to see. But if you get out of your car, and really look at the wheat blowing in the wind and at the light hitting the grain elevators — it's so beautiful. I can't imagine being anywhere else."

The record for the fastest trip across Canada on foot has stood unchallenged for 26 years. Back in 1991, Al Howie of British Columbia ran 7,300 kilometres from St. John's to Victoria in 72 days 10 hours and 23 minutes, from June 21 to Sept. 1, 1991.

He ran more than 100 kilometres a day, about two-and-a-half Boston Marathons each day for more than two months. Howie was inspired, like countless others, by Terry Fox, easily the most famous trans-Canada runner.

Fox started the Marathon of Hope in St. John's in 1980 to run across the country on one leg. The return of cancer forced him to end his quest near Thunder Bay after 143 days and 5,373 kilometres. Since 1981, millions of participants in the Terry Fox Run raised over $650 million for cancer research.

Steve Fonyo followed Fox in 1984 finishing the 7,924-kilometre run on one leg in 14 months.

Rick Hansen was also inspired by Fox. In 1985 he took off on a worldwide trip by wheelchair rolling 40,073 kilometres in 792 days. It took him from August 1986 until May 1987 to wheel from Cape Spear to Vancouver where he had started two years before.

The first car trip was driven by Jack Haney in 1912; it took him and Thomas Wilby 52 days to drive from Halifax to Alberni, B.C. There was no road for a great deal of the trip and they actually shipped their car across Lake Superior and often drove on train tracks. In places the fields beside the roads provided a better driving surface.

Via Rail advertises a four-day train trip across Canada costing between $1,000 and $4,000. Of course "across Canada" means Toronto to Vancouver. Toronto to Halifax on the Ocean will add another 22 hours.

Air Canada can fly you St. John's to Vancouver in about eight hours with one stop.

Still some people are still doing it the old-fashioned way.

Dana Meise has walked the route of the Trans Canada Trail from west to east and is now working on the northern route towards the Arctic Ocean.

Sarah Jackson started in Victoria in June 2015 and is headed east. Dianne Whelan is one-third of the way into a four-year journey walking, biking and canoeing across Canada. She is attempting to be the first to "do" all of the TCT including the water routes. Whelan, too, looks to Fox for inspiration.

"Terry Fox used to look one telephone pole ahead. For me, in the wild, I look one tree or one rock ahead and make that my goal," she said. “The amazing thing about Canada is that 40 per cent of it is completely empty, when you look at it on that scale, the massiveness really becomes apparent.

"It's part of our mystique: wilderness and the Canadian identity are so inseparable yet at the same time it's a very intimate country, we have a culture of kindness. I've spent weeks isolated and then come out into a small community and people aren't immediately paranoid, you're generally offered a cup of tea. That kindness make the large spaces seem small — I don't ever feel lost in it."

Whelan initially called her adventure and film project 500 Days in the Wild but she's not taking that literally and she's in no hurry.

"I'm at an age where I don't want to see how fast I can go, how hard I can push — we've lost something in that push. That rush goes against the pace we've been using to move across the landscape for millennia. For me there is no real rush, I'm connecting and exploring this country, parts of the country that are new to me at a pace that is natural. In a few years, I might hold the record for the person that made the slowest crossing of Canada."