By DEBORAH JONES, NARAMATA, B.C.

 

    Long before Canadians decided to build the world’s longest trail from sea to sea to sea, local fruit farmer C..P. (Buck) Salting would load his family and friends into a big old truck, drive up to the abandoned Kettle Valley Railroad, and manoeuvre the truck’s soft tires over the steel train tracks spanning the giddy heights above this green village of orchards and vineyards. Mr. Salting would put the truck in gear, then everyone — kids, adults and a dog or two, including the driver — would clamber out onto the truck’s flatbed. Puttering through the arid desert highland at about 10 kilometres an hour, they’d gaze at the blue Okanagan Lake far below, try to spot rattlesnakes sunning themselves and search for artifacts from the historic railway, built in the early 1900s.

 

     “We’ve all been playing on the KVR forever,” says Mr. Salting, 76, who started driving along the track when it was abandoned in the 1970s, and continued using it when the rails were removed in the early ’80s. Maintaining their informal playground was hard work, and so the Salting clan would lug along tools to clear brush and debris. “To get on the track, you had to keep logging the trees,” he remembers.

 

     Thirty years later, the Salting clan is still whacking away at the brush that, left untended, would obliterate the old Kettle Valley Railroad, part of the Trans Canada Trail.  Now, though, they’re part of a group of volunteers known throughout the province as the “Wood Whackers,” part of the Trails B.C. organization. When they’re out working the trail, the volunteers encounter all sorts of hikers, such as the Mash family of Langley, who have a multigenerational plan to walk the 18,075-km national trail over a 40-year span.

 

     As the Mash family strolled along the KVR, a four-by-four truck bounced toward them. Several elderly men got out to talk to them. “We chit-chatted for a while,” recalls Heather Mash, who has hiked part of the trail each summer since 2000 with her husband Bart and their children Hayley, 20, and Ben, 16. “They wanted to hear our story, and they were just really pleased that someone was using the trail.”

 

    Mr. Salting and as many as 30 other Wood Whackers, who tend a swath of the trail that meanders through the Okanagan Valley, are part of a massive volunteer force that, since the national route was conceived in 1992, has built and maintained the trails in each province. While various governments maintain the parts of the trail that run through parks, the 800 municipalities on the route and other formal areas, almost all the back-country work is done with the sweat of volunteers.

 

     The Trans Canada Trail Foundation calls it “the most ambitious endeavour ever embarked upon by the volunteer sector in Canada.” The volunteers, such retired school principal Leon Lebrun, of Coquitlam, B.C.,  call it fun.

 

    Mr. LeBrun plans to celebrate his 67th birthday next month  high in the mountains east of Hope, using a pickaxe and shovel to clear a rugged part of the trail now blocked by land and snow slides. As a regional co-ordinator with Trails B.C., which is affiliated with the national trail foundation, Mr. LeBrun put out a call for a few British Columbians willing to spend five holiday days with the mosquitoes in the deep bush, hacking at wood and hauling rock and wood debris. Within a day, he says, he received six calls from eager bushwhackers. “People just like the idea of this whole thing, of the Trans Canada Trail,” he shrugs. “There’s something about going out in the bush and pushing a trail through it. There’s something pioneering about it. It intrigues people to do that.”

 

    He adds, “This is one way of showing their pride as Canadians.”

 

    Mr. LeBrun retired as an educator 10 years ago, and since then has volunteered full time, eight hours a day, on trail co-ordination and physical work. “I’m interested in the outdoors, but the Trans Canada Trail has a particular appeal to me as an educator, because of the heritage value of these trails, and the possibility of people learning about communities along the way, as well as how communities relate to the environment,” he says.  “The idea of the trail is to take people into all kinds of landscapes, so they see what Canada is made up of,” he adds with passion. “It’s made up of timber harvests, mining, farming, industry — all of those kinds of things, and we want people to see that safely on a trail, where you can take the time to absorb what’s around you.”

 

    The Mash family might agree with all that Mr. LeBrun says, but for them the ambitious goal of hiking the entire Trans Canada Trail is enough. For now, says Ms. Mash, the family is just working on getting through the B.C. part of the trail. Her husband suggested the project in 2000, when the trail was still being established across the country and their kids were 9 and 14.  “We thought it’d be a good way to keep our family together and start the tradition when they were young,” says Ms. Mash.

 

    Theirs is a long-term plan, to say the least. On one of the family’s first forays onto the trail, on a gruelling hot day, recalls Ms. Mash, Ben apologized to his dad for asking for help carrying his backpack.  “My husband said, ‘That’s OK, because one day we’ll be in Saskatchewan and you’ll have to carry my pack, because I’ll be old then.’ My son said, ‘Hey, I’ll be carrying my own son’s pack by then!’ ” In the meantime, says Ms. Mash, the family admires the work of the volunteers who keep the trail clean and clear. “We’re at 1,054 kilometres now ..... and the trail is well-maintained. There’s been almost no part that we couldn’t get through. Even when we did a couple of days in winter, the trails were easy to follow and easy to hike, well-marked.”

 

    For his part, Mr. Salting plays down the hard work involved in keeping the trail enjoyable for trekkers. “All we do is brush off the track, take fallen trees down, try to keep the brush back off the track,” he says with a laugh.