Matthew Rabillard-Wong

August and September, 2025

I spent the end of August and most of September on the Great Divide Trail (GDT). The GDT is an 1100 km (684 mi) long trail that follows the Continental Divide through the Canadian Rocky Mountains from Waterton National Park to Kakwa Provincial Park.

Stats

• Dates: August 25 – September 23
• Total Days: 29
• Zeros: 4 (3 in Jasper, 1 in Coleman)
  • All of these were to do with a job interview process
• Daily Average: 38 km (23.6 mi)
• Daily Average (excluding zeros): 44 km (27.3 mi)
• Longest day: 60 km (37 mi)
• Days of rain: 3
• Tarp pitches: 4 (The rest of the time I cowboy camped)
• Longest Carry: 5 days (Elk Valley to Field)
• Base Weight: 10 lbs (IDRK, I didn’t weight anything beforehand)
• Showers: 3 (1 in Coleman, 2 in Jasper)
• Laundry: 1 (Jasper)
• Nights in a bed: 1 (Coleman)

Resupplies

These are my best guesses. I think there might have been an extra half day somewhere but I don’t really remember.

• Waterton National Park: 3 days
• Coleman: 4 days
• Elk Valley Trailhead: 5 days
• Field: 2 days
• The Crossing Resort: 4 days
• Jasper: 4 days
• Blueberry Trailhead Lockers: 3 days + 1 day for the road walk out of Kakwa

Conditions

I started in late August during a heat wave that lasted until I hit Jasper. This meant we had daily highs of 30 C and overnight lows of maybe 10 C. I’d been expecting fairly cool fall temperatures so this was a welcome surprise. There was almost no rain – I think I pitched my tarp maybe 4 times on the entire trail. Additionally, because of my late start, the bug pressure was minimal and all the fords were running low.

Gear Notes

Lighterpack: this isn’t an exhaustive list and I guessed some of the weights. I would assume my baseweight was somewhere around 10 lbs.

• The Good
  • 20 F quilt. Due to the heat wave, I probably could have gotten away with my 40 F bag. However, I would have frozen my nuts off at the very end.
  • Nashville Cutaway 40L. Pretty much the perfect pack size for this. Something with a bit more structure might have been cool but I already owned this. Definitely heavy on the first day of carries but never uncomfortable.
  • Anker 10000 mAh battery bank. This proved to be totally enough battery capacity even with my degraded phone battery. My longest stretch without a town stop was the 8 days from Jasper to Kakwa, and I think I only used 80% of my total capacity.
  • AliExpress Aricxi Tarp was more than adequate. For $60, I don’t think you’re finding better value. It’s a roughly 300 g SilNylon beak tarp. Paired with a relatively sheltered campsite, this thing was all I needed.
  • MYOG Bug Bivvy. Basically just a copy of a Borah Bivy, as it costs about $300 to import one of these to Canada. I’d made it a bit too small because I designed it around the use of a CCF pad and I was using a NeoAir instead. By the end of the trip, this thing had roughly 1500 km on it and the only sign of wear was the crappy Chinese zipper I’d used.
  • Thermarest NeoAir XLite. I opted to bring an air mat instead of my regular torso length CCF because I thought I’d be sleeping on wooden tent pads regularly. I didn’t sleep on a single wooden pad; however, the NeoAir was awesome with the colder temps at the end.
  • Not using bear hangs. I didn’t carry anything to hang food. I felt like I saw very few appropriate bear hangs during my thru hike; most of the potential bear hangs would have simply created piñatas for bears.
• The Bad
  • Opsak for food storage. This worked fine; I never had any issues but there is also some peace of mind that comes with having a bear bag. You’re also not allowed to random camp in national parks without a bear proof container and this technically doesn’t qualify. In hindsight, I probably would have just carried a bear bag to make life easier.
  • MacPac Trail Rain Jacket. In fairness, this thing was completely hammered to begin with; it had already done roughly 2000 km of Te Araroa. Thankfully I didn’t have to use it until after Jasper, and I had the wherewithal to tape the seams with duct tape in Jasper. I still had to use it once in near freezing rain and it was a miserable experience. In hindsight, I would have used a Frogg Toggs jacket instead.
  • Rain mitts, or a lack thereof. Bread bag rain mitts would have been cool for the near freezing rain north of Jasper.

Helpful Info

I was hoping to do the whole trail in less than a month and the GDT doesn’t supply an itinerary for this. It’s worth noting, as soon you dip below the 30 day mark on the GDT, it starts to feel a bit more like a job instead of a holiday. Because of my timeline, I opted to create my own itinerary. There were a few things I learned along the way that would have been useful to know beforehand, I’ve compiled these below.

• Base your days off vertical gain not mileage. The GDT has a ton of elevation gain and loss, 42 000 m (137 000 ft) according to google. The elevation is also heavily front loaded in sections A, B, and C. If you’re basing your days off distance hiked, you’ll end up with some seriously lopsided days from an effort perspective. I instead based my days off elevation gain/loss. For reference, I hiked roughly 2000 m (6500 ft) of gain/loss per day; this felt quite manageable for the most part. Another tip, check both gain AND loss for each day; there was a day where I did like 2500 m (8200 ft) and 3500 m (11 500 ft) of loss, and it was totally fucked up.
• The tread is quite good for the most part. From what I’d heard before starting this hike, I was going to be crawling along at 2-3 km/h most of the time (Te Araroa style). However, the tread is actually quite good for the most part. Between Waterton and Jasper, you’re on well defined trail probably 95 % of the time. There are sections of blow downs and slow trail but most of the time, I was easily able to average 4 + km/h (including stops).
• Sections F & G have quite good travel. I had a preconceived notion that sections F and G were going to be super slow. I met another hiker in Jasper and we opted to hike together and follow the fast itinerary through section F and G. Before meeting this other hiker, I’d originally planned to take 7 days of food out of Jasper and hike 50 km per day. In hindsight, this is totally doable. The deciding factor here is weather, if you encounter near freezing rain like we did or swollen rivers, you’ll certainly be rationing food with this strategy.
• The route finding is not that bad and not terribly time consuming. For the most part, it’s fairly straight forward with only a few sections of sustained off trail travel on the main route. This will vary with weather and conditions.
• You can average 5 + km/h on the Walker FSR out from Kakwa. You could likely hike the entire Walker FSR in a single push if desired; it would take roughly 20 hours. For reference, we hiked 53 km to our ride out while averaging 5.5 km/h including stops.
• Starting late season may lead to better trail conditions. The idea here is that by late season most of the trail work will have happened so you’ll have buttery smooth trail with minimal blow downs and willows. This is by no means a guarantee. Also, as a side note, the GDTA does a fantastic job maintaining the trail; it’s an absolutely herculean effort given the remoteness of some sections.

Permits

Permits are arguably the worst part of this entire trail; it passes through 5 national parks and 8 provincial parks. For all the national parks and some of the provincial parks, hikers are required to have campsite reservations. The reservations open early in the year and most hikers will try to reserve campsites at this point; however, some will opt to snag permits closer to the hiking season. I chose to do neither; in fact, I didn’t really have the option to do either of those options, as I only decided I wanted to hike in the middle of July. At this point, pretty much all the campsites were already reserved. I opted to just get permits in towns as I went. This ended up working perfectly fine. However, there were a couple things that helped to make this work.

1. Starting in late August when tourist season is starting to wind down slightly.
2. Being able to hike 50-60 km per day. This is not to say I was hiking this much everyday. However, being able to bust out the odd higher mileage day was incredibly helpful when it came to dealing with permit issues.

If you can do these things, you can likely skip getting permits ahead of time and simply snag them along the way while in town. Additionally, pretty much every camp site I came across had empty sites; this is not to say don’t get permits, but if you’re behind schedule there will almost always be space at a campsite.

Trip Blog

The plan for most of the summer leading up to the trip was to hike the entirety of the GDT with a really good friend, Clay. However, an injured hamstring on the JMT 10 days before we were set to start left me without a partner. I spent a bit of time mulling over what to do but I pretty quickly decided to go for it; I’d already packed all my resupply boxes and had handed in my notice at work, so I felt like it made the most sense to just go solo.

I know some people can do a day by day trip report but I’m not capable of that. So instead, I’m just going to split this up by section and include whatever interesting anecdotes I can remember.

Section A

Before the trip, I was living in Jasper and working at a bike shop, so I opted to drive down to southern Alberta to start the trip. I’d also left it too late to send boxes to the Crossing Resort and the Elk Valley Trailhead Lockers, so I needed to drop these off in person. Just to add one final complicating element, two days before I left Jasper, I learned I needed to do a job interview for an engineering role in about 4 days; this meant I was going to need to start a day later to hit the first town, Coleman, at the right time. This also meant all my permits were now a day behind, thankfully I didn’t have many to begin with.

Section A was primarily colored by the fact I needed to hike 150 km in less than three days to make it to Coleman in time for my interview. In the rush of prepping my resupply boxes and driving down, I had neglected to look at the forecast; hence, I didn’t realise we were actively experiencing a heat wave, and was thus surprised that it was positively hot as fuck.

The only things I can remember from this section is sleeping next to a pit toilet the first night, somehow getting really lost on La Coulotte ridge, and doing a 14 hour day into Lynx campground. And subsequently being upset there was someone else staying at the campsite, meaning I couldn’t sleep in the only pit toilet.

I made it to Coleman in time for the interview and it seemed to go quite well. I then spent $90 at 7-Eleven buying food for 4 days that consisted solely of chocolate, nuts, chips, candy, and ramen. I capped off my time in Coleman by eating one of the most disappointing pizzas I’ve ever had, and that’s saying something; I lived in New Zealand for a while, the land of truly disappointing pizzas.

Section B

Section B was a continuation of the death march from Section A. I think I did 200 km in like 3.5 days through this section; this isn’t really the correct pace when you’re trying to enjoy yourself. I’m still not sure why I was hiking this quickly. I’d told some friends I wanted to do the trail quickly and I guess I was feeling the pressure.

This section starts by walking through a super busy OHV area where everyone looks at you like you’re crazy. My first night, I camped with a very nice family at Window Mountain Lake on my first night. They built a nice fire and kept thinking to myself “I wonder if they would mind if I burned my garbage?” On my way to the lake, I passed a group of three guys. Two of them had massive packs, and the third member had nothing but a day pack and two cases of beer, one in each hand; he was walking all lopsided because they’d clearly been working on one of the cases.

This section is primarily OHV tracks with endless small to medium sized hills. Due to a lack of planning, I didn’t fully realize how much elevation there was in this section. I didn’t track anything, but I would assume it was well over 2000 m per day. My gas station diet was also kind of wearing on me. There was zero nutritional value, but the big issue was I hadn’t brought enough calories; I probably had 1000 calories less per day than what I actually needed. I also managed to completely spill one of my dinners on the ground and proceeded to eat it, dirt and all.

Section B was also the section of dirt naps. Everyday, I took a 20 minute dirt nap – often directly in the middle of the trail. In the 3.5 days it took me to complete the section, I only saw two other hikers. There was a point where I’d seen nobody for two and a half days and I was starting to hear voices.

Section C

Towards the tail end of Section B, I became aware of a $20 breakfast buffet in Sunshine Village. For no particularly reason, I quickly became obsessed with the idea of making it to this buffet. However, the buffet hours were from 7 AM to 10 AM. This presented a slight issue: for me to arrive at a reasonable hour without wasting most of a day waiting for the buffet to open, I was going to need to hike 115 km in two days. Basically, a 60 km (37 mi) day followed by a 55 km day. Another issue was I also didn’t really have the right permits, but that hadn’t stopped me before (if anyone from Parks Canada is reading this, I had all the right permits).

I managed to do the 60 km (37 mi) day without too much trouble; although, I wasted about an hour resupplying at the Elk Pass Trailhead Lockers, so the 60 km (37 mi) took me nearly 15 hours. However, the subsequent day through Mt. Assiniboine Provincial Park was what nearly killed me. The previous night, I’d stopped an hour before camp to eat dinner and I guess I’d left my tarp there. So, when I woke up the following morning and headed off, I had no tarp and I didn’t realize this for about an hour. Thus, I had to backtrack to get my tarp; all this messing around added about 10 km (6 mi), transforming my casual 55 km (34 mi) day into a 65 km (40 mi) day.

Once the sun hit the valley, it got up to about 33 C and I absolutely fried myself; I ended up giving myself a pretty decent case of heat exhaustion. I’ve had heat exhaustion on a few occasions and I recognized fairly early what was going on. So, I pulled out all the stops trying to fix it: electrolytes, long breaks, and even a couple river dips. However, the damage was already done. I distinctly remember climbing towards Assiniboine and having to stop every 50 m to sit down for 5 minutes. Not exactly the ideal pace when you need to cover 65 km (40 mi). Needless to say, I didn’t make it anywhere near Sunshine Village that night. Instead, the lovely ranger at Assiniboine set me up with a spot in the group campsite where I played a fantastic game of cards with two other hikers.

I did eventually make it to Sunshine Village and my consolation prize was a sort of shitty $40 burger and a phone call from the HR rep saying I’d moved onto the third round of the interview process. There was also a group of guided hikers that showed up; they watched with semi amazement as I dried all my stuff and tried to take a nap at one of the picnic tables outside the restaurant. I finished my time in Sunshine Village by snagging a permit for the Rockwall trail and charging my stuff.

I was nearly in a state of shock when I got to the Rockwall trail, there were people absolutely everywhere. On the climb to Flo lake, a lot of people had terrible etiquette; the amount of times I had to get out of the way for people descending was unreal. I was also drying my quilt on the outside of my pack and managed to put a decent hole in it – this made me angry. Flo Lake was also just kind of depressing; it had one of the smelliest pit toilets I’d ever encountered and the lake was just a basin of smoke.

Once off the Rockwall trail you climb one more pass, then begin a long slow descent down towards the Trans Canada Highway and Field. You also cross a number of slide paths which are perfect habitat for bear.

Section D

Section D was the first time I really took my foot off the gas from a mileage perspective. My experience with heat exhaustion near Mt. Assiniboine had made me want to stop pushing. So, I made a rule for myself that I was only allowed to hike during daylight hours – this meant a max of about 13 hours per day. I would go on to break this rule many times. However, it felt good to have some sort of contract with myself and it also shifted my perspective of the trip slightly – it suddenly felt like I was on vacation.

The start of Section D is in Field; it’s an interesting little town. There are about 300 residents and it basically just serves as the Parks Canada visitor center for Yoho and Kootenay National Parks. I believe it was originally a railway town. The resupply options are highly limited; in fact there is only a singular gas station – no grocery store. Most hikers will send a box; however, I hadn’t bothered with that. Thankfully, I was only purchasing two days of food. On shorter food carries, I tend to just purchase food that makes me happy; I don’t worry too much about weight. So, for this food carry, I purchased pretty much nothing but muffins, honey buns, and Cheetos. My digestive tract was certainly much the worse for this decision; however, my heart and mind were at peace.

While sorting my resupply on a picnic table in Field, I wandered off to use the washroom, leaving all my food on the table. I was probably only gone for two minutes but this was enough time for a Parks employee to find it and tell me off. At the time, I tried to make some sort of lame excuse; but in hindsight, this was just ignorant behavior on my part. Don’t leave food unattended in bear country, regardless of how confident you are a bear won’t show up.

Section D is a tale of two halves, rather two rivers. There’s the Amiskwi River and the Howse River Flood Plain. I opted not to take the Kiwetinok alternate; my decisions were still being colored by the impending job interview and I was feeling rushed for time. Coming out of Field, the Amiskwi River makes for good travel even if it is covered in blow downs.

When tackling the Howse River, you have two choices: bushwhack on the right bank, or cross the deep and fast main channel to walk on the open floodplain. It’s worth noting, the GDT does not recommend you ford the Howse River; the only reason to do it, is to shave off miles to town. I consider myself as competent when it comes to fording big rivers. However, multiple days before arriving to the Howse River, I’d decided I wasn’t going to ford it. There were a number of reasons for this decision: I’m fairly small (5’9″ and 135 lbs); I was alone; there’s no real point to crossing the river – it only shaves a few kilometers into town for a lot of added risk; and I knew a hiker a few days ahead of me had gotten swept downstream while fording. Despite all the aforementioned reasons, after a couple hours of bushwhacking down the true right of the river, I decided to cross. I’m still not really sure why I did this; perhaps it was impatience, or perhaps I was just sick of looking at the flat floodplain on the far side. Crossing the braids was easy enough. However, the main channel was belly button deep and moving fast. I made it across without swimming but I had to be extremely careful with each step and it took me nearly two minutes to cross something that was at most 10 m (30 ft) wide.

Once you’re across the Howse River, you need to then cross the outflow of Glacier Lake. This was quite deep, yet relatively slow moving, so I opted to swim across. I’d never swam with a pack before and it presents some unique challenges. You can’t really do a proper front stroke because of the pack so you end up doing this awkward doggy paddle. I did have the wherewithal to start way upstream because it ended up pulling me fairly far downstream.

After this escapade, I spent a lot of time thinking about risk management and risk mitigation. The benefit to crossing the Howse River is minimal; you shave off maybe a couple hours getting into town and you avoid some bushwhacking. While the risk is quite high; you’re crossing two big, silty glacial rivers. The location is also important; you’re within a few kilometers of town when you make the actual crossings. It’s not a case where you’re deep in the backcountry and your only options are either ford or backtrack for three days; in this scenario, I would feel a crossing is far more justified. However, given the fact it’s right next to town and not even part of the main route, the ford just feels needlessly dangerous.

Section E

The vibe of Section E was slightly odd for me; I spent most of it thinking about my impending job interview.

I arrived into the Crossing Resort still semi-wet from my adventure on the Howse River Floodplain. The resort itself is somewhat dystopian. It’s essentially a full service resort with a hotel, cafeteria, and multiple restaurants; the entire setup is completely off-grid with no cell service. It’s on the side of Icefields Parkway and it’s one of the busiest places I’ve ever seen. Much to my dismay, the $20 salad bar was closed; I’d been looking forward to this for the past two days. Instead, I settled for the cafeteria and their mexi-poutine. Which was basically just poutine with ground beef, sour cream, and salsa on it – perfect for an already upset stomach.

After gorging myself on the poutine and many free soda refills, I collected my resupply box from the office for a fee of $80 – highway robbery in my mind, especially given the fact I’d dropped the box off myself. I’d also included a new pair of shoes of in my box. However, my existing shoes were still fine and I couldn’t bear throwing them out; so, I opted to carry the new pair all the way to the post office in Jasper where I could send them back home.

The White Goat Wilderness was one of the most stunning sections of the entire trip. It was also the first place where I broke my newly imposed “no night hiking” rule, by attempting to hike the entire White Goat in a 15 hour day. I ended up making it to the bottom of Cataract Pass at about 10:30 PM and setting up camp before having the coldest night of the trip; I woke up to socks frozen solid and a tarp covered in frost. After getting up, I realized I’d camped within 30 m of another party. They offered me cheese, homemade muffins, and Twinkies. Thanks Michelle, Sarah, and Jamie!

The White Goat was also where I became aware of another NOBO hiker who was a half day ahead of me, Damian. He was the only other thru hiker I’d heard about so far; I was excited to say the least! Now I had someone to chase.

Once out of the White Goat Wilderness, I was into familiar terrain. I’d done the Brazeau before, as well as Maligne Pass and Skyline. When I’d come through the Maligne Valley in the spring, it had been covered in blow down and quite slow going. However, this time, a party of horse packers had come through about a week prior, cleared all the blow down and hacked out a ton of willow. So it ended up being steady 4+ km/h cruising all the way from Cataract Pass to Jasper.

I ran into Damian at the beginning of Skyline and we ended up hiking into Jasper together. It was absolutely lovely getting to chat with another GDT hiker. We also decided to hike sections F & G together; I was looking forward to sharing miles with someone!

Section F

I had a good time in Jasper. I saw a handful of friends. I went to the Indian buffet. I took my first shower since Coleman. I washed my clothes for the first time on trail. I did a job interview. I fixed my rain jacket.

Leaving Jasper was hard. The job interview hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped and I was not looking forward to being stuck in my head without signal for the next 8 days. Saying goodbye to my friends was hard as well; I wasn’t sure if or when I would be back. I really appreciated having a partner for the remainder of the trip. Had I been alone, there’s a strong chance I would have quit in Jasper.

Section G

Section G is the heart of the GDT. It felt as though we could have walked all the way to the arctic circle without seeing another soul. I saw two separate herds of caribou in this section and probably 15 moose.

We opted to resupply at the Blueberry Trailhead Lockers; this meant a 15 km round trip down to the trailhead with almost 900 m of elevation gain. Damian was clever and cached most of his gear Blueberry Lake; I instead took everything. He’d also sent a box to the trailhead. I’d originally planned to carry 7 days of food from Jasper to Kakwa; so, I had no box waiting for me. I opted to resupply almost fully out of the hiker box. This is sort of a scum bag move; however, it was really late in the season and the hiker box had close to 30 lbs of food in it, so I didn’t feel too bad about taking 4 days of food. When we left, it honestly looked like I hadn’t touched the thing.

Section G is also where our luck ran out with weather. Up until this point, we’d had blue skies and sunshine practically the entire time; a prolonged period of good weather like this is incredibly rare for the continental divide. During section G, we had two days of temperatures hovering around 4 C and constant rain. With my semi-functional rain jacket, I found myself near hypothermic for long stretches of this section. I’d been clever enough to grab a spare garbage bag in Jasper and I fashioned this into a makeshift poncho. It certainly helped, but with driving rain it still became overwhelmed.

The last day was sheer misery. I woke up before sunrise to spitting rain and decided to wait for the sun to come up before I got moving. Once the sun rose, I quickly packed up and started hiking. The rain never let up; it got harder and harder as the day went on. I stopped twice for a total of maybe 5 minutes to check the map and re-tie my shoes. The 18 km to Kakwa took me 4 hours, and was I ever happy to see the cabin. The weather was so bad I didn’t bother taking any photos of Kakwa Lake or the terminus. Guess I’ll have to come do the extension to take some photos.

The Bonus Section

You finish the GDT in Kakwa. However, you aren’t really done; you still have 100 km of road walking to get to the Yellowhead highway. We ended up walking 53 km out until Damian’s sister, Pauline, picked us up. I’m forever thankful to Damian and Pauline for everything they did for me! The list is too long to go through, but they were so unbelievably generous to me.

Afterword

I wanted to write something similar to a forward but at the end instead; I learned it’s called an afterword. Interesting. Anyways, I’m writing this from the basement of my parents’ place in Victoria. I moved back here a couple weeks ago with the goal of finding engineering work. Writing this feels like the end to a chapter of my life. I graduated university two years ago; and I’ve been fortunate enough to spend most of these past two years traveling – while working just enough to make ends meet. During this period, I rode a bike across New Zealand, walked across New Zealand, walked across the Canadian Rockies, and worked at a bike shop in Jasper. I also did numerous other things in between and met a ton of interesting and cool people. At the beginning of this past summer, I felt as though I was starting to lack purpose. To some extent, I was feeling pressure to start building a career. I think some of this pressure came from watching my peers from university begin to carve out their own careers. I felt as though I couldn’t just keep spinning my wheels travelling. As I finish writing this, I’m set to start a full time engineering role within the next few weeks. I hope it provides the purpose I’m looking for. I’m not sure if it will, but it’s the first time in a long time where I’ve felt excited about where I’m going.