Ten years in the making, British Columbia’s Vancouver Island Trail (VIT) is Canada’s newest long-distance trail. It spans 770 km, stretching from the regal city of Victoria in the south to the jagged sea-stacks of Cape Scott in the north. Along the way, trail-users can fully immerse themselves in every facet of the island’s ecology and culture, including old-growth forests, velvety mountains, bumpy logging roads, abandoned mining camps, colossal wooden railway trestles, and the territories of 49 First Nations cultures. Inspired partly by the US’s Pacific Crest Trail, famously depicted in the 2014 film Wild, the VIT has been dubbed a ‘pilgrimage into the wilderness’.