Inaugurating the Great Northern Bikepacking Route.
Words :: Ali Becker // photos :: Kristin Schnelten
I feel a bit of anxious energy bubbling up as my partner, Mathieu, and I leave the village of Meaford and cycle out along the shore of Georgian Bay.
It’s 8 a.m. and already the air is hot and humid, but that’s not what’s causing the stir. I’m nervous, I guess, about meeting someone for the first time. A person who has recently and almost single-handedly redirected the entire course of both mine and Mathieu’s lives.
It sounds dramatic, I know—and it is.
Hailing from the Silicon Valley of the North, Waterloo’s Matt Kadey is the mastermind behind what is currently considered the longest mapped, off-road cycling route in the world: the Great Northern Bikepacking Route (GNBR).
Meandering 13,500 transcontinental kilometres from the shorelines of the Salish Sea at Mile 0 in Victoria, BC, across 10 Canadian provinces and three American states, wrapping up at the outer reaches of Newfoundland—and North America’s—easternmost coast at the Cape Spear Lighthouse National Historic Site, the GNBR is a big ol’ ride.
The route was officially launched in 2023, and Kadey poured countless hours into patchworking tracks together, plotting points of interest, pulling insights from keen local cyclists and adventure enthusiasts all the while weaving in a few preexisting bikepacking routes along the way.
As Matt and his buddy John roll up beside us with spandex-clad smiles and energetic high-fives at a roadside apple stand, my anxious energy quickly dissolves into the familiar feeling of greeting an old friend.
We saddle up in unison, and begin making our way towards the deceivingly punchy climbs of the Niagara Escarpment—sharing smiles, pedal strokes and the stories of adventure, challenge, connection and kindness that make life by bike so glorious.
In January 2024, when Mathieu and I heard the GNBR route was ready, we took a quick glance at the maps, then each other, and decided to make the first attempt at bikepacking the entire route in one fell swoop.
While most people in our late-30s age bracket would likely have a lot of logistics to sort out before loading up their bikes and setting off on a four- or five-month bikepacking odyssey, Mathieu and I do not—and that’s because we have built a slightly unconventional and untethered life.
Mathieu and I met in 2011 at a mutual friend’s house party and immediately hit it off—despite the fact he was active, athletic and motivated to challenge himself, while I was an out-of-shape 27-year-old with a sedentary lifestyle, punctuated by poor decisions impacting my mental and physical health.
To put it lightly, I was at an all-time low—and looking for a way out.
Luckily for me, Mathieu saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself, and while I wasn’t sure exactly what I had to offer our relationship back then, we made a pact that we would help each other change our lives for the better.
Six months later, Mathieu moved into my tiny apartment and while we were unpacking his boxes, I came across a small, coil-bound notebook with a sparkly gold cover and an Acadian flag sticker plastered across the front. It was the journal he had haphazardly kept on this solo cross-Canada bike tour.
To put it lightly, I was at an all-time low—and looking for a way out.
It was full of serendipitous, almost unbelievable movie-type moments—such as the time he stopped by a laundromat in Quebec and the owner came over with a smile, handing him a sandwich along with a spare pannier bag, some wool socks and a French book—three things Mathieu had been planning to pick up in the next town.
The more I read, the more I realized that I wanted—no, needed—more stories of travel and adventure in my life. When I closed the final page, I looked at Mathieu and asked if he would ever do the trip again. “Only if I had someone to share it with,” he smiled.
With Mathieu’s help, I finally kicked my pack-a-day cigarette habit, took my first-ever sustained break from alcohol and became more aware of what I was eating and how it was making me feel.
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We made the decision to ride our bikes across Canada together in the summer of 2015—and we went all in. I realised all I needed could fit into the four pannier bags on the sides of my bike, and I had never felt more free. After finishing the crossing, our old lives didn’t fit anymore. We went on a quest to build a new one that prioritized well-being and adventure.
Every year since then, we’ve spent spring, summer and fall riding across countries, continents, provinces or states, amassing a total of nearly 100,000 km of two-wheeled travel and making the leap early on from paved-road expeditions to remote, off-road routes with more solitude.
In the beginning, we funded our travels with short-term manual-labour gigs while we house-sat, and supplemented that plan with social media shares, blogs posts and articles for outdoor publications and tourism organizations.
As our audience, skillset and confidence grew, we were able to support our cycling lifestyle through a myriad of avenues: digital content creation, sponsorship relationships with brands, affiliate marketing for companies we align with and, most recently, public speaking engagements about our adventures and wellness transformations.
So when the opportunity popped up to tackle the GNBR, we were ready, willing and able.
We knew we needed to head out in mid-May to make it all the way across before snow flew on the East Coast. So, headlong into a bitter-cold sideways wind blowing off the West Coast, we took the token Mile 0 selfie on May 18, 2024, and hit the trail.
A couple months before, we had shared a short video announcing our upcoming attempt, and it quickly amassed a small group of loyal adventure enthusiasts who wanted to come along for the ride. We made a promise to document the trip with daily vlogs to share our experience and trip reports.
What began as a fun way to keep friends, family and a few onlookers in the loop with daily videos, reels and stories steadily grew into a community of incredible people who sent us supportive messages and comments, shared intel about the upcoming route and sent generous financial donations to support us on the ride.
We carried a live-tracking GPS device to alert people of our location, an effort that brought us to tears on a few occasions when families standing roadside handed us fresh watermelon slices and encouraging high fives—or invited us over for dinner, showers and a good night’s sleep in a real bed.
Every day we received feedback from people all over the world, thanking us for sharing our trip and its beautiful landscapes, and for restoring their faith in humanity by highlighting the people who helped us. Messages of gratitude continually arrived, saying our posts had inspired them to get outside and soak in the beauty of nature, both on the bike and off.
In fact, the support and encouragement we received is a huge part of what helped us navigate the hard moments we had along the way, such as the worn-down afternoon ride into Moose Jaw where I stopped to scream profanities into the blistering headwind, while Mathieu, crying, threw his bike down on the dirt shoulder—both of us feeling battered by a string of sleepless nights in the pouring rain. We were desperate to quit the trip, but had no idea where we’d go.
I opened my phone to check the GPX file and, in between blurry, salt-water tears, noticed a Facebook message from a kind woman named Allison, offering to host us that evening in the upcoming town and nourish our weary bodies with a hearty bowl of beef stew and a hot shower followed by a good night’s rest in her spare room. This selfless gesture lifted our spirits off the side of the road and carried us the final 30 km into town.
Dozens of trail angels like Allison helped us weather the cold rain and big climbs in beautiful British Columbia, navigate knee-deep snowpacks, wild winds and nearby tornado touchdowns through Alberta and Saskatchewan, and battle menacing mosquitos and relentless horse flies through Manitoba, Minnesota, northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
They sheltered us through Ontario’s sweltering summer heat and the torrential rains that washed away much of our route across rural Quebec, kept us stocked up during New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia’s remote and rural passages and strengthened us against the cold temps and wicked Atlantic winds along the rugged stretch of Newfoundland’s T’railway.
We were welcomed with open hearts into St. John’s, NL, on the final days of the tour, escorted into the colour-streaked city by a friendly cyclist who just happened to be on the trail when we passed by.
He showed us the way to our lodging for the night—the home of a kind stranger who offered us a free, no-strings stay in his beautiful log cabin home and full use of his car while he was away on holidays on the West Coast.
We were blown away time and again by the open-heartedness, generosity and enthusiasm for adventure that radiated out through hundreds of people from one coast to the other—palpable in every province and each state we passed through.
Update: Last spring, with a positive, forward-looking post, Ali and Mat announced they were parting ways, choosing to follow their own paths toward new adventures. With indomitable smiles, their post expressed an appreciation for their time together and shared hopes for one another’s future. –Kristin Schnelten
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